Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Why the Bengal Army mutinied
● The Siege of Delhi, 1857
● The Reliefs of Lucknow, 1857-1858
● Central Indian campaigns, 1858
● The end of the East India Company, 1860
The Indian Mutiny was the most tragic event of the two centuries of the British presence in India. The mutiny was a large and very dangerous uprising that, under better leadership, may have ended British rule there and then. Indeed, so small was the British garrison of India that without the help of Indian troops, it would have found it almost impossible to put down the mutiny.
A variety of causes existed for the mutiny, and it could have been avoided altogether if the British had paid greater attention to the sepoys’ (Indian soldiers’) grievances. In the end, the governance of India passed from the Honourable East India Company to the British crown, which reformed the Indian army so that such tragic events could never happen again.
The battles detailed in this chapter were fought by armies with the following troop types:
● Sepoys: Native Indian infantry serving with the British East India Company’s army.
● Sowars: Native Indian cavalry troopers serving with the Company’s army.
● Europeans: The European troops of the British East India Company, these troops differed little from their British Army counterparts save that they were better paid and were a hard lot who generally had good reasons for wanting to spend their lives in virtual exile.
The Mutiny Begins
Early in 1857 something odd began to happen in the villages of Bengal. At night, a runner arrived at a particular village and gave the head man a chapatti. He also told him to bake more chapattis and pass them on to neighbouring villages. Even now, no one knows who started this strange version of the chain letter, let alone what it meant, but the underlying and rather sinister significance was that something wide-ranging and probably violent was about to take place.
Reasons for the outbreak of violence that was the Indian Mutiny include:
● An old Indian prophecy had it that in the centennial year of the Battle of Plassey the British would be driven from India forever.
● The Honourable East India Company was generally averse to becoming involved in local affairs, but some areas existed in which it felt its intervention was necessary, stamping hard on customs to like thagi (ritual murder in honour of the goddess Kali) and satee (the burning alive of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres), thereby annoying those with vested interests in such matters. Nor did the Company’s well-meaning regulations on inheritance and land tenure meet with universal approval.
● Many Hindus saw the well-intentioned activities of Christian missionaries as part of a British plot to violate the caste system and imperil their souls. This feeling overflowed into the Honourable East India Company’s Bengal army, which contained a significant proportion of high-caste Hindus and Rajputs, recruited mainly in Oudh. They objected very strongly to a recent regulation requiring them to serve overseas if need be, as according to their faith a sea passage lost them their caste. The sepoys in the Bombay and Madras armies considered this attitude to be right over the top, but the fact remained that it existed.
● Up to the time of the Sikh Wars in the 1840s (see Chapter 12), Bengal sepoys could discuss such problems with their British officer. As memories of that war faded, however, the Company had commissioned a new generation of quite unsuitable British officers who made no bones about the fact that they actually disliked the sepoys. Despite their presence, enough decent officers remained to warn the generals that serious trouble was in the offing. For their part, the generals, grown old in India and knowing that sepoys took pride in their soldiering, refused to countenance any idea that a mutiny was a distinct possibility.
● The Honourable East India Company decided to re-equip its troops with Enfield rifles. A disaffected workman at the Dum Dum arsenal probably started a clever and effective rumour that the grease on the new paper cartridges for these rifles, which the sepoys had to bite open, was a mixture of cow and pig fat. As the Hindus held cows as sacred and the Muslims abominated pigs, this rumour destabilised the entire native element of the Bengal army. The problem was not just that any sepoy handling the
cartridges would be regarded as unclean and forbidden to sleep with his wife until he had been through a ritual purification, they also saw the action as a deliberate step along the road to enforced Christianity. The average sepoy was terrified, and that terror conditioned all his subsequent actions.
Too late, the authorities listened and promised to redress the last of these grievances, but some stupid, insensitive officers were determined to force the issue. Early in 1857 the Company disbanded several regiments that refused to accept the cartridges. In April, 85 troopers of the 3rd Light Cavalry, serving with the Meerut garrison, refused to accept the cartridges. They were court martialled and sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour. The rest of the Company’s native regiments at Meerut now felt driven into a corner. They considered their only alternatives:
● They could accept the cartridges and risk losing their souls.
● They could refuse the cartridges and face severe punishment.
● They could mutiny and sweep away the system that had placed them in such terrible danger.
