Victoria’s Scottish Lion
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After Outram’s men had passed through the lines, it was the turn of Hope’s brigade, but as they retired the silence was broken by concerted artillery and small-arms fire. ‘For a minute or two all thought the retirement was discovered,’ wrote Norman, ‘and that we should have the enemy emerging from the Kaiserbagh … and falling on our diminished force, now placed at great disadvantage’, but fortunately ‘a rocket cart of the Naval Brigade was still in front, and a fire of rockets was at once turned on the Kaiserbagh. This seemed to satisfy the enemy, for their fire ceased.’285
Once the Residency was empty, Colonel Hale’s troops, occupying buildings to the left of the line of retreat, pulled back towards the Dil Khooshah. ‘Each exterior line came gradually retiring through its supports, till at length nothing remained but the last line of infantry and guns,’ reported Campbell, ‘with which I was myself to crush the enemy if he had dared to follow up the picquets.’286 The commander-in-chief remained near the Sekundrabagh with fifteen field guns pointing up the road towards the Residency, just in case. Once everyone was clear, he rode back towards La Martinière.
‘Well, young man, what’s your opinion of this move?’ Campbell asked Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander, as they prepared to bivouac for the night. ‘I don’t understand it, sir; but it looks as if we were running away.’ ‘Of course we are!’ he replied, ‘but il faut reculer pour mieux sauter [You have to step back to jump further]’.287
It was perfect, but for one oversight. Captain Waterman of the 13th Bengal Native Infantry had settled down to snatch a few hours’ rest before departure, and woke to find the grey light of dawn breaking in the east. ‘All was deserted and silent. To be the only man in an open entrenchment and 50,000 furious barbarians outside!’ wrote a colleague. ‘It was horrible to contemplate!’ Waterman crept out towards the Motee Mahul, to find that abandoned too.* ‘He escaped in safety,’ wrote another officer, ‘but the fright sent him off his head for a time.’288
With everyone now in the Dil Khooshah, Campbell reordered his army and on the 24th sent the civilians and most of the wounded ahead to the Alumbagh. ‘Round the Dil Khooshah the scene of confusion was bewildering in the extreme’, recalled Roberts. ‘Women, children, sick and wounded men, elephants, camels, bullocks and bullock carts, grasscutters’ ponies and dhoolies with their innumerable bearers, all crowded together. To marshal these incongruous elements and get them started seemed at first to be an almost hopeless task.’289 The chaos was exacerbated by some improbable impedimenta. ‘Captain Hinde lent me a bullock cart for the harmonium,’ explained Mrs Polehampton, ‘as it is too large for the camel, having fallen off several times.’290 Despite such indulgences, many of the ladies felt aggrieved. Mrs Germon had been incensed when, as they left the Sekundrabagh, her friend Mrs Barwell lit a candle to see if her baby had a chill and was abruptly ordered to snuff it out because of the proximity of ammunition and powder wagons. Campbell’s order that dhoolies at the Dil Khooshah be used for injured soldiers before able-bodied civilians, infuriated her even more.291 A few were gaining a little perspective. Though she ‘felt inclined “to lie down and die” from fatigue and exhaustion’, after her journey, Mrs Harris realised, ‘it seemed ungrateful and wrong to grumble now at any hardships after our merciful preservation’.292
By evening they had reached the Alumbagh, miraculously with no civilian casualties. As Major Vincent Eyre wrote:
The removal of some 600 women and children, and 1000 wounded and sick, without a single accident or loss, in the face of a besieging enemy four times his own in numerical strength … was a feat far more difficult in warfare than the defeat of an enemy in the field.293
Campbell had been forced to contend with the least fit and most spoilt party of evacuees any British general has ever suffered, but he managed to get the whole, lumbering, whingeing crowd through an enemy-occupied city, while musketballs whistled overhead, without losing one British civilian.* Wolseley called it ‘the best piece of staff work I have ever seen’.294 As one of the garrison wrote, it ‘proves beyond a doubt that the present Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army may lay claim to rank in genius with generals of the highest celebrity’.295 The Rev. Alexander Duff reported from Calcutta that it was ‘an achievement which the most experienced here consider as greatly outrivaling any of Sir Colin’s feats on the Alma or at Balaklava’.296 Campbell himself called it ‘a model of discipline and exactness … The enemy was completely deceived, and the force retired by a narrow tortuous lane, the only line of retreat open, in the face of 50,000 enemies, without molestation.’297 ‘All other remaining cares seem small, now that they have been snatched from destruction’, declared the governor-general.
