Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh

Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh (left), with her sisters Bamba (center) and Sophia (right) as debutantes in 1894

Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh (born October 27, 1871 in Elveden , Forest Heath , England, † November 8, 1942 in Penn in the county of Buckinghamshire , England) was a British suffragette .

Life

Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh was the second eldest daughter of Maharajah Duleep Singh and Maharani Bamba Müller . She had four brothers and four sisters. One of the brothers died the day after giving birth, the others were Victor Duleep Singh , Frederick Duleep Singh, and Edward Alexander Duleep Singh, who died at the age of 13. Two of her sisters came from her father's marriage to Maharani Bamba, these were Bamba Sutherland and Sophia Duleep Singh , known as the suffragette , and two other sisters from her father's second marriage after her mother's death in 1887: Ada Pauline and Duleep Singh Irene Duleep Singh. Her grandfather was the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh , who was forced to abdicate by the British. Her mother was the daughter of a German entrepreneur and an enslaved Abyssinian Coptic woman . Her parents met in Cairo and married in Alexandria when her father was on his way back to England. The family lived in exile in Britain and the male descendants were prohibited from returning to India. After the death of their father in Paris in 1893, each of the children inherited a stately trousseau. In 1894 Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh was together with her two sisters from their first marriage debutante at court at Buckingham Palace .

In 1886, Duleep Singh tried to travel back to India with his wife and daughters in order to revive his kingdom there . They were stopped and sent back to Aden. Duleep Singh traveled to Paris to work in exile on the revival of his empire. His wife Bamba and daughters returned to England, where Bamba died in London in 1887. The three daughters were placed in the care of Arthur Oliphant and his wife. Oliphant was the son of Duleep Singh's stable master during his stay in England. They lived with the Oliphants in Folkestone. Here Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh met the German teacher and governess Lisa Schäfer. Schäfer came from Kassel and later became her life partner.

As a child, Catherine had made several trips with her mother to Switzerland to visit her uncle Wilhelm Alexander Müller. Even later, Catherine often traveled to see her relatives, mostly when she was at the Bayreuth Festival in southern Germany. Together with her sister Bamba she studied from September 1890 successfully at Somerville College of the University of Oxford . Study subjects also included singing, playing the violin, and swimming. Like her sister Sophia, she joined the suffragists. She was part of Millicent Garrett Fawcett 's Fawcett Women's Suffrage Group and was a member of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies .

She traveled through India in 1903, visiting the family's ancestral home in Lahore and other places such as Kashmir, Dalhousie, Simla and Amritsar. She also visited the princely states of Kapurthala, Nabha, Jind and Patiala, was received by the kings there and had contact with the local people. She returned to Germany with Lina Schäfer in 1904. They spent their later life together in Kassel. She often traveled to her family in Switzerland. Lina Schäfer died on August 27, 1937. For Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh, life in Germany became too dangerous due to the approaching National Socialism , and after receiving a warning from a neighbor, she sold her property in November 1937 and fled to Switzerland England.

Death and inheritance

Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh died on November 8, 1942 at her Penn home. The evening before her death, she and her sister Sophia attended a play in the village and they had dinner. The next morning the door of her room was locked when the maid tried to enter the room. Sophia broke open the door and found her sister dead. Only Sophia could attend the funeral because Bamba could not travel to England because of the war. Catherine left a will from 1935 stating that she wanted to be cremated and that her ashes should be buried in Elveden. Some of her ashes should also be buried in Lina Schäfer's grave in Kassel. She bequeathed her property to her sisters Bamba and Sophia. However, no account or safe in a Swiss bank in Zurich is mentioned in the will.

In July 1997, a list of more than 5,000 dormant accounts at Swiss banks was published by the Swiss Bankers Association at the urging of Holocaust survivors. That list included the name of the Princess, with the address "Duleep Singh, Catherine (Princess), who last lived in Penn, Bucks, 1942," as the Account Owner. These accounts have not been kept since the end of World War II.

There were numerous applicants who wanted to inherit the property. They also included the Indian government and relatives in Punjab and Pakistan. However, there were no direct descendants as none of Duleep Singh's children had descendants. A three-person committee was set up to clarify the claims. The Indian government's claims were rejected because it was a private account and Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh was not the regent of a princely state. Further claims were also rejected and finally the heirs of her sister Bamba, the caretaker Supra and his family were recognized as heirs who had initially not submitted an application. The fortune of 137,323 Swiss Francs was divided among the five living sons and the children of his deceased daughter.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Genealogia di Catherine Hilda DULEEP SINGH. In: geneanet.org. Geneanet, accessed January 20, 2019 (Italian). 
2. ↑ Lucy Worsley: Lucy Worsley on Queen Victoria's suffragette god-daughter. In: co.uk. The Telegraph, accessed January 20, 2019 (UK English). 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Nirmal To: Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh (daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh) (1871-1942) - ਸਿੱਖ ਇਤਿਹਾਸ. In: sikhhistory.in. Retrieved January 20, 2019 (pa-IN). 
4. ↑ Gurharpal Singh, Darsham Singh Tatla: Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community . Zed Books, 2006, ISBN 978-1-84277-717-6 , pp. 45 ( books.google.de ).
5. ↑ Anita Anand: Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-3546-3 , pp. 368 ( books.google.de ).