By now, British shortcomings in the Crimea (see Chapter 13) were common knowledge and this almost certainly influenced the sepoys’ decision to mutiny. On Sunday 10 May, while the British element of the garrison was at church parade, the mutiny became a fact when the sepoys cut down British officers, violated their wives with burning torches until they died, and slaughtered their children. The native regiments then marched off to Delhi. The march had a strange, nightmare quality about it: It was smartly done in full uniform with medals, bands playing the old English country airs to which the ranks had always swung along, the Colours carried proudly, and the mess silver safely packed along with the baggage. On reaching Delhi the following day the garrison promptly joined the mutineers. Once more, the Indians hunted down and massacred British officers, civilians, women, and children. A handful of the British managed a hair-raising escape after blowing up the city’s arsenal. The mutineers found a leader in the elderly Bahadur II, King of Delhi, whom both Hindus and Muslims could accept, proclaiming him Emperor of Hindustan. Bahadur appointed his eldest son, Mirza Mogul, commander of his new army.
The news spread like wildfire across northern India. In one garrison after another the Honourable East India Company’s native troops mutinied, although in some places the disaffected regiments were disarmed and dispersed before they did any damage. One of the worst incidents took place at Cawnpore: For three weeks in early June 1857, 300 British and loyal Indian soldiers under Sir Hugh Wheeler held the mutineers at bay from a makeshift entrenchment. Under offer of safe conduct to Allahabad, which was still in British hands, the British embarked on the river craft that were to take them to safety. The mutineers then massacred the men and violated, tortured, and mutilated the women and children, flinging their bodies down a well.
The Siege of Delhi, 8 June-20 September 1857
General Sir George Anson, Commander-in-Chief India, received orders on 12 May 1857 to besiege Delhi. With commendable speed he put together what became known as the Delhi Field Force. At first it consisted of only the 9th Lancers, the 75th (1/The Gordon Highlanders), two Royal Horse Artillery troops, the 1st and 2nd Bengal Fusiliers (European), the 9th Light Cavalry, and the 4th Irregular Cavalry. Of the two native infantry regiments present, one mutinied and cleared off to Delhi while British disarmed the other. By 17 May, Anson’s column was moving, but the strain of events had been too much for the 70 year old and 10 days later he died from cholera. General Sir Henry Barnard succeeded Anson and continued the march. At Baghpat Colonel Archdale Wilson joined Barnard with the remnant of the Meerut garrison, consisting of two squadrons of the 6th Dragoon Guards and part of the 60th Rifles (1/The King’s Royal Rifle Corps), some loyal Company cavalry, and seven guns, including five taken from mutineers who had tried to stop the garrison crossing the river Hindon.
A 30,000-strong mutineer army with 30 guns, dug in at Badli-ke-serai, six miles north of Delhi, halted Barnard’s progress. True to the British tradition of attacking in India whatever the odds, Barnard’s 4000 men sailed into the enemy mass, which broke and fled after a short fight. The advance continued, finally coming to a halt on a long ridge to the northwest of the city walls, too rocky to dig into. To put it at its most optimistic, the situation was unusual.
A British force consisting of 600 cavalry, 2300 infantry, and 22 guns, holding a barely tenable position, was ‘besieging’ 40,000 mutineers with several hundred guns, snug behind seven miles of 7.3-metre (24-feet) high masonry curtain walls, with bastions mounting artillery at regular intervals, the whole fronted by a ditch 6 metres (20 feet) deep and 7.6 metres (25 feet) wide. It was all a matter of perspective. Barnard was too weak to mount any sort of attack. The rebels, on the other hand, attacked repeatedly without success.
On 1 July a large contingent of mutineers from the Bareilly garrison joined the rebels inside the city. One of the newcomers, Bakht Khan, an Indian artillery officer with 40 years’ experience, promptly persuaded Bahadur that he was the man to lead the army. Naturally, Mirza Mogul resented being sacked, with the result that mutual suspicion and recrimination became the norm among the rebels’ senior commanders.
Barnard died from cholera on 5 July. His successor, General Thomas Reed, was already ill and had to hand over to Archdale Wilson a fortnight later. Wilson proved to be a sensible commander who decided to concentrate on holding his ground until sufficient reinforcements and a siege train arrived. Reinforcements were arriving, in small numbers, but they were barely keeping pace with the daily losses.
John Nicholson
John Nicholson was one of the most remarkable commanders in British military history. Of commanding stature, austere, humourless, and deeply religious, he possessed a powerful personality that impressed itself on those around him. Once, Nicholson pursued a notorious malefactor into the mountains, caught, fought, and killed him, then displayed the man's head on his desk as a warning to others that they should keep their criminal tendencies under control. Such deeds made him a legend among the wild tribes of the northwest frontier. His method of dealing with local ringleaders of the mutiny was swift, simple, and direct. He tied them with their backs to the muzzles of cannon and blew them apart.
