Scudamore, Frank Ives.

Published

New York : E.P. Dutton, [1925?]

Scudamore, Frank Ives.

299 p., [1] leaf of plates : ill., port. ; 23 cm.

Frank Ives Scudamore (1823–1884) was an English Post Office reformer and writer. He oversaw the country's first significant nationalisation and in 1874 he was managing a turnover of a million pounds per annum passing through 3,600 different offices.

Life

The son of John Scudamore, a solicitor, by his wife Charlotte, daughter of Colonel Francis Downman, R.A. and niece of Sir Thomas Downman, he was born at Eltham in February 1823, and educated at Christ's Hospital; Sir Charles Scudamore, was his uncle. On leaving school he entered the General Post Office (1841), and, on the amalgamation of the receiver-general's and the accountant-general's offices in 1852, was appointed chief examiner of the new department.[1]

In 1856 Scudamore became receiver and accountant general. He was, after George Chetwynd of the money-order office, heavily involved in the scheme for government savings banks. Scudamore explained to William Ewart Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer the proposed machinery, and had support and obtained authorisation from parliament in 1861.[1]

In 1865 Scudamore drew up a report on the advisability of the state acquiring the telegraphs, which were then in the hands of a few private companies, on lines suggested by Frederick Ebenezer Baines. In negotiations Scudamore was employed as chief agent, and the way was prepared for the Telegraph Act 1868 entitling the state to acquire all the telegraphic undertakings in the kingdom, and the Telegraph Act 1869 giving the Post Office the monopoly of telegraphic communication. In 1870 the Irish telegraphs were transferred to the Post Office.[1] Sir John Tilley, Scudamore's superior, did not support the nationalisation, but allowed Scudamore to run the resulting state telegraph system.[2]

Scudamore had been promoted assistant secretary (1863) and soon afterwards second secretary, of the Post Office, and in 1871 he was made C.B. By 1874 he had overseen the country's first significant nationalisation, he was managing a turnover of a million pounds per annum passing through 3,600 different offices.[3] Clashes over his impatience of obstacles led to his resignation in 1875. Among other changes made by Scudamore was the introduction of female clerks into the postal service. He then accepted an offer of the Ottoman government to go to Constantinople to organise the Turkish international post office; the sultan conferred on him the order of the Medjidieh in 1877; he gave up his post on encountering delays. He continued to live at Therapia, and wrote.[1]

Scudamore died at Therapia on 8 February 1884, aged 61, and was buried in the English cemetery at Scutari.[1]

Works

Scudamore wrote:[1]

People whom we have never met (1861), a lecture on fairies.

The Day Dreams of a Sleepless Man, London, 1875.

France in the East; a contribution towards the consideration of the Eastern Question (London, 1882), which is a plea for the good intentions of France in south-eastern Europe, and against the policy of preserving the integrity of the Ottoman empire.

Scudamore also contributed to Punch, and in The Standard, The Scotsman, the Comic Times, and other papers.[1] He wrote for The World under Edmund Yates.[4]

Mentioned by Anthony Trollope

The distinguished British author Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), was employed in the Post Office from 1859 until 1867, when he resigned to devote all his energy to his writing. In his autobiography, he mentioned Scudamore:[5]

When Sir Rowland Hill left the Post Office, and my brother-in-law, Mr.[John] Tilley, became Secretary in his place, I applied for the vacant office of Under-Secretary. Had I obtained this I should have given up my hunting, have given up much of my literary work,—at any rate would have edited no magazine,—and would have returned to the habit of my youth in going daily to the General Post Office. There was very much against such a change in life. The increase of salary would not have amounted to above £400 a year, and I should have lost much more than that in literary remuneration. I should have felt bitterly the slavery of attendance at an office, from which I had then been exempt for five-and-twenty years. I should, too, have greatly missed the sport which I loved. But I was attached to the department, had imbued myself with a thorough love of letters,—I mean the letters which are carried by the post,—and was anxious for their welfare as though they were all my own. In short, I wished to continue the connection. I did not wish, moreover, that any younger officer should again pass over my head. I believed that I had been a valuable public servant, and I will own to a feeling existing at that time that I had not altogether been well treated. I was probably wrong in this. I had been allowed to hunt,—and to do as I pleased, and to say what I liked, and had in that way received my reward. I applied for the office, but Mr. Scudamore was appointed to it. He no doubt was possessed of gifts which I did not possess. He understood the manipulation of money and the use of figures, and was a great accountant. I think that I might have been more useful in regard to the labours and wages of the immense body of men employed by the Post Office. However, Mr. Scudamore was appointed; and I made up my mind that I would fall back upon my old intention, and leave the department. I think I allowed two years to pass before I took the step; and the day on which I sent the letter was to me most melancholy.

