Clodagh Finn: The Siberian diary of 13-year-old Anna Whitney
Anna Whitney with her granddaughter Barbara. Pictures: Courtesy of Barbara Lloyd
It doesn’t quite feel right to read another person’s diary, yet it seems Anna Whitney (age 13½) wanted the details of her extraordinary trans-Siberian journey —from Japan, across the vast terrain of Russia to Europe — to live on after her.
The 10-page account of her travels in May 1908 is the work of a sensitive, eloquent observer, wise beyond her years. She wrote of violent snow storms, severe flooding, a juddering derailment mid-journey and seeing trainloads of emigrants, “in rags and tatters”, being sent by the Russian government into exile in Siberia.
She saw untold riches too; the crowns, thrones, rubies and diamonds so lavishly displayed in the Kremlin’s treasury, but it was the experience of hearing 100 choristers sing within Moscow’s famous walled complex that impressed her most: “Picture to yourselves,” she wrote, “a large magnificent cathedral… which is all brilliantly [lit] till all the gold and jewels glitter and sparkle until it looked like heaven.”
When it filled with the unaccompanied singing of men and boys, some as young as six, our young traveller was deeply moved: “I have never heard such beautiful singing. I could have listened for hours. I wish you could have heard it,” she wrote.
But then Anna Braithwaite Whitney was attuned to religious life as the daughter of a Christian missionary in Japan. She would later become a Quaker, and an Irish citizen after she moved to Dublin. She married Wilfred Lamb of the Lamb Bros, Fruitfield jam family, in 1917; but just nine years before, she and her brother Joseph were embarking on a momentous journey.
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The adventure — and her account reads as if she considered it one — began on May 1, 1908, on the third deck of the SS Mongolia. As the steamer set out from Tsuruga, Japan, en route to Vladivostok, she waved her handkerchief at her parents and friends until she could no longer see them.
Once at sea, her party — she was travelling with two adults — settled themselves on chairs under blankets on the deck until a thick fog engulfed them: “The fog horn was so noisy that one of the gentleman (Bishop Awdry) said to a little boy who was walking beside him: ‘The fog horn has a very bad cold and has to blow his nose all the time, hasn’t he? Aren’t you sorry for him?’”
After three days, the boat docked in Vladivostok where the customs officials clambered up the side of the boat and opened all the luggage.
On dry land, the first sight that struck Anna were the roads although, as she put it, “roads is hardly the name for them, except on the main street”. She was taken by the carriages, too, which ran on wooden wheels, without brakes. “One can imagine how they would jolt and shake until the occupants would feel as if life had been shaken out of them.”
Hours later, Anna boarded an International Sleep-Car Company train (the company famous for operating the Orient Express) to begin the longest train journey in the world, more than 8,000km across two continents and six time zones.
Indeed, she never quite knew the time: “We had been changing the time and every now and then we would be surprised at being told when we had got up, & were preparing to go into breakfast that instead of 8am, it was only 3am, or just as we would be going into dinner, hungry as lions, we would find that it was 3pm. They always managed to change at meal times, so it was rather aggravating.”
Mealtimes, when they did come, were substantial affairs with up to four courses, consumed in sittings that lasted two-and-a-half hours.
Getting up was fraught too. On the first morning, she jumped up immediately “only to get a stinging blow by the rack above me. I learned by experience not to get up so quickly.”
She provides a wonderful description of the changing landscape, and weather conditions, as the train travelled through Siberia. When there was snow, she and her fellow travellers took to “snowballing” during the frequent stops along the way.
“A good many tried to hit me but failed to my great glee.”
When the weather was better, the pervasive dust made life uncomfortable: “Do what we could to keep him [the dust] out, it was of no use. One time we came into our cabin and found the little table two inches in dust. Everything we touched was gritty.”
She describes the Siberian landscape too, with its array of “the most beautiful flowers” peeping out from under the snow. “In other places there were beautiful big yellow anemones, buttercups, tulips and a great many smaller flowers. I was able to pick a few which I have pressed.”
When the train was derailed in southern Siberia on the shores of Lake Baikal (the deepest lake in the world) passengers were thrown around in the “violent jolting and shaking”, but nobody was seriously hurt.
“After our fright and excitement had cooled down we all met on the grass nearby and had [a] thanksgiving meeting to which nearly all the passengers were there. Even the Russians seemed to understand what we were doing for all the waiters and workmen stopped talking or working and took off their hats.”
She described how they had been packed into windowless carriages, which had a stove in the middle and a narrow bench running along the edge. It seems that one or several of such trains drew alongside hers because other passengers tried to offer the misfortunate people on board clothes.
One woman was so frightened by the gesture that she “ran as if for dear life… but afterwards she came back and snatched them away,” Anna wrote.
She went on to describe, in vivid prose, her stopover in Moscow and tour of the Kremlin; her onward journey to Warsaw – where the “moon rose out of a dark cloud, making the ripples of the blue water beneath us ripple like gold” — then Germany, through Berlin and Cologne, on into Holland and, finally, taking another steamer to the UK.
“We arrived at Queensborough [Kent] at six in the morning… After breakfast, I went to bed as I was so tired and Joe did likewise. And here endeth my Story.”
It’s a shame that Anna Whitney did not continue to chronicle her life after her move to Dublin where she had three children, Bevin, Margaret and Edie.
Margaret’s daughter, Barbara Lloyd remembers a warm, kind woman who lived at Naisetra in Bluebell, Dublin. She used to tell her of the paper houses in Japan — as a child she couldn’t understand how they didn’t blow down. Barbara now has her Japanese fan and umbrella.
It was only after her death on February 15, 1965, that her diary, kindly shared with this column, came to light. Reading it is a timely reminder of the enduring value of a now almost forgotten art.