The Sikhs not only respected his strength of purpose and scorn of soft living, but also recognised an individual with the rare gift of leadership. Thousands of Sikhs volunteered to serve under Nicholson, enabling him to press the siege of Delhi vigorously. The troops instinctively called him 'The General'. Nicholson most loyal adherents were a troop of barely governable Multani horsemen. When a sniper's bullet killed Nicholson, they flung themselves on his grave and cried like children. He was 35 at the time of his death and would become known as the Hero of Delhi. His statue remained near the Kashmir Gate until Indian Independence, when it was shipped to Lisburn in Ulster where his family had lived and where his memory is still honoured.
Reinforcing the besiegers
The great infusion of strength and firepower needed came from the Punjab, annexed only nine years earlier. There, Sir John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner, had reacted very quickly on the outbreak of the mutiny, disarming suspect regiments as well as securing arsenals and important strategic points. One of his commanders, Brigadier-General John Nicholson (see the sidebar on him), possessed immense influence among the local people, and thanks to this he was able to send the Delhi Field Force no fewer than three Punjabi cavalry regiments and seven Punjabi infantry battalions, followed by a heavy siege train and a unit of Punjabi sappers (engineers) and miners.
The arrival of Nicholson and his troops doubled the size of the Delhi Field Force. The siege train (including numerous heavy guns and mortars plus hundred of carts carrying 1000 rounds per gun and ample powder, all drawn by plodding elephants and bullocks) occupied no less than 21 kilometres (13 miles) of road and was still some way behind. Bakht Khan, aware of the fact, sent out 6000 men to capture the siege train. Wilson, whose agents informed him of this, sent Nicholson with 2500 men and 16 guns in pursuit. Nicholson caught up with the rebels at Najafghar on 25 August and routed them in an hour-long fight, capturing all their guns and baggage. The morale of the British soared, while that of the mutineers took a nose dive. Now that the constraints of discipline were gone, the mutinous regiments began to fall apart and the rebel army, joined by the city’s undesirables, started to mutate into an armed mob. As a professional artilleryman, Bakht Khan knew what the siege guns could do to the ancient city walls and urged an envoy to go to the British on 30 August with a tentative offer of terms. The British sent the envoy packing.
Assaulting Delhi's Walls
On 3 and 4 September 1857 the British siege train arrived and began its work against several pre-determined sections of the defences at once. Shattered masonry and dismounted cannon began to tumble into the ditch. Over the next few days, the rebels did everything in their power to storm or silence the batteries, without avail. Archdale Wilson still had barely sufficient resources for one assault:
● If it succeeded, the mutiny would suffer a serious blow.
● If it failed, Britain had little future in India.
Nicholson bullied Wilson into making an attack as soon as the British had made practical breaches in the defences. At first light on 14 September an assault by five columns, assisted by a party given the suicidal task of blowing in the Kashmir Gate, started. This boiled down to 5000 men attacking a force of over 30,000, consisting mainly of trained regular soldiers who held a fortified position. Longer odds are difficult to imagine. When the moment came, Numbers 1 and 2 Columns charged forward, running through a blizzard of musketry that shot down the ladder parties immediately. Others snatched up the ladders and men, dead or alive, tumbled down the counter-scarp to the bottom of the ditch. The British discovered that the ladders were too short unless they placed them on the berm (a shelf at the top of the slope), which was too narrow to hold them. It took several endless minutes to pile up rubble and the bodies of comrades into heaps on which they could place the ladders, and they had to carry out the work under a rain of masonry blocks from above. However, such was the fury of the attackers, many of whom had slaughtered wives and families to avenge, that no one could stop them. Crawling hand over hand up the debris of the breaches or clambering up the ladders, they swarmed onto the ramparts and in savage fighting pitched the rebels off the walls.
Fighting inside the city
At the Kashmir Gate a small party of Bengal sappers and miners under Lieutenants Duncan Home and Philip Salkeld had the suicidal task of blowing in the gate. Half of them were killed or mortally wounded, but they succeeded. Number 3 Column charged over the smoking wreckage into a square known as the Main Guard, where Numbers 1 and 2 Columns and the reserves joined it. Then the difficult and dangerous process of methodical street fighting began, clearing each house in turn as the advance into the city progressed.