Notes
* The Company seemed to go out of its way to annoy Campbell. He was excluded from the Calcutta council for two weeks until the right forms arrived (Martin, R.M., The Indian Empire, VIII, 464).
* Simpson’s chief of staff in the Crimea.
** Quite how Lawrence missed 6,000 mutineers hiding behind trees is unclear.
* Sixty-seven boys, one old boy and eight staff members served during the siege (Fraser, J., 5). Of those in the Residency, unluckiest of all was Dr William Brydon. He had been sighted outside Jalalabad in January 1842, slumped on an exhausted horse, his skull bearing an Afghan sword cut. The British had been expecting the return of the 12,000-strong column from Caubul. They asked Brydon what had happened to the army. ‘I am the army’, he replied.
* Given what the ‘most indecent and inhuman treatment’ meant to a Victorian readership, this suggested they had been raped, rather than simply hacked to death, but as Lady Canning told the queen, ‘there is not a particle of credible evidence of the poor women having been “ill-used” anywhere’. (Surtees, V., 245. See also RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/502/30).
* In all the hubbub, it was forgotten that Wheeler’s garrison had themselves been dumping bodies down a well during the siege. It seems likely that many of the women and children, ‘most of whom were wounded, some with three or four bullet-shots’ at the Satichaura Ghat, died well before the final massacre. Brigadier Neill wrote ‘the bodies of all who died there were thrown into the well of the house’ and then ‘all the murdered also’ (Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War, II, 39).
** Though it was reported that the walls bore messages and commendations to God, all were later additions written by soldiers to goad each other on (Thomson, 215; RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/502/28).
*** The sentiment was not restricted to the British. The American ambassador branded the rebels ‘enemies of the human race, and meriting from the whole of the human race summary and peremptory extirpation’ (Duff, 246).
**** Political agent at Rawal Pindi during Campbell’s tenure.
***** Nicholson here means ‘severe’ in the sense of being self-disciplined and austere, i.e. restricting oneself to the traditional British capital punishment of hanging rather than his more vicious suggestions.
* Duff was writing in 1858, so he meant 1758.
** Previous Commanders-in-Chief in India did not travel light. In the 1840s, eighty to ninety elephants, 300–400 camels, nearly as many bullocks plus drivers and 332 tent pitchers (including fifty whose sole job was to carry the tent windows) was normal. Charles Napier felt this was excessive and reduced it to just thirty elephants, 334 camels and 222 tent pitchers, ‘realising a public saving of £750 a month while in camp’ (Napier, C., Defects, 35–6). Campbell dispensed with almost all of it.
* ‘Few would deny that the epithet “Clemency”, bestowed in wrath and indignation, has become a title of honour more enduring than garters and earldoms’ (Maclagan, Clemency Canning, 315).
** ‘General Havelock, his senior, must have approved of the order, or he would have cancelled it’ (Forbes-Mitchell, 22).
* Stokes argued that by congregating troops at Cawnpore, ‘the British had flaunted the most elementary laws of strategy and at the very least invited a diversionary attack on their enormously long and exposed flank’. Instead, they should ha
ve made an ‘approach to Lucknow along the direct route from Benares through Jaunpur’ (The Peasant Armed, 41). Given that the Grand Trunk Road, telegraph and river all led to Cawnpore, rather than Jaunpur, this seems a strange suggestion. Furthermore, the British had barracks and cantonments (admittedly wrecked ones) in Cawnpore, and since Havelock’s discovery of the well, the idea of abandoning Cawnpore to the rebels was unthinkable. For the list of objections to this plan that Campbell telegraphed to Outram, see Forrest, Selections, II, 202.
** In reference to Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard (1473–1524), ‘le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’.
*** Outram joined the volunteer cavalry for the assault, armed only with a walking stick (Fayrer, 222).
**** Bagh means pleasure garden or palace complex.
***** This followed a reconnaissance by engineer Colonel Robert Napier on the 24th.
* An officer in the garrison later wrote, ‘I scarcely understand what General Havelock meant to express, when referring to his anxiety to let the garrison know that succour was at hand … We had been for some days prepared for the arrival of the relieving force; our ears made us sufficiently acquainted with their actual approach.’ See also Fortescue, XIII, 314; Outram, Campaign in India, 16.
