Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  The old governor-general, Lord Hardinge, thought highly of the new commander-in-chief: ‘He gains the confidence and attachment of those under his command, and I find him practicable, good-tempered, and considerate. He is a very superior man.’4 At first, Dalhousie also found Napier convivial. ‘I never had a more agreeable inmate in my house’,5 he wrote, little knowing he nourished a viper in his subcontinent; that March, Napier had persuaded Lord Ellenborough to lobby the Duke of Wellington to make Napier heir to the governor-generalship.

  Campbell, meanwhile, was ordered to Rawal Pindi. It was demotion from command in Lahore, but he was content to serve out his last few months there before returning home. British power in the locality had been cemented by another of Lawrence’s Young Men, Deputy Commissioner John Nicholson, worshipped locally by a growing cult as the god ‘Nikalsain’. Rawal Pindi seemed serene. ‘They are a quiet, docile and industrious people, not in the least likely to give me any trouble during the time of my probable residence amongst them,’ wrote Campbell. It was some compensation for the infernal climate. ‘The heat is scarcely endurable’, he complained. ‘The thermometer stands in my tent at this moment (2pm) at 106 degrees. It is, in fact, like living in a cauldron … The only object which could induce anyone, I imagine, to stay in this climate [is] the saving of a little money.’6

  His first job was to start chipping away at the native soldiers’ pay. Sepoys who served in Scinde during and after Napier’s annexation had been granted extra wages in consideration of the foul climate and risk of disease. Through the course of the two Sikh Wars which followed, this allowance was extended to all native troops on active service. With the coming of peace, the authorities saw the chance to return to pre-war sepoy pay rates but, as they were conscious of the risk of mutiny, the reduction was planned in stages. It was poor reward for winning a war and when, on 12 July 1849, Campbell removed the marching allowance from the 22nd Bengal Native Infantry stationed in Rawal Pindi, the sepoys refused to accept the new lower wage. Next day, Campbell reported the mutiny to Napier. The commander-in-chief saw it as ‘the first step towards open, violent action, most dangerous in its nature’.7 His instinct was to head to Rawal Pindi, though on reflection he felt his presence might only give the crisis undue attention. Instead he wrote stressing the need for a firm hand, adding that should matters deteriorate, Campbell could always retreat upon Peshawur, where Her Majesty’s 53rd Foot ‘would settle every difficulty, as the 98th did at Newcastle. Now, as then, you would be an ugly customer with a British regiment at your back.’ Napier also instructed Sir Walter Gilbert to ready the 60th and 61st Foot plus a Bombay field battery in case of trouble, and granted Campbell permission to discharge any sepoys who refused their pay. ‘I cannot, at this distance, give you any orders: each commander of a station must act according to circumstances and the dictates of his ability and courage’, the commander-in-chief told Campbell.8

  The Earl of Dalhousie, from Sir William Lee-Warner’s The Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie.

  But before Napier’s reply could reach Campbell the situation in Rawal Pindi worsened markedly. On 18 July the 13th Bengal Native Infantry refused their reduced pay as well. A tense but short-lived stand-off resulted, before the whole demonstration collapsed that same day. Campbell dismissed the affair as ‘a mere bit of bullying on their part, which they expected would have the effect of frightening the government into compliance … Without their European officers, and in a bad cause, they would have been easily quieted.’ However, he warned, ‘there was reason to fear that the same feeling pervaded other Native corps stationed in the conquered territories’. For weeks mutiny had been the central topic of conversation between the sepoys at Rawal Pindi and Wuzeerabad, and other garrisons besides. At least eight native regiments were implicated. In Napier’s eyes, this raised the threat of an infectious challenge to British power. He had only 12,000 European soldiers in the Punjab, against 40,000 sepoys, and in every location the native regiments outnumbered the British.9

  Though quashed, the mutiny gave the Indian press, which had never forgiven Campbell for Chillianwala, an excuse to pounce. They cooked up a story that Campbell had ordered out the artillery and threatened to fire on the native troops, and that the sepoys had called his bluff by shouting ‘Fire!’ Once this was exposed as fantasy, the newspapers, unperturbed, drew a bead on Campbell’s leniency towards the mutineers. The Times of India insisted:

  Instead of the Bengal sepoys being pampered and petted, as they seem to be, and constantly impressed with the idea, apparently, that their services are indispensable to the state – it were well that they were made aware of the scorn they are drawing down upon themselves by the exhibition of the want of the first of a soldier’s qualifications – that of patience, submission, and perfect obedience and subordination.10

  Targeted by the press for the second time in six months, Campbell once again sunk into melancholia. ‘I neither care, nor do I desire, for anything else but the little money in the shape of batta to make the road between the camp and the grave a little smoother’, he told Hope Grant that June. This bleak mood was aggravated by an especially harsh attack of the ague that September and the discovery that his mentor and ally Sir Charles Napier was to leave India in March, barely a year after landing. ‘My ambition has long evaporated’, he confided to his journal on 2 October. To cap it all he found that, due to an administrative error, he had been receiving the pay of a second-class, rather than a first-class brigadier. Even the occasion of his birthday depressed him. ‘The desire to enjoy repose from the daily routine of the service grows faster and faster upon me … My dislike to the little annoyances of station or garrison command daily augments, and I dislike the endless official letter-writing’, he complained. ‘I am only fit for retirement’.11

  Whatever his own doubts, Calcutta valued his talents. Campbell was offered command in Peshawur, gateway to the Khyber Pass, home to the strongest garrison in India. Under protest, Campbell agreed, taking office on 25 November 1849. ‘It may interfere with my return home, and on this account I regret the move’, he wrote.12

  In Peshawur, Campbell was subject to the orders of the independently-minded political agent, George Lawrence. Before the war, the city had been governed by the Sikhs, as counselled by Lawrence. Now it was a British enclave with George as ruler but also servant of his brothers’ Board of Administration. He shared their unshakeable self-confidence and conviction that the mere presence of a Lawrence evoked terrified respect and obedience in equal measure from the natives, blithely declaring that he ‘found the province perfectly tranquil, and with apparently every prospect of remaining so’.13

  Eroding Campbell’s independence still further was that Punjab peculiar, the Trans-Frontier Force.* Raised by the Board in May 1849, it consisted of five native infantry and five native cavalry regiments plus three light field batteries, all under the command of Brigadier-General J.S. Hodgson. It was answerable directly to the Board of Administration rather than the commander-in-chief, giving George Lawrence the privilege of his own private army. Napier distrusted the force from the start, warning that it would ‘plunder the people more or less’.14 He already held the Lawrences in contempt. ‘Boards indeed rarely have any talent, and that of the Punjaub offers no exception to the rule’,15 he sniffed. Despite his affection for Henry and John Lawrence, Campbell was absorbing Napier’s prejudice against ‘politicals’.16

  Peshawur was a lonely outpost, boiling hot in summer, but where ‘in the winter … the winds used to blow down from the snow hills with a piercing bitterness that searched our marrow’.17 It was as vice-ridden as Hong Kong; nothing was safe from the locals, who pillaged everything from watches to horses, often at knifepoint. ‘You may go without your breeches, but damn it, sir, you shall carry your sword!’ Campbell thundered at one indifferent officer. After that the British went everywhere armed.18 To the north-west of town was a stout fort, and in the centre, billets in the Ghor Khatri. Campbell condemned the existing facilities and s
tarted new barracks. ‘He crowded the troops, European and Native, into as small a space as possible in order that the station might be the more easily protected from the raids of the Afridis and the other robber tribes’, complained one artillery lieutenant,** and so ‘for long years Peshawar was a name of terror to the English soldier from its proverbial unhealthiness’.19

  Peshawur guarded India’s most combustible frontier. Here the peaks seemed to crouch in ambush for the unwary traveller, a maze of reclusive caves, unsounded ravines, wizened passes and steep gorges, perfect for guerrilla warfare, and an ordeal for regular troops. It was home to 100,000 armed Pathan tribesmen, fiercely independent and well-practised in mountain combat, who had nurtured their rivalries over centuries. They were expert swordsmen and their jezails (matchlock or flintlock rifles) were more accurate than their crude workmanship promised. They considered the mountain passes their own personal toll roads, and unless they received an annual ‘allowance’, they imposed their own levies by robbery. Fortunately, Campbell had a bespoke force to challenge them: the Corps of Guides raised in December 1846 by Lieutenant Harry Lumsden. Another of Sir Henry Lawrence’s protégés, Lumsden recruited men who knew the region best, from the very tribes opposing him. In place of the standard issue percussion musket, his Guides carried a two-grooved rifle providing long-range, accurate fire against a dispersed enemy, and instead of traditional British army red, they wore a strange, new, mud-coloured uniform known as ‘khaki’. Napier called them ‘the only properly dressed light troops in India’.20