Although those fighting inside the walls were unaware of it, the entire operation was on the brink of disaster. To the west of the city, Major Reid’s Number 4 Column was advancing through the heavily fortified suburb of Kishengunj to the Kabul Gate. Nothing went as planned. Reid’s promised artillery support did not materialise, and the mutineers routed its raw Kashmiri contingent. More rebels began pouring through the Kabul and Lahore Gates and started to push the column back. Reid was wounded and his successors gave contradictory orders. If the mutineers turned right they would trap three British columns in the city. Major Henry Tombs’s troop of Bengal Horse Artillery, which lost 27 of its 48 gunners, and the cavalry just managed to contain the threat. The pressure eased a little when Number 2 Column stormed the Moree Bastion and the Kabul Gate from within, and the arrival of the Guides Infantry and the Baluchi Battalion finally brought the situation under control.
Wilson moved his command post into the city of Delhi during the afternoon. The early success of the assault was clouded by the realisation that although he now controlled a quarter of the city, he had lost a quarter of his fighting strength. In addition, Nicholson had received a mortal wound. For a moment, Wilson toyed with the idea of withdrawing, then decided that to do so courted disaster. After so much bloodshed the infantry were becoming stale, but by now siege artillery had been brought in and this demolished any centre of protracted resistance. The mutineers were already beginning to leave in large numbers and by 20 September Delhi was in British hands.
Hodson's heroism
Most people would consider the capture of Bahadur enough high-risk activity for the time being, but Hodson took out 100 of his men to bring in three Indian princes, all of whom had given active support to the mutineers and connived at their atrocities. They were hiding in the same tomb as Bahadur, and the message Hodson sent in to them was that he was taking them back to Delhi, dead or alive. The huge crowd shouted for the princes to lead them in an attack on the soldiers, but none of the three had any stomach for a fight. They went off in a cart with a 10-strong escort while Hodson and his men faced down the mutineers once more. The troopers used their horses to control the crowd, and finally had the several thousand mutineers penned inside the grounds of the tomb. Hodson told them to throw down their arms. They began to mutter angrily. Hodson repeated his order, sharply. Incredibly, the mutineers obeyed, then shuffled off. So many of them had been at the tomb that it took two hours to collect all the weapons. Hodson and his men then set off after the cart carrying the princes, catching up with it not a minute too soon. A mob intent on rescuing the princes was surrounding it and the escort was in trouble. Hodson, realising that the princes could once again become the chosen figureheads of the mutineers' cause, borrowed a carbine and shot the three of them dead. The British then displayed the princes' corpses for three days at a spot where the mutineers had committed some of the worst atrocities. Naturally, Hodson's action provoked controversy, but it undoubtedly saved lives, both British and Indian.
When the British took the Red Fort in Delhi, Bahadur was hiding with his family in a tomb six miles outside the walls. Major William Hodson was sent to bring him back to the city. Hodson was a natural beau sabreur (dashing adventurer), who enjoyed fighting for its own sake and was a noted swordsman. Taking just 50 of his sowars, he told Bahadur that the British would spare his life if he surrendered at once. For two hours Hodson and his little band faced down thousands of demoralised but still armed and dangerous mutineers. Bahadur and his queen then gave themselves up and Hodson escorted them back to Delhi. However, he hadn’t quite finished for the day, as the sidebar ‘Hodson’s heroism’ relates.
From start to finish of the siege, the casualties that the Delhi Field Force incurred amounted to 992 killed, 2795 wounded, and 30 missing, a total of 3817, of whom 1677 were Indian soldiers. It is impossible to estimate how many mutineers and their supporters were killed during the siege, but the number was far greater than the British casualties and more were tried and executed after the seizure of the city.
The lesson for the mutineers was that if they could not win at Delhi, they could not win at all. Much hard fighting remained, but after Delhi the fortunes of the mutineers declined steadily.
The Reliefs of Lucknow, 1857-1858
Lucknow was the capital of the former kingdom of Oudh, an area from which the mutineers drew much of their support. It was a typical Indian city of the period, sprawling and labyrinthine. The British Residency was in its own enclosure on a small plateau. On all sides save the north the buildings of the city pressed against or overlooked it.
Sir Henry Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner for Oudh, saw the mutiny coming. He began fortifying the Residency and laying in supplies for a siege during May. News of the Meerut mutiny reached him on 14 May, and shortly after, he received a tip-off that the native element of the Lucknow garrison would mutiny on the evening of 30 May. Lawrence moved the city’s European community inside the defences. The warning proved to be accurate, but before the mutineers could reach the Residency the under-strength 32nd (1/The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry) and 4/1 Battery Bengal European Artillery chased them out of town. For the moment, these two units and about 300 loyal sepoys constituted the entire garrison.