* Outram had been the first Commissioner of Oudh following annexation.
* According to their paymaster at the start of the mutiny, Major Grimes, they numbered 8,500 (Windham, Observations, 9).
* Major-General Mansfield (Chief of Staff), Major Archibald Alison (military secretary) and ADCs Sir David Baird, Captain Frederick Alison and Captain Forster (whom Campbell persuaded to join him, having run into him in Cairo (Ramsay, 276)).
** A detachment of the Madras Native Infantry arrived in Cawnpore on 10 November.
*** One such note held by the British Library (BL/Mss.Eur.A205), on onion-skin paper, measures only 2.5 by 3.5in. Sometimes the words were in English but written using Greek characters, on the basis that it would be literally all Greek to the sepoys. For the want of a classical education …
* Kavanagh recounted the journey in his modestly titled How I Won the Victoria Cross, in which he bemoans the fact that no statue has yet been erected to his memory, nor public subscription raised to ensure him a comfortable old age (although he was granted 20,000 rupees by the government of India and promoted to assistant commissioner. Lal only received 5,000 rupees and lands worth 837 rupees per annum (Sen, 228; Forrest, A History of the Indian Mutiny, n.127). Given that the only witness was Lal, who wrote no memoir, just how much of Kavanagh’s tale is true is debatable. Colonel Maude suggested that it was actually Lal who delivered the message, claiming Outram ‘did not much believe in the probabilities of his [Kavanagh] getting through … and so, as a matter of fact, the despatches were not entrusted to his hands’ (Maude and Sherer, II, 336).
* Here the houses projected into the streets so ‘the eaves almost touch’. One traveller on an elephant feared they might crush his howdah, but he pressed on and was rewarded with a good view of ‘the women of scarlet, arrayed in their flaunting finery’ (Taylor, 115–16).
** Kavanagh claimed credit for this, but his natural vanity and erroneous description of the potential approaches weakens that claim.
*** He had bought his lieutenant-colonelcy in the 93rd in the latter months of the Crimean War, over the head of Major Ewart.
**** The corps of cavalry irregulars formed by Old Rugbeian William Hodson, who as a lieutenant served with Campbell at Sadoolapore.
***** Carriage could not be found for the Shannon’s 8in guns, so Peel took these 24-pounders instead from the arsenal at Allahabad.
* The garrison’s knowledge of semaphore was culled from Gubbins’ copy of The Penny Cyclopedia, which, although sounding like a cheap reference guide, in fact ran to twenty-seven volumes. The entry for semaphore (under the entry for telegraph) covers ten pages, giving detailed instructions on different methods.
** Hobson-Jobson defines a gurry or ghurry as a small fort.
* The ‘queen’ of Oudh.
** The editor of Outram’s despatches argued that Campbell should have approached the Sekundrabagh from the south, as Outram advised. This approach would have been less of a bottleneck, but would have meant fighting through the suburbs, taking the barracks and then advancing under fire from the Kaiserbagh. See also Goldsmid, II, 262.
* There is some debate about who got there first. Campbell credited Subadar Gokul Singh of the 4th Punjabis. For a full discussion see Forrest, A History of the Indian Mutiny, II, n.147 and Gordon-Alexander.
** A shored-up doorway according to Gordon-Alexander.
*** Roberts wrote that the gates were being shut when a native soldier jammed his shield between them and stopped them (Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 326). Lieutenant Jones-Parry described how his men blew the obstructing bar of the gate open with a single Enfield rifle round (Wylly, Neill’s Blue Caps, II, 96).
**** Some sources give the figure as 1,857, but this seems too coincidental. It is worth mentioning that, although it has become a fight of the 93rd, the 4th Punjab Infantry suffered nearly as many casualties.
* Blunt was plagued by bad fuses, causing shells to explode in the muzzle (Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 304).
** Henry Wylie Norman, brigade major to Campbell at Peshawur and at this point deputy adjutant-general. Later field marshal.
*** At one gun, only Lieutenant Young and Able Seaman William Hall were left standing. Both received the VC. Hall, the son of an escaped American slave, was the first black man to receive the award.