In one of his novels, Trollope made a humorous mention of Scudamore. In The Way We Live Now, the planned elopement of Marie Melmotte is frustrated when she is intercepted by detectives instructed by a telegram sent by her father:[6]

It may be well doubted whether upon the whole the telegraph has not added more to the annoyances than to the comforts of life, and whether the gentlemen who spent all the public money without authority ought not to have been punished with special severity in that they had injured humanity, rather than pardoned because of the good they had produced. Who is benefited by telegrams? The newspapers are robbed of all their old interest, and the very soul of intrigue is destroyed. Poor Marie, when she heard her fate, would certainly have gladly hanged Mr. Scudamore.

Sasun Mountains, August 25, 1894. True to its name (Kurdish: ‘Walnut Valley’), the village of Gelîguzan was made up of several hundred sturdy stone houses interspersed with walnut and oak trees at the eastern end of a long thin valley. For months, the melting snows from the surrounding mountains had nourished orchards of mulberry trees, figs, and fields of grain. Directly to the south of the village loomed the giant peak of Mount Antok, a place of refuge for the people of this valley in times of trouble.1

2 Foreign Office (British), Confidential 6695, FO 424/182, Further Correspondence Respecting Asiatic (...)

3 Ibid.

2This was such a time. Ten days before, the villages of Shenik and Semal had been burned. The culprits were said to be government soldiers dressed as Kurdish nomads. Khushman Agha, a Kurdish ally, had told the villagers that Ottoman regular soldiers were preparing to attack Gelîguzan and that “no quarter would be given – man, woman or child.”2 Already, many of the women and children of Gelîguzan had fled up the mountain. But some small children and elderly remained. Around three hundred of the villagers, both men and women, armed mostly with flintlock rifles, had elected to stay and make a final stand. For days, the villagers had watched the numbers of Ottoman soldiers grow, it seemed to one villager that “all of the soldiers in the world had come to fight us.”3 The attack came right before dawn. Shells from mountain guns set houses on one side of the village ablaze, their occupants were shot as they attempted to escape. Officers instructed the soldiers to pursue and kill all. One soldier recalled,

4 [F. Scudamore], Daily News, March 29, 1895; FO 424/182, p. 2-4.

Out[side] the village the slope was covered with people running in every direction. Some were carrying goods, some had children in their arms, others were helping each other along. [...] The officers shouted [...] Don’t fire, don’t fire. Kill with the bayonet.4

5 R. Kévorkian, 2001, p. 49-50; G. Sasuni, 1957, p. 580; A. Chalabian, 1994, p. 88.

6 Foreign Office, 1895, p. 206; FO 424/184, p. 77.

7 E. Ökte, 1989, p. 288-289.

8 Ibid. p. 298-299.

3As the sun rose, the village of Gelîguzan lay in ruins, many of its inhabitants murdered. Over the next two weeks the killing continued. At the beginning of September, the commander of the Fourth Army, Mehmet Zeki Paşa arrived and ordered a halt to the violence. By this point, one to two thousand men, women and children had been murdered.5 Hammond Smith Shipley, a British consular officer who spent six months researching the violence as part of a Commission of Inquiry concluded that the villagers in Gelîguzan and elsewhere in the Sasun mountains, “were massacred without distinction of age or sex, and indeed for a period of three weeks”.6 The Ottoman State received a different story. According to the report of Zeki Paşa, the troops had successfully quelled a rebellion in the mountains and captured the “evil doer Hampartsoum.”7 There is no mention in this report of any violence against the civilian population. Instead Zeki Paşa wrote that, “I have myself witnessed that food and clothing and all kinds of help on humanitarian and Islamic principles have been provided.”8