Defending Lucknow
By 12 June news came that every British outpost in Oudh had fallen. Towards the end of the month, reports said that the Cawnpore garrison had surrendered, although some time elapsed before the defenders of the Residency learned of its horrible fate (see the section ‘The Mutiny Begins, 1857’ earlier in this chapter). They were, however, becoming increasingly conscious of their own isolation. On 29 June Lawrence learned that a small force of mutineers had reached Chinhut, some 10 miles distant. He led out a sizeable portion of the garrison to deal with them, but to his horror discovered that they numbered 10 times the figure he expected. Having sustained 200 casualties and lost five of its 11 guns, his force withdrew into the Lucknow defences. The Chinhut affair was a disaster, as the British defeat led every mutineer and malcontent for miles around to converge on the city. As many of the larger buildings close to the perimeter were still standing, the enemy’s fire could reach everywhere in the defences. At any one time there were reputedly no fewer than 8000 mutineers and their supporters firing into the Residency. Shellfire mortally wounded Lawrence on 2 July and command passed to Colonel J.E.W. Inglis of the 32nd, later promoted to brigadier general.
Inglis pursued a much more aggressive defence than Lawrence had, instituting a series of successful sorties that wrecked the enemy’s forward posts. The mutineers resorted to mining under the defences. The garrison’s engineers, with the assistance of former tin miners from the 32nd, counter-mined and usually won the brutal subterranean fights that took place in hot, claustrophobic semi-darkness. On 10 August, however, the mutineers did succeed in blowing a gap in the defences. Above ground, most of their comrades showed little inclination to exploit it, and those that did the British quickly shot down.
While the fighting raged, the garrison had other challenges to overcome. Overcrowded living conditions, poor sanitation, intense heat, and the difficulties involved in disposing of human and animal remains all contributed to the spread of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and smallpox that killed or incapacitated as many people as the mutineers’ fire.
Havelock and Outram to the rescue: The First Relief
Details of the rebels’ atrocities had become public knowledge in Britain. As women and children were in the Residency, the only politically acceptable course was to despatch a relief column as quickly as possible. In a strictly military context, the loss of the Lucknow Residency would have been of no importance whatever. Reinforcements were on their way to India from the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but they would take time to arrive.
The officer chosen to lead the relief column was Brigadier General Sir Henry Havelock, a Regular Army officer who, having no money of his own, had chosen to serve permanently in India, where living was cheaper. Now aged 62, he may have been considered too old for the task, but he had a wide-ranging experience of active service, including the epic siege of Jellalabad (see Chapter 12). He was entirely reliable and possessed a cool head in action. On 30 June he began assembling his troops at Allahabad on the Ganges, just south of the Oudh frontier. They included the 64th (1/The North Staffordshire Regiment), the 78th (2/Seaforth Highlanders), the 84th (2/York and Lancaster Regiment), an Honourable East India Company regiment, the Madras European Fusiliers (later 1/Royal Dublin Fusiliers), 3/8th Battery Royal Artillery, 20 volunteer cavalry, and an irregular cavalry unit of doubtful value. All the regular units were under strength and only 2000 men were actually available for Havelock’s apparently impossible mission.
On 7 July Havelock set out for Cawnpore, knowing that the mutineers had massacred the garrison but believing that the women and children were still alive and held captive. On 11 July, 3500 mutineers barred the column’s path at Fetehpur, where the rebels discovered that the new Enfield rifles shot holes in their ranks beyond the reach of their old Brown Bess muskets, the balls from which were simply pattering into the dust. When Havelock gave the order to advance with the bayonet, the mutineers bolted. From start to finish, the ‘battle’ had lasted a mere 10 minutes. No British casualties resulted from enemy action, but 12 men died from heat-stroke.
On 14 July a flank attack dislodged another rebel force from its position at Aong. Two days later the British found the Nana Sahib himself, the mutineers’ leader, blocking the road into Cawnpore with 8000 men and eight guns. Havelock used a feint to the mutineer’s centre to distracted the rebels’ attention, while his main body of the relief column swung off the road to the right and rolled up the Nana Sahib’s line as the 78th Highlanders, followed by the 64th, put in a ferocious bayonet charge. A second charge routed reinforcements that the Nana Sahib had summoned from the city.
The British entered Cawnpore the following day. The stench and sights where the women and children had been killed were sickening, and mutilated corpses filled the well to overflow. Men from the 84th recognised some of the regiment’s womenfolk and children among the victims. Until now, neither side had in fact shown much mercy, but from this point on, nothing less than the extermination of the mutineers and their supporters would suffice for the British.