**** ‘I trust that your wound is really slight, as it is reported to be’, wrote Canning. ‘But what business had you to put yourself in the way of it?’ (Shadwell, II, 33).
* Gordon-Alexander suggests that the bugle call was a bluff, and that the sepoys ‘had determined to retire more than an hour before our rockets, with their fiery trains, came skimming about’. He contends that there was cache of gunpowder set to blow with a train of powder ‘as thick as a man’s arm’, and the rebels withdrew because they thought the rockets would set it off (125–7).
* The defenders were so dirty they had taken to dying their white clothes a ‘peculiar reddish-slate, formed by a mixture of black and red ink’, so they didn’t show the dirt (Martin, R.M., The Indian Empire, VIII, 425).
** One of the most popular stories of the relief is how Campbell was invited to a filling dinner of delicacies by Martin Gubbins, at which the commander-in-chief asked why, if there was such plenty, were so many of the garrison starving (Ruutz Rees, 340). It still gets repeated, and though in the spirit of both men, it is pure invention (see Martin, The Indian Empire, VIII, 470).
* According to Major North, although much was plundered by British troops, the precious stones alone filled eight barrels and the rest took up 118 ammunition boxes (North, 279).
* Forbes-Mitchell (106) and Gordon-Alexander (149) also recalled a sergeant left behind, asleep, who caught up with the rear guard.
* However, Norman (25) reported that more than one native servant was killed. Mrs Harris (161) recorded two natives were shot helping her to her carriage and Ruutz Rees (342) that one old lady was wounded in the leg. Major North (263) also wrote that, with regard to the wounded, ‘though every precaution which kind consideration for their precarious state could suggest had been observed, this move proved fatal to many of their number’. Among the soldiers, casualties were restricted to a single officer killed, and fifteen officers and men wounded. Many of these losses were incurred helping fragile civilians in and out of buggies, collecting strings of pearls when they split, recovering harmoniums, etc. (Fayrer, 238).
1 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W)6/11/55; Connell, 218.
2 St Aubyn, 123.
3 Bury and Norwich Post, 14 July 1857.
4 Douglas and Dalhousie, II, 446.
5 NLS/MS.2257, Haythorne.
6 Shadwell, I, 408.
7 Pandey, 115.
8 Oliphant
, I, 58.
9 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 250.
10 Surtees, V., 244.
11 Maude and Sherer, II, 436.
12 Maclagan, Clemency Canning, 125.
13 Shadwell, I, 437.
14 Bombay Times, 27 January 1858.
15 Raikes, 119.
16 Surtees, V., 244, 250.
17 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 252.
18 Ramsay, I, 269.
19 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/502/17.
20 RA/VIC/MAIN/G/36/118.
21 Ramsay, I, 276, 285.
22 NLS/MS.2257, Haythorne; Douglas and Dalhousie, II, 409.
23 Victoria, III, 196.
24 Ramsay, I, 284; Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 336; Ramsay, I, 273.
25 Fortescue, XIII, 258.
26 Chalmers, 115.
27 Grant, 99.
28 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 35.
29 Grant, 139.
30 RA/VIC/ADDE/1/742.
31 Hilton, 30.
32 Fayrer, 140, 149; Ruggles, 49.
33 Kavanagh, 10.
34 Malleson, I, 410.
35 Outram, Campaign in India, 33–4.
36 Hilton, 55; Metcalfe, H., 28; Fayrer, 160.
37 Forrest, A History of the Indian Mutiny, I, 255.
38 BOD/MS.Eng.Misc.e.1476.
39 Campbell, G., Memoirs, I, 282.
40 Hare, II, 363.
41 Russell, My Diary in India, I, 178.
42 Bennett, 1,228–31.
43 Maude and Sherer, I, 208.
44 The Times, 13 October 1857.
45 Macaulay, VI, 102.
46 Trevelyan, 299.
47 Hutchins, 81.
48 Leckey, 91–106.
49 Martin, R.M., The Indian Empire, VIII, 409.
50 Dawson, Soldier Heroes, 87–8.
51 RA/VIC/MAIN/Z/502/21.
52 Punch, 12 September 1857, 109.
53 Morning Post, 21 September 1857.
54 Kavanagh, 17.
55 Surtees, V., 243.