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Anna Harriett had only one romantic love in her life. His name was Thomas Louis Leon Owens. He was from a middle-class Protestant family , literate but not well-off. John Owens and Mary Lean, Tom’s parents, had married in 1810 in the diocese of Ossory, Ireland. Their son was one of thousands who emigrated to escape the economic blight caused by the potato famine that swept Ireland from 1845 to 1850. Most of these young men went west, flooding into America. But some went east, to the Company’s India, hoping to find a career and a life. Tom Owens immigrated to India sometime in the second half of the 1840s, in late 1847 or possibly 1848. For the first time in this Glascott family history in India, the young man in question had not come to India by the path of becoming a soldier for the almighty East India Company . By 1849, young Tom Owens was living in the district of Bombay City known as the Fort. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Bombay was a major international and commercial center, far different from the city that had greeted the young cadet’s eyes when Billy Glascott landed there forty years earlier, in 1810. British Bombay had grown into a grand urban metropolis, much of it modeled after the architecture and the infrastructure of London. There were grand boulevards and a wealth of those gigantic stone buildings so loved by nineteenth-century Englishmen. The centerpiece of British Bombay was probably itsTown Hall, finished in 1830, an enormous stone edifice complete with Doric columns, built on the site of what had been Bombay Green. “The steps and colonnade of that imposing structure provided a dramatic backdrop for the public reading of the Queen’s Proclamation in 1858” (Asiatic Society of Bombay, n.p.).There had been an active chamber of commerce since 1836, and the Bank of Bombay opened in 1840. The Bhor Ghat Road to Poona, which opened in 1830, was the rough beginning of what became a 56 five Love and Bombay, at Last major commercial route for goods to come into Bombay from the Indian interior . The boundaries of the city had expanded enormously in forty years, as the various little islands were connected by causeways and their marshy lands drained. The big public buildings, the churches, and the bigger merchant houses were concentrated in the Fort area, jostled by cheap housing. By the end of the 1830s, there were “only a few Europeans who continue to inhabit the Fort” (Roberts, 238). By 1850, the Fort was so crowded that it was like a “large basket so full of goods that they threatened to tumble out of it.” Along with the urban center of the Fort, there was a range of crowded adjacent districts, including Girgaum and Parell (now Parel), which made up what the British upper classes referred to as “Black Town” or “Native Town” (Roberts, 299). This was where most of the Indian residents, the “country-born” mixed races, and the lowerand middle-class Europeans lived. The richer Europeans, merchants and upper-level officers, lived apart, in early suburbs, building so-called bungalows on the outskirts of the city, on Malabar Hill and Mazgaon. Many of these bungalows were actually enormous stone villas, in the Gothic or Renaissance style, set among charming gardens complete with statues and fountains. The expanding infrastructure of the British presence in Bombay created a modest but flourishing job market of salaried positions outside the Honourable Company, particularly at the lower levels of clerks and copyists, for those men who could speak and write English. These were of two groups: the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community born in India (such as the male children in the Glascott/Donohoe family) and the many middle-class British people without prospects at home who had immigrated to India looking for work. Tom Owens found a job, and by 1849 he was working as a clerk in the Commissary General’s Office and living in the Fort area. He was twenty-one years old. A clerk’s salary was not much. But one of the compensations for Tom was that he found many other young men in similar circumstances. Among the society of hardworking clerks in Bombay, Tom got to know a young AngloIndian named William Glascott. In 1849, William, Mary Anne’s younger brother, was twenty-eight years old. He had been a clerk in the Military Board Office in...

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