On 25 July, leaving a small garrison to hold Cawnpore, Havelock commenced his march into Oudh, fighting several successful actions but running short of artillery ammunition. With the rebels massing to his front, his lines of communication under threat, and the Nana Sahib raising a fresh army at Bithur on his flank, Havelock reached the conclusion that he would have to fall back on Cawnpore until he received reinforcements and fresh supplies. In a message to Lucknow, he asked whether it was possible for Inglis to break out and join him. Inglis told him that, burdened as he was with sick and wounded plus hundreds of women and children, breaking out was not an option, but he hoped that by placing everyone on half rations he could hold out until 10 September.
As soon as his supply situation had eased a little, Havelock moved against the Nana Sahib, who was now on his home ground and had collected about 4000 men and several guns. It was Nana Sahib’s misfortune that he was a better mass murderer than he was a tactician, for he chose to fight in front of an unfordable stream crossed by a single bridge. An hour’s fighting broke the mutineers, who were driven into the stream or across the bridge and through the town. The British then burned the Nana Sahib’s palace to the ground. On 15 September reinforcements arrived, including the 5th (1/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers), the 90th (2/The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)), 2/3rd and 1/5th Batteries Bengal Artillery, and a contingent of Sikhs from the Punjab. With them came Major General Sir James Outram, designated commander of the enlarged force and Civil Commissioner for Oudh.
Outram and Havelock knew each other well and had served together during the recent campaign in Persia. As Havelock had been responsible for the first clear-cut victories since the mutiny began, Outram did not wish his arrival to be seen as a reflection on Havelock. The two agreed that Outram should accompany the column as a volunteer, but that Havelock should remain in command until they had relieved Lucknow.
Inglis was still holding out in Lucknow when the column, now 3000 strong, moved off on 18 September. It dispersed an enemy force at Mangalwar on 21 September and two days later found the rebel army drawn up four miles south of Lucknow. Estimates put that army’s strength at 10,000 infantry with ample artillery and 1500 cavalry. A marsh protected its front and its left rested on the former summer palace of the kings of Oudh, the Alambagh, which was enclosed by a high wall with a turret at each corner. Once again, Havelock demonstrated his tactical ability. He decided to attack the enemy right with a wide turning movement. While this was in progress, rebel guns, previously concealed by trees, opened fire on the marching column and inflicted serious casualties. Major Vincent Eyre’s 1/5th Battery quickly silenced its opponents then turned its attention to the enemy cavalry. Unable to charge because of the marsh and unwilling to endure the hail of shot, the rebel horsemen fled. The mutineer infantry, having lost both their artillery and cavalry, crumbled as the flank attack developed and Outram at the head of the Volunteer Cavalry, now 168 strong, chased them as far as the city. A good day’s work ended with more good news: Delhi had fallen to the British (see the section ‘The Siege of Delhi’, earlier in this chapter).
Havelock began the final phase of the operation on 25 September. He planned to storm the bridge over a canal marking the southern boundary of the city, then fight through the gardens of the palaces and other buildings beside the river until they reached the Residency. The fighting was bitter in the extreme but the plan worked, thanks to the close-quarter blasting of the British artillery. The gun crews suffered cruelly, but volunteers replaced those who had been shot down, while the infantry, with vengeful yells of ‘Remember Cawnpore!’, flung the rebels out of one position after another at the point of the bayonet. At last they reached the Residency gates amid scenes of jubilation.
The cost of the final breakthrough amounted to a horrific 31 officers and 504 men killed or wounded. This alone meant that Outram was now too weak to comply with his orders to evacuate the Residency. In effect, the relief amounted to nothing more than a reinforcement. If the mutineers rejoiced that Havelock and his men, so long a thorn in their side, were now penned inside the Residency, their joy was short-lived, as outlined in the next section.
Campbell is coming, hurrah! Hurrah!:
The Second Relief
On 27 October the British received word that the advance guard of a second relief column, with Brigadier General Hope Grant in command and consisting of units that had taken Delhi, had reached Cawnpore. On 6 November Hope Grant sent another message to the effect that he was well on the way to Lucknow, and was simply waiting for newly arrived reinforcements from England under the redoubtable General Sir Colin Campbell, the recently appointed Commander-in-Chief India.