9 E. Uras, 1988, p. 731-733; see also C. Walker, 1990, p. 165-170; F. Dündar, 2010, p. 47.

10 D. Quataert, 2006, p. 258.

4The narratives of Zeki Paşa and H.S. Shipley have remained for twelve decades the basis for two dominant and conflicting historical explanations for the violence. According to Zeki Paşa, this was a story of sedition. Zeki Paşa claimed that Armenian radicals incited the local Christian population of Sasun to commit violence against the Ottoman state. According to H.S. Shipley, on the other hand, what had occurred was a massacre carried out by the Ottoman military. This was a story of state oppression. Some scholars within Ottoman Studies today continue to embrace the “sedition” story. This academic subfield reflects the narratives developed from many dispatches sent by Ottoman bureaucrats of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, as well as by officers of the Ottoman military. Furthermore, it relies on earlier works, particularly the foundational work of Ahmet Esat Uras, itself based on documentation produced by the Ottoman state, including the Zeki report.9 Scholars working within Ottoman Studies tend to situate the historical camera in Istanbul and assume that sources in the Ottoman archives are closest to the truth.10 Yet, Zeki Paşa’s account of the Sasun violence, along with accounts found in other state sources, diverges from the story of massacre found in all other accounts (Italian, American, British, French and Russian consular reports, missionary documents, Armenian-language memoirs, the investigations of journalists and travel accounts). Why is the Zeki Paşa report so radically different from all the other available sources? There seem to be two possibilities.

11 J. McCarthy et al., 2014, p. 2.

12 Ibid. p. 23; C. Walker 1991, p. 139.

5Some scholars have suggested that all the other sources are false and based on some sort of conspiracy. For instance, in Sasun: A History of an Armenian Revolt, Justin McCarthy, Ömer Turan and Cemalettin Taşkıran argue that the Armenian revolutionaries were feeding missionaries, consuls and journalists misinformation.11 However, such an immense effort would surely indicate an awe-inspiringly well-organized operation. It would have had to direct a complex web of propaganda across six independent missionary stations in different cities around Sasun. The problem is that the Hunchak revolutionary society had by all accounts only a very small number of adherents at this time in the mountains.12 There is no way they could have coordinated such a massive misinformation campaign. This leads us to the second possibility: the misinformation campaign was not outside of the Ottoman state but within it. As this article will show, after the violence there was a concerted effort made by both local and central Ottoman authorities to cover it up. The Zeki Paşa report was part and parcel of this cover-up. And yet, for decades, the Zeki Paşa report has been employed uncritically.

13 Foreign Office, 1895, p. 207; FO 424/184, p. 77.

14 O. Miller, 2015, p. 250-258, 282-288, 443-457.

15 R. Suny, 2001, p. 1-4, V. Dadrian, 2001, p. 5-39.

6The sedition story can be contrasted with a story of oppression. H.S. Shipley wrote that what happened in Sasun was not “the suppression of a pseudo-revolt” but “the extermination, pure and simple” of two districts in the Sasun mountains.13 This story of oppression can be supported with material (both published and unpublished) from the international Commission of Inquiry held to investigate the violence. Over the course of six months, from the end of January to the middle of July 1895, the commission held over a hundred sittings and interviewed over 190 witnesses. The consular delegates composed a sixty-page “Joint Report” based on hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony.14 The Joint Report of the Consular Delegates has been emphasized in the broader field of Armenian Studies and is part and parcel of a larger story of Ottoman state oppression. This story is based on memoirs and oral histories produced by Ottoman Armenian communities, and supported by British, French, and Russian reports from consuls based in the Ottoman East.15 While both narratives, sedition and oppression, acknowledge that violence occurred, the blame is placed on different parties. The narrative of sedition focuses on the culpability of the Armenian radicals in the violence that ensued; the narrative of oppression focuses on the culpability of the Ottoman state.