  Ever since the annexation of the Punjab, the Pathans had grumbled and sulked, expressing their discontent in intermittent brigandry. The principal culprits were the Swatis, the Utman Khel, the Afridis and the Momunds. In October 1849 certain Utman Khel villages refused the demands of the local revenue collector. George Lawrence knew that in the past the Sikhs had required 1,200–1,500 men plus guns to extract taxes from this tribe. Lawrence was all for strong-arm tactics. In October 1847, while reconnoitring with Lumsden near the village of Babuzai, George had been fired upon by tribesmen. His response was to return with a brigade and six guns, storm the village and burn it to the ground.

  George Lawrence while in captivity in Afghanistan, from Vincent Eyre’s Prison Sketches.

  Dalhousie had decreed that ‘The employment of British troops for the mere collection of revenue is a measure to be avoided’, but he was persuaded in this case that the situation demanded ‘a conspicuous example [be] made of these men, the first in this newly conquered province who have dared to resist the orders of British officers’.21 For the governor-general, the villagers’ intransigence was ‘not merely a denial of the revenue which they owe, but is, in fact, a test and trial of the British power, and of the authority which was to be exercised over them’.22 The Lawrences’ Board of Administration demanded a punitive expedition and Dalhousie authorised the use of crown and company troops.

  George Lawrence set forth with a detachment under Lieutenant-Colonel Bradshaw of the 60th Rifles. Lumsden led 200 Guides as a vanguard, and such was his reputation that most villages capitulated before Bradshaw hove into sight. The first exception was Sanghao, where Bradshaw found 2,500 tribesmen resisting him. In taking the village by force the colonel lost four killed and eighteen wounded. In retaliation for their impudence, he laid waste their houses. At Palai, Bradshaw overawed 5,000 locals, this time incurring three dead and twenty-two wounded. Palai and two neighbouring villages were obliterated. His mission accomplished, Bradshaw headed back to Peshawur, which he reached on 22 December 1849.

  ‘British troops destroying villages and leaving poor women and young children to perish in the depth of winter?’ wrote Napier to Campbell on 2 January 1850. ‘I can hardly believe this, but will take good care it never happens again under my command.’23 Bradshaw and Lawrence had embarked on their little campaign before Campbell had assumed command at the end of November,24 so Campbell could with a clear conscience write, ‘With the commencement of this affair I had nothing to say. It had been determined upon, all arrangements made, troops detailed and commander named before my arrival.’25 When Napier heard from Campbell that the order to burn the villages came from George Lawrence, he was consumed with rage, and so, on 30 January the commander-in-chief, still resembling a cross between Moses and a bearskin hearthrug, arrived in Peshawur to grasp the tiller. ‘I truly rejoiced to see Sir Charles Napier again’, Campbell declared.

  His arrival was opportune. Seven days later Lieutenant Pollock, Assistant Commissioner of Kohat, reported an Afridi raid on a group of British sappers building a road. The tribesmen had cut the soldiers’ tent cords while they were sleeping, and murdered them as they thrashed about under the canvas. One survivor reached the nearby garrison tower in the Kohat Pass and raised the alarm. Possible Afridi motives ranged from discontent at the seventeen-fold increase in the salt tax (salt mining being the Afridis’ sole industry) to the embezzlement of British baksheesh by a local potentate. George Lawrence put it down to the Afridis’ fear of new roads ‘which, by rendering their hitherto difficult country easily accessible, would put a stop to their predatory habits’. He demanded that Campbell give them a good hiding. A detachment was already due to reinforce Kohat, and its progress could double as a show of force to secure the 13-mile pass leading to the town, ‘a long and very dangerous defile, commanded by steep heights during its whole length’. Campbell assembled 600 men from the 60th, 61st and 98th Foot, along with the 23rd and 31st Bengal Native Infantry, the 15th Bengal Irregular Cavalry, plus a troop of horse artillery. Lawrence brought his own detachment of the Punjab Irregular Force: two whole regiments – the 1st Punjab Cavalry and the 1st Punjab Infantry – plus an extra 1,600 native levies under his direct command. This little army left Peshawur on 9 February, accompanied by Napier (officially there in an advisory capacity). Given the carnage Bradshaw’s troops had wrought, Campbell banned all reprisals except by his express order. And anyone caught looting would be flogged or hanged.26

  Afridi Tribesmen in the Khyber Pass. Albumen print by Bourne & Shepherd. (Courtesy of Bonhams. Part of Lot 112 from Sale 21102.)