On the morning of 10 November, two bedraggled figures arrived at Campbell’s camp with a request to see the General. One was a native spy in Outram’s service, the other towered over him and, although he was wearing native clothes, a mixture of oil and lampblack stained his skin and a turban concealed his head of fair hair. His name was Thomas Kavanagh (a clerk by trade - not a soldier), and he and his comrade had slipped out of the Lucknow defences the previous night to guide the relief force in. Leaving Lucknow, Kavanagh and his accomplice were picked up by a rebel patrol, talked themselves out of trouble, lost their way, and finally floundered through a swamp before reaching British lines. Campbell said that their achievement was ‘one of the most daring ever attempted’. Although a civilian, Kavanagh received the Victoria Cross (see the sidebar in Chapter 13) as he was under military command at the time of his exploit.
Campbell made excellent progress and had 5000 men and 49 guns available for the final advance on the Residency. He decided to accept Outram’s advice and make this as close to the river as possible, even if it meant storming several riverside palaces he knew had been put in a defensible condition. On 14 November the British drove the enemy from the walls of the Dilkusha Park, and then from the Martiniere School. The following day they brought the heavy baggage and provision train into the Dilkusha Park, a necessary step because Campbell intended evacuating the Residency as soon as he had broken through.
Campbell was a patriotic Scot who favoured his fellow Scots above all others, but above all he favoured his beloved 93rd. He ensured that its men were always in the thick of the fray, and they never let him down. On 16 November they led the attack on the Secundrabagh palace, lying within a high-walled enclosure of strong masonry some 110 metres (120 yards) square, loopholed all round, and garrisoned to capacity with mutineers. Two hours of concentrated gunfire battered a small hole between 0.9 metres (3 feet) and 1.2 metres (4 feet) square in the wall beside the gate. The 93rd’s pipers had roused them to fighting madness, so that when Campbell’s drummer beat the advance they surged forward with a howl of pent-up rage. One after another, the kilted figures, berserk with a fury that those within could never match, swarmed through the breach.
The fight for the gates was bitter in the extreme, but when the British threw them open the rest of the 93rd, followed by the 53rd (1/The King’s Shropshire Light Infantry), the 4th Punjabis, and a composite battalion, poured through, hounding the mutineers across the courtyard, up stairs, along passages, and from room to room. The British didn’t knowingly leave a rebel alive in the Secundrabagh. They carried some 2000 rebel bodies out afterwards, but a photograph of the interior, taken months later after the carrion had done their work, shows the courtyard still littered with skulls and bones. Considering the nature of the fighting, British casualties were remarkably light - the 93rd, for example, sustained only 22 killed and 75 wounded.
It was now afternoon and Campbell decided to tackle the Shah Najaf, a domed mosque inside a garden, surrounded by a loopholed masonry wall surmounted by a parapet. Once again, the 93rd led the assault, followed by a composite battalion, once the attached naval guns under Captain Peel, RN, firing at point-blank range, had knocked a breach in the walls. This proved to be more difficult than expected. The crowds of mutineers on the walls, blazing away with their muskets at the British infantry, caused serious casualties, so the British fired rockets, clearing the wall like magic. The British heard the rebel buglers inside sounding the advance, and for a moment the enemy appeared about to make a determined sortie. Then silence ensued. After a while, a patrol under Staff Sergeant John Paton discovered that the mutineers had escaped through a gate at the rear. The British promptly occupied the building, and reached Outram’s garrison the following day. The events of 16 November 1857 produced the greatest number of Victoria Crosses ever won during a single day.
Evacuating Lucknow
The evacuation began as soon as Campbell’s force arrived. It was a model operation conducted without the mutineers’ knowledge. Sadly, Havelock, worn out by strain and the effects of dysentery, died on 25 November. Two days later, leaving a garrison of 4000 men and 35 guns with Outram at the Alambagh, which was much easier to defend and relieve than the Residency, Campbell set out on the return march to Cawnpore. On the way, he learned that one of the rebels’ best commanders, Tantia Topi, had attacked the small garrison left behind at Cawnpore with 14,000 men and 40 guns.
The rebels had driven the garrison back into its entrenchments, but it was still holding its own when Campbell returned. Having sent the women, children, sick, and wounded off to the safety of Allahabad on 3 December, he was able to give Tantia Topi his undivided attention. On 6 December he drove in both wings of the rebel army while Peel’s guns punched holes through its centre. The British pursued the fleeing rebels, who lost all their supplies, for 22 kilometres (14 miles).
Campbell returned to Lucknow at the head of a 20,000-strong army in March 1858. The recapture of the city cost him 1200 casualties, but his men killed thousands of rebels and the rest fled. This time, the prize agents were slow off the mark, for so great was the quantity of loot that they were quite unable to assess its value. Shortly after (by coincidence, of course) a number of heavily mortgaged estates at home suddenly found themselves running at a profit.
Fighting in Central India, 1858
Although the British decisively defeated the mutineers at Delhi and Lucknow (see the preceding sections), at the beginning of 1858 large areas of Central India remained in rebel hands.
The officer selected to restore British power in Central India was Major General Sir Hugh Rose, who did not have wide experience of active service and whose appointment as commander of the Central India Field Force was far from universally welcome. The snobbery between the Indian and home establishments was very much two-way traffic and people who had been in India for less than a year were not considered capable of doing things the ‘Indian’ way. Rose couldn’t have cared less and did things his way. He was intelligent, competent, vigorous, and possessed of an iron will.
Rose achieved so much with so little. When he assembled his force at Mhow it contained a substantial contingent that the Nizam of Hyderabad had supplied. The 1st Brigade, under Brigadier General Charles Stuart, contained half the 14th Light Dragoons (later Hussars), the 86th (2/Royal Irish Rifles), one troop of the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry, two regiments of Hyderabad
Contingent Cavalry, the 25th Bombay Native Infantry, the 1st Troop Bombay Horse Artillery, two field batteries of the Hyderabad Contingent, and some Madras sappers and miners. The 2nd Brigade, under the command of Brigadier General Charles Steuart, contained half the 14th Light Dragoons, part of the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry, one regiment of Hyderabad Contingent Cavalry, the 3rd Bombay European Regiment, the 24th Bombay Native Infantry, a battery of the Bombay Horse Artillery, a field battery of the Hyderabad Contingent, a company of Madras sappers and miners, and a siege train. This small force, which any opposition it encountered was likely to dwarf, took the field on 6 January 1858:
● Rose’s first priority was to relieve the garrison of Saugur, which had been under siege for seven months. First, however, he had to take the fortress of Rathgur. The siege train began battering its walls on 26 January and three days later had opened a breach. This was the moment that the Rajah of Banpur chose to show his hand, closing in to attack the British rear. Leaving the siege guns at their work, Rose detached a force of cavalry, horse artillery, and infantry to meet the threat. At the first shot Rajah’s men took to their heels, with Rose in pursuit. On the afternoon of 30 January he put them to flight again.
● Rose relieved Saugur on 3 February amid scenes of jubilation. Next, he took the fortress of Garrakota, 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the east, because it lay on the flank of Rose’s intended line of march. Forty years earlier a British force far larger than Rose’s had failed to capture it and since then it had been strengthened with outlying earthworks. For all that, the rebels weren’t much interested in fighting. After being worsted in an artillery exchange, they abandoned the fortress on the night of 11 February.
Everything was going according to plan for the Central India Field Force. Rose was all set to continue his advance into the state of Jhansi, considered to be the centre of rebel activity in Central India, but had to bide his time until a column under Brigadier General George Whitlock arrived in support - which it did at a leisurely pace. Rose was incandescent with rage, but used the time to collect adequate supplies and transport. The rebels also put the delay to good use, fortifying two passes through a range of hills, both of which led into Jhansi. Rose feinted towards one and attacked the other. The attack failed, but succeeded the second time. The rebels hastily abandoned both passes and every fortified place between them and the city of Jhansi save for the fort at Chanderi, which the 1st Brigade took after a four-day siege.
Action in Jhansi
When he had reached a point some 22 kilometres (14 miles) from Jhansi, Rose received orders to go to the assistance of the loyal Rajah of Charkheri, whom Tantia Topi was besieging. As Charkheri lay 130 kilometres (80 miles) off his route, Rose doubted whether he could get there in time. He also believed that the capture of Jhansi would cut the heart out of rebel activity in Central India and destroy the prestige of its Rani (princess), who had done much to incite rebellion across much of the country (see the sidebar, ‘The Rani of Jhansi’). Jhansi was heavily fortified and its citadel towered on a granite rock above the city. No fewer than 12,000 men manned its defences and the Rani’s formidable presence kept them at their posts. The Rani also asked Tantia Topi to come to her assistance, which he did as soon as he had taken Charkheri.
Rose’s siege guns opened fire on Jhansi on 25 March. Five days later a huge bonfire in the distance signalled the approach of Tantia Topi’s army, consisting of 22,000 men and 28 guns. The position of the tiny Central India Field Force could now be said to be somewhere between a rock and a hard place. Rose kept his siege guns in action and deployed just 1500 men opposite the two fords of the river Betwa that he knew Tantia Topi would have to use. By means of a feigned withdrawal he drew the rebel advance guard across the river during the afternoon and evening of 31 March.
Rose intended attacking at first light, but when the rebels themselves advanