Sahib

by Richard Holmes

  A man’s kit in India in quarters is 6 pairs of white trowsers, 6 pairs of draws, 3 flannel shirts, 6 shirts, 4 white jackets, 4 puggerees, 6 pairs socks, 1 pair sefferen [possibly santara, meaning ribbed woollen cloth] trowsers; for watering order: 2 pairs blue clothern overalls, one blue stable jacket, 1 dress coat, 1 shako, one cloak, 2 pairs of boots. Besides these we had many fancy things, not regimental.163

  The Bengal Horse Artillery cut the finest and most impractical of figures. In 1841, ‘leather breeches and long boots, brass helmets with red horse-hair plumes, and jackets with ninety-nine buttons, or, “by Our lady” a hundred, were the favourite dress of the Bengal Horse Artillery’.164 During the Mutiny some regiments, like HM’s 75th, originally turned out in white, but this ‘looked soiled at once and was moreover a good mark and most conspicuous from a long distance’, and so it was dyed khaki with vegetable dye and an assortment of other agencies including curry powder and diluted office ink.165 The 93rd Highlanders had been issued with ‘very ugly loose brown coats of some stout cotton material, with red coats and cuffs’ for the China expedition, and continued to wear them during the Mutiny, along with their kilts, and Highland bonnets, considered by Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander to be ‘that most useful feature’ of his national dress, for it kept the head cool and warded off sword-cuts.

  Some regiments, however, paid almost no attention to what their men wore. Gunner Richard Hardcastle complained that the officers of HM’s 90th:

  do not care how their men dress – only that they are there at all. If you could see them on the march you would be fast to make out whether they were soldiers or not – every variety of colour from red to white, some brown, others blue – all of them, their shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbows, then dressed bare and trousers rolled up to the knees, In this way they fight all their battles.166

  Khaki proved to be very practical during the Mutiny, and, suitably enlivened by brightly coloured sashes and puggarees, it became the basis for much Indian irregular cavalry uniform after it. But it was not a popular everyday dress amongst British soldiers, shot through as most of them were by a strong streak of dandyism. By the 1880s, troops routinely wore khaki on operations on the North-West Frontier, but in barracks they showed that variety which remains the hallmark of the British regimental system. ‘The uniform we wore in India was somewhat different to the home-service issue,’ recalled Frank Richards;

  On the Plains and in the winter we wore thin, fine Indian khaki by day, and red in the evening: I think that a suit of red was supposed to last us two years. The red Indian jacket was lighter than the home-service one; and we were not issued with red tunics. During the heat of summer on the Plains we always wore white on parades – but as the only parades then were Church Parades and funerals this was seldom. In the Hills during these months we wore the Indian khaki.167

  Soldiers bought off-duty kit to wear on local leave, on trips to the bazaar or on shooting expeditions. Once Richard Hardcastle of the Royal Horse Artillery was safely off operations and living in barracks in Meerut, he invested in some fashionable clothes, and told his cousin:

  You want to know how I look to a tee? I take your question to mean how I look just now. Well, as well as a pair of fancy carpet slippers, crisp white unmentionables, fancy summer shirt with starched front and collars and fashionable blue necktie … I should dearly like you to see me – how comfortable and gentlemanly like we are for I am unable to tell you in a letter.

  The nearest comparison I can give to make you understand is the students at Airedale College but they even in some things are below the mark.168

  In about 1851, Private George Payne of the 14th Light Dragoons had a portrait painted of himself in India to show his relatives just what he looked like. In uniform he wore his blue regimentals with a blue shako with a white weeping plume. But off duty he was a thing of loveliness: white shirt and collar with a slim black bow tie; white shell jacket, white overalls strapped over slim black shoes, and a little white turban. And just to make the point that he normally rode rather than walked, a riding whip dangles from his left hand.169

  Gentlemanly occupations often went with a gentlemanly appearance. Many private soldiers and NCOs enjoyed shooting. Pearman recalled that he ‘spent most of my spare time in the jungle and small bush wood with my gun’ – or went ‘dogging’, that is collecting butterflies and moths.170 The latter activity had the advantage of passing time and making money. In 1854, HM’s 52nd Light Infantry were quartered on the edge of the Himalayas, which abounded in:

  large and very beautiful butterflies. These the men catch in gauze nets, and set up in a box shaped like a backgammon board, and about the same size; each half being protected by a pane of glass. A good collection in such a box will fetch £2 or £3.171

  Fishing was very popular with both officers and men. In 1897 Lieutenant Colonel Thomsett

  feasted upon masheer (a river fish) and trout which had been caught by our Political Officer, I believe, sesee, a kind of partridge found not very far from camp, and most delicious eating, to finish up with prunes soaked in rum, which were not by any means to be despised.

  Afterwards they all went off to the British Field Hospital where a jolly singsong ensued: ‘the medicos did the thing uncommonly well’.172 Captain Crawford McFall, marching with the Zhob Field Force in 1890, saw how:

  an old corporal of the Sappers and Miners made great bags at every halt in the streams. The fish appeared to be very … ignorant of the sinful ways of man, and very good fish could be got out of the tiniest streams.

  The masheer, however, was not an unqualified success: ‘it is very bony and great care has to be taken to get the best out of it when cooked’.173

  When the British arrived in India great expanses of the country were almost unpopulated and teemed with game; shikar – shooting expeditions – were extraordinarily popular. In Albert Hervey’s regiment the officers were often accompanied by sepoys, ‘armed with their own private fowling pieces … [who] enjoyed the sport as much as we did’. Indeed, his adjutant owed his life to a sepoy’s intervention. A wounded cheetah had seized the officer by his cap – ‘one of our English hunting-caps’ – when the sepoy ran up and killed the creature with a mighty crack across the head with his hunting knife.174

  Both Nicholson and Outram had killed tigers on horseback with their swords, a feat apparently achieved by galloping round the tiger in ever-decreasing circles and striking before it sprang. Charles Callwell went deer-stalking in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he ‘got in an easy shot at a fine stag, declared by the shikari to be a true bara-singh (twelve points) and missed!’.175 Shooting tiger from a howdah on an elephant’s back, the classic sport of viceregal India, eventually became too costly for the average regimental officer. In 1854 a party of officers went off on a month’s tiger shooting and bagged three. ‘It was expensive work,’ reflected Major Bayley, ‘as the party took some twenty to thirty elephants, and the keep of one of these animals costs ninety rupees a month.’176

  Especially in the early nineteenth century, when game was still very abundant and officers could afford elephants, bags were huge. Lieutenant William Price told Richard Purvis that:

  we killed 22 tigers, 5 bears and 81 hay-deer. My elephant … got dreadfully wounded in the flank by a tigress that I had mortally wounded … and he is still very lame. If it does not make him timid hereafter, I care not for the accident, for I never saw a better elephant before the accident occurred.177

  Some readers may take some comfort from the losses inflicted, in turn, on the officer corps by the wildlife of India. During its stay at Secunderabad in 1871–73, HM’s 76th Foot mourned the loss of ‘three keen sportsmen’ – one-tenth of its officer strength:

  H. S. B. Giles, a popular officer, was taken clean out of a tree by a tiger, and was practically mauled to death, while his shikari, armed with a rifle, was standing alongside paralysed with fear. C. C. Whistler, a probationer for the Indian Staff Corps, when out shooting in the neig
hbourhood of the Fort of Asseeghur, wounded a tiger, and was following it on foot when the brute sprang on him from a thicket, and inflicted injuries from which he soon afterwards died. Pott was the third, and he also succumbed to injuries received when after a tiger in the jungles of the Deccan.178

  J. W. Sherer, in contrast, argued that even the most ardent opponent of field sports could not take offence at his shooting, ‘as it amused myself, and did no harm to any living thing’, but he confessed to ‘the easy diversion of one more fond of natural history’.179 He was not alone. As the nineteenth century went on, many officers shied away from the big bags of earlier years. On the frontier in 1879, Major Le Mesurier went off to a swamp with a colleague, shooting for the pot. In the process he winged three ducks, and, remorseful, ‘carried them home after dressing the wing, let the three go on the large tank in front of the house. Two, a duck and a drake, are as jolly as can be; but the third is evidently moribund.’ Sadly, they soon disappeared, taken, he suspected, by a jackal.180