  Their first stop was Akhor, a village Lawrence believed bore some of the guilt for the sappers’ deaths. The tribesmen protested their innocence. Napier gave them an hour to hand over their weapons, but they refused. ‘I therefore ordered Sir Colin Campbell and Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence to crown the heights round the village, but not to fire unless fired upon.’27 After a little skirmishing, they had Akhor surrounded. Lawrence revealed that he had instructions from the Board to torch the village. ‘This was as impolitic as it was dishonourable to the character of British soldiers,’ protested Napier, ‘yet no power was entrusted to me, and I had been sufficiently cautioned against interfering with the Punjaub civil authorities.’28

  A detachment of the 15th Irregular Cavalry and some tribal levies were left to guard Akhor’s smouldering ruins while the rest of the army resumed its journey, stopping only to burn a second village, Gurgon Khail. In response, the Afridis now turned to guerrilla tactics, and as the British entered a steep-sided pass, they rained rocks and matchlock fire down upon them. Sniping continued through the night. Incensed, Lawrence destroyed two more abandoned villages on 11 February and the next day a further three at Bosty Khail, razed to the ground by his levies while Campbell’s troops stood guard.29

  On the 12th Napier had gone on ahead to Kohat with the two native infantry regiments detailed to fortify the garrison. On his return, he found two of Campbell’s piquets had been attacked, and the column very nearly encircled by Afridis. They passed a tense night expecting an assault, but the tribesmen remained content to pick off soldiers from a distance. Now that Campbell had conducted the sepoys to Kohat, his force could return to Peshawur. Napier had arranged for a detachment to sally forth from Kohat as a diversion to draw off the enemy, while Campbell headed back through the pass, but the Afridis ignored the bait. Instead they harried Campbell with rifle fire all the way back, occas
ionally plucking up the courage to rush down and fight at close quarters. The rocky terrain sheltered them from Campbell’s round shot and the tribesmen were so scattered as to make grapeshot virtually useless. As Campbell’s troops were working their way along one gorge, a gun overturned on the boulder-strewn track, blocking the way for the rear guard. The Afridis saw their chance, emerged from behind a thousand outcrops and descended into the pass. Campbell rode forward and ordered the rear guard to steady themselves and charge. It was enough to persuade the tribesmen to turn and flee before they got close.30

  Campbell made it back to Peshawur but losses of nineteen killed and seventy-four wounded were ruinously high given that the column was simply opening up a pass. ‘There’s not much advantage to be gained in firing at rocks, and the enemy took good care to keep themselves well behind them,’ complained one officer in the Delhi Gazette, ‘the enemy being the potters, we the pottees.’31 Campbell might have ‘smoked the hornets out of their nests’, but he had ‘scarcely drawn their stings’. Lawrence’s 1st Punjab Infantry had taken the brunt of the casualties. Lawrence blamed Napier and Campbell for being too soft, complaining that the Afridis had been ‘by no means intimidated by the amount of punishment they had received, and which I never had regarded as sufficient’.32 As a show of force it was a signal failure. ‘It ought never to have happened’, Napier told Lord Ellenborough.33

  Scarcely was Campbell’s little army back in Peshawur when, on 28 February, Afridis besieged the police tower in the Kohat pass. The defenders, running out of ammunition, were only saved when troops from Kohat, led by Captain Coke, appeared and routed the enemy. Twelve men lay dead and another dozen wounded. Coke left a company of the 1st Punjab Infantry to hold the tower but on 2 March the Afridis turned up again, this time taking control of the garrison’s water tank, misguidedly sited 150 yards beyond the walls. ‘The Afridis, so far from being cowed, as Lawrence expected they would be by the burning of their villages, are more exasperated and have taken the pass’, Napier informed Dalhousie.34 Captain Coke marched out from Kohat again, this time with nearly 1,000 men, and put the Afridis to flight.