16 J. Verheij, 1998, p. 238-246; Id., 1999, p. 81-84; Id., 2012, p. 94, fn. 27.

17 M. Polatel, 2016, p. 179-198; E. Gölbaşı, 2015, p. 140-163.

18 R. Cole, The Missionary Herald, September 1892, p. 374; FO 424/184, p. 435-436.

7There have been various attempts over the years to bring together sources from the Ottoman archives with sources from outside the state. Instead of focusing only on the culpability of outsiders, scholars such as Jelle Verheij have emphasized instead the numerous local actors involved.16 Recently, a new generation of scholars has begun to examine the history of the Sasun massacre and the broader Hamidian violence of the 1890s using both Ottoman archival and consular records.17 This article will build on these efforts with two additional, albeit interconnected, types of source: American Board missionaries and investigative journalists. By the 1890s, the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) had been operating in the Ottoman East for decades. Most of the missionaries were locals like Simon Tavitian. Others, like George and Grace Knapp, might be considered “American-Ottomans”. Born in the region and speaking the local languages fluently, they often identified themselves with the communities their parents had endeavored to proselytize. Too often in the prevailing scholarship, missionaries are drawn in broad-brush strokes that suggest all were outsiders, rather than local or localized. There is little basis for the claim that the ABCFM missionaries were working with Armenian nationalists such as the Hunchaks. Ample evidence reveals the American Board missionaries and the Hunchaks might be better understood as competing networks.18

19 W. Lately, Everyman, September 19, 1913; K. Rafter, 2013, p. 91-105.

20 O. Miller, 2015, p. 369-376, 410-411.

8A similar simplification of the past has been used to suggest that journalists either fabricated stories to support the sale of newspapers or were woefully ignorant of local languages or histories (or both). This sort of typecasting, often employed by the Ottoman state to cast aspersions on all journalists, has been revitalized by some Ottoman historians. Some journalists did their utmost to compile the available evidence from survivors and perpetrators and convey narratives to a reading public. Others were far less careful. However, rather than judging all “correspondents” with the same brush, it is necessary to investigate the broader record of each journalist. Special correspondents who reported on the Sasun massacres included the fluent Turkish-speaker Frank Scudamore of the Daily News, the scholarly Emile Dillon of the Daily Telegraph, E.A. Brayley Hodgetts of the Daily Graphic, and Henry John Cockayne Cust, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Emile Dillon was the Seymour Hersh of the 1890s and early 1900s, with an astonishing record of detailed investigative reporting.19 Although not as accomplished, Frank Scudamore was also widely accredited. Both interviewed survivors and perpetrators.20 While further work is needed in how investigative journalists of the nineteenth century operated, there is ample evidence that both Scudamore and Dillon conducted careful investigative reporting, often in conjunction with British and Italian consuls.

21 Ibid., p. 61-62.

22 J. Sheil, 1838, p. 85; H. Southgate, 1840, p. 263-264; W. Ainsworth, 1842, p. 249-251; F. Millingen (...)

9It is critical to resituate the violence in a broader story of the efforts of the Ottoman state to centralize its control of its territory during the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the violence in the mountains of Sasun in 1894 was not exceptional but instead part of a near continuous six-decade history of violence faced by the mountain population throughout the Ottoman Empire.21 For the local inhabitants in the eastern reaches of Ottoman Anatolia, the process of centralization inaugurated under Sultan Mahmud II from the beginning resembled a conquest.22 From the 1830s to the 1850s, the Ottoman state conquered the lowland areas using a conscript-military and a strategy of divide and rule. Over the next four decades (1850s-1890s), the Ottoman military made its way into the mountains, pushing the frontier of state-controlled areas – where taxes and conscription were exacted – ever higher into the mountains. By the end of the century, only a few areas (such as Dersim) remained outside of the reach of the state. The violence of Sasun must be understood in this longue durée conquest of mountain communities. As the Ottoman state monopolized the legitimate use of violence, it also increasingly sought to monopolize the legitimate use of narrative. Through tight control over the medium of print technologies, the state attempted to limit the spread of narratives it deemed dangerous or seditious. Just as any attempt to resist the state’s forceful intrusion was “rebellion” so too was any attempt to challenge the single-minded state’s narrative. These trends of the monopolization of both force and narrative help explain why the violence in Sasun took place, how it happened, as well as how it was remembered.