  Surgeon Walter Henry of HM’s 66th described a cruel practical joke practised on those ubiquitous scavengers, the huge, grave adjutant birds:

  A more venial trick – and not unamusing, I confess – is to tie two legs of mutton together with a piece of whip-cord, leaving an interval of three or four yards – the jigots are then tossed out amongst the adjutants, and soon find their way into the stomachs of a couple of the most active of the birds. As long as they keep together it is all very well; but as soon as the cord tightens, both become alarmed and take wing – mutually astonished at the phenomenon, no doubt. A laughable tugging match then ensues in the air, each adjutant striving to mount higher than the other, until at last they attain a great elevation. When at length the weaker bird is forced to disgorge his mutton, a new power comes into play – the force of gravity – and the pendulum leg of mutton brings the conqueror down to earth good deal faster than he wishes.181

  The quintessential Indian field sport, which tested nerve and gave men a feel for the country, was pig-sticking. It also brought British officers and officials into contact with a segment of the population that they might not meet as easily in cantonment or court-house. Major A. E. Wardrop – author of one of the classic accounts of the sport – described how shortly after Edward VII died, he ‘stopped some twenty people on one of our country roads, and said to each: “Brother, have you heard that the great king is dead?” The whole idea meant nothing to them.’182 Pig-sticking was the pursuit of wild boar by a mounted man armed with a steel-tipped bamboo spear, normally with a maximum length of 8 feet, although ‘some people prefer them a little shorter’. The sport had something in common with foxhunting in Britain, for it was controlled by individual tent clubs, around twenty in 1914, each supervising the chase in its own country, and liaising with local officials and landowners. There were numerous annual pig-sticking competitions, the most distinguished being the Kadir Cup, entered by tent clubs across the whole of India and competed for on that cynosure of pig-sticking country, the yellow grassland of the Kadir of Meerut. (The trophy itself now rests in honourable retirement in the Cavalry and Guards Club in London.)

  The Poona Tent Club claimed to be the oldest in India, instituted in Maratha times before the battle of Kirkee in 1817. Clubs sometimes sported a hunt coat (the Shikarpore Hunt had ‘blue with gilt buttons, with a boar’s head engraved on them, and the letters SH’) and were run by committees in which military officers inevitably featured prominently: the honorary secretary was ‘king in his country’. Committees ensured that pigs were not hunted out of season and only beasts above a recognised minimum size (generally twenty-seven or twenty-eight inches high at the shoulder) were pursued. ‘If small boar are killed before they reach a really rideable size,’ warned Major Wardrop, ‘the supply soon fails.’ Maintaining a supply was paramount, for numerous pig were killed in a successful season. In 1911, the Agra Tent Club killed 129 boars in fifty-five days’ hunting, eighty-six of them falling to the spears of officers of 14th Battery Royal Field Artillery, and in the same year the Multan Tent Club killed no less than 400.

  Pigs could grow very much bigger than this, and most tent clubs were able to boast a record kill of around forty inches. The sport was dangerous because the hunter needed to chase his quarry cross-country at full gallop over a landscape strewn with swamps, sharpsided dry watercourses, and blind wells. And the boars were no timid creatures. Although most pigs would generally make off at their best speed when flushed from cover by a line of beaters, ideally well supported by elephants, when the rider drew level the pig would often turn and charge, slashing at horse and man with his razor-sharp tusks. The redoubtable Bengal boar, one soldier recalled, ‘thinks of nothing but fighting, and comes at one at any point of the run’. If a man’s horse fell, the boar would often seize his advantage and rush in to cut up the dismounted rider. A determined boar might even charge an elephant in the line of beaters, driving off a timid one, and perhaps scattering the passengers from its howdah as it crashed off across gullies and through thickets, trumpeting in terror. Wardrop described an occasion when disaster was averted only by an elephant’s steadiness:

  Fortunately it was one of the Bandi shikar elephants, as many elephants turn tail if a pig charges. The elephant pressed the boar into the mud with his trunk, put his tusks under him and threw him a dozen yards or so. The operation was again repeated, the boar attacking again. The second throw crushed this brave boar on hard ground where he was quickly dispatched.183

  A pig-sticking meet would consist of perhaps a dozen enthusiasts with an adequate supply of horses and all the paraphernalia of Indian camp life, setting up camp at a suitable spot. After a good breakfast, the line of beaters would form up with the head shikari on his flag-elephant in its centre, whence he would direct operations, and a row of elephants some way behind. The riders – ‘spears’ – would be divided into two or three ‘heats’, parties of three or four men, accompanied by umpires, and would ride ahead of the beaters. The umpire’s authority was final, regardless of his civil or military rank. ‘I remember one umpire, a subaltern, in charge of an unruly and very senior heat,’ wrote an officer, ‘who was second to none as a disciplinarian.’ When pig were flushed it was important for the umpire to be sure that a quarry of rideable size was amongst them, and that the chosen beast was in the open, for ‘your real old warrior is full of guile, and, unless he is well clear of the jungle, at the least hint of danger he slips back and nothing on earth will persuade him to break’.

  When the umpire was sure that all was well he would drop a small flag and shout ‘Ride!’ to the first heat. The heat’s riders then gave chase, with the object of getting ‘first spear’ by being the first to strike the boar. Although they could do as they pleased for the early part of their gallop, cutting in front of other horsemen and taking their own line, once the leader was within two horse’s lengths of the boar ‘no one must interfere with him’. The first horseman would watch for the boar to lower his tail, a sure sign that he planned to charge, and would then try to take him in the shoulder as he came on, galloping horse and charging pig meeting with a combined speed of some fifty miles an hour. Usually the momentum drove the spear deep into the pig, inflicting a mortal wound. Sometimes, however, the point glanced off (it still counted as ‘first spear’ if there was a clear impact) or missed altogether, giving the next rider his opportunity.

  There was much to go wrong. Men fell into wells or gullies, were knocked off their horses by low branches, collided with hard-riding friends, or jumped into watercourses which turned out not to be dry. Very occasionally a tiger, disturbed from his slumbers, might react with furious disapproval: one panther is recorded as having mauled two officers before making off. A bear could be very crusty indeed, and ‘the chances of getting a horse to stand to bear were almost nil once the bear had been roused and was angry and noisy’. The quarry itself was never inclined to sell its life cheaply. One officer described how his three-man heat spotted a pig trotting on
about 300 yards ahead of them, and set off in pursuit.

  We shorten the distance to half before he grasps the situation. With one turn of his wicked old head he too is in full stretch. But he has left it too late, and we collar him some two hundred yards from his point … We are all nearly abreast. With a sharp jerk the boar crosses the leading horseman, and, turning sharp right, crosses S’s near fore and brings him down. Hog, horse and man fly headlong. When the dust clears we see S pinned under his horse who is lying, knocked out, tail to the pig. The pig is standing looking at them both, shaking his head, bewildered and angry, and things look awkward for S. P is near S’s horse’s head, and sees that the only thing to do is to jump off, and run to help on foot. This he does with his customary quickness; but the hog with one glance at his fallen foe disdains him, and seeing me coming up on the right, charges home. Neither horse nor pig flinch. The spear goes deep into his back, and the shaft breaks like splintered matchwood. But the fight is not over, for the gallant half-paralysed beast cuts again and again at P before he falls with a sob, dead, on his side.184

  Hunting stopped for lunch – tiffin – at about 1.00, when a flag was hoisted from the lunch tent. It resumed at about 3.00 and went on for perhaps another two hours, when the men – for ‘ladies are quite out of place at ordinary meets of a tent club’ – would return to camp. There was usually a vet on hand to treat wounded horses, or, failing that, a well-thumbed copy of Hayes’ Veterinary Notes.

  Most contemporary accounts of pig-sticking were replete with references to the men’s horses. For instance, there was the long debate as to whether ponies were better than walers, and a discussion of the relative merits of steeds: