- Ursula Graham Bower
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Ursula Graham Bower
Ursula Violet Graham Bower MBE (later known as U. V. G. Betts) (15 May 1914 – 12 November 1988), was one of the pioneer anthropologists in the Naga Hills between 1937–1946 and a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese in Burma from 1942-45.[1][2]
Contents
Biography
Born in Wiltshire in England, the daughter of Commander John Graham Bower, RN (1886–1940), Ursula Bower was educated at Roedean School; the Great Depression and the hostility of her parents to the education of women prevented her from attending the University of Oxford.[2] On her father's remarriage in 1932, Bower became the stepdaughter of children's writer Barbara Euphan Todd, the creator of the fictional scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. In the same year she travelled to Canada.
She first visited India in 1937 with a school friend, on a trip where her mother had hoped she would meet a nice husband. Instead, she fell in love with the Naga Hills and their tribes. Bower returned alone to India in 1939 to "to potter about with a few cameras and do a bit of medical work, maybe write a book." She spent some years as an anthropologist among the Nagas of the Naga Hills.[1] She took more than a 1000 photographs documenting the lives of local tribes which were later used in a comparative study.[3]
At the start of World War II she joined the Women's Auxiliary Corps (India), known as WAC (I). By this time she had so won the friendship and confidence of the Naga chieftains that when the Japanese armies invaded Burma in 1942 and threatened to move on into India, the head of V Force asked her to form her local Nagas into a band of scouts to comb the jungle for the Japanese. Bower mobilized the Nagas against the Japanese forces, placing herself at their head, initially leading 150 Nagas armed only with ancient muzzle-loading guns across some 800 square miles (2,100 km2) of mountainous jungle.[4] 'Bower's Force', as her unit became known, eventually grew and became part of the 14th British Army under V Force. Bower's force of Nagas became so effective that the Japanese put a price on her head. She was the subject of an American comic book entitled Jungle Queen.[2][5] Her personal weapon of choice was the sten gun, two of which she wore out in action.
By her orders guards were posted on main and secondary trails, and a watch-and-warn system was established. Over these trails thousands of evacuees, deserters, escaped prisoners and bailed-out airmen fled from Burma to India. Bower also directed Naga ambushes of Japanese search parties.[1] On 24 April 1945 she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire for her actions in Burma,[4][6] and in 1944 she received the Lawrence Memorial Medal, named for Lawrence of Arabia, for her anthropological work among the Nagas.[7][8]
Bower never received any formal training in anthropology, but her photographs, film and two monographs on the Nagas and the Apatani establish her as a leading anthropologist, alongside her friends J.P. Mills, Bill Archer and Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf. In 1950 she received a postgraduate diploma in anthropology from the University of London.[2]
She met Lt. Col Frederick Nicholson Betts when he was serving in V Force in Burma during World War II and married him in July 1945, returning with him to Britain in 1948. For a period she and her husband grew coffee in Kenya. They had two daughters, Trina and Alison Betts, both of whom were educated at Roedean, like their mother, before attending university. After her marriage she was known as U. V. G. Betts. Her papers are held by the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.[9]
Works based on her life
Two BBC Radio 4 plays, The Naga Queen by John Horsley Denton and The Butterfly Hunt by Mathew Solon were based on the life of Ursula Betts and her husband F. N. Betts.
A documentary film entitled Captured by Women featuring some of Ursula Graham Bower's photograph and object collections in connection with her own film footage of her time in Nagaland, India, is being produced by The Oxford Academy of Documentary Film (OADF), with funding from the British Film Council (The National Digital Archive Fund - Screen South). This is a collaborative project between OADF and the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and it is directed by Dr Alison Kahn. The documentary also includes the film footage and work of Beatrice Blackwood, another important anthropologist who collected photographs and objects from Papua New Guinea (among other places), and who also captured film footage of her time in the field in the 1930s.
Other sources
- Ursula Graham Bower. 1950. Naga Path London, John Murray.
- Ursula Graham Bower. 1950. Drums Behind The Hill, New York, Morrow.
- Ursula Graham Bower. 1953. The Hidden Land London, John Murray.
References
- ^ a b c Time Magazine, January 1, 1945. Ursula and the Naked Nagas.
- ^ a b c d Cook, Bernard A. "Women and War: A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present" Vol 1, ABC-CLIO Ltd, (2006) pg 76 ISBN 1851097708.
- ^ Tarr, Michael Aram & Stuart H. Blackburn (2008). Through the eye of time: photographs of Arunachal Pradesh, 1859-2006 : tribal cultures in the eastern Himalayas.. Brill Academic. ISBN 9789004165229.
- ^ a b Keane, Fergal, Road of Bones: The Siege Of Kohima 1944. The Epic Story Of The Last Great Stand Of Empire, Harper Press (2010) ISBN 0007132409.
- ^ Jungle Queen, True Comics, No. 46 (Winter 1945).
- ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 37047. p. 2166. 24 April 1945. Retrieved 23 July 2010.
- ^ "Miss Ursula Graham Bower". Royal Society for Asian Affairs.
- ^ "Recipients of the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal". T E Lawrence Studies.
- ^ "BETTS, MRS, U.V.G .". Index of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge.
External links
Categories:- 1914 births
- 1988 deaths
- Old Roedeanians
- Members of the Order of the British Empire
- Women anthropologists
- English anthropologists
- 1942 in Burma
- English non-fiction writers
- British guerrillas
- Women in World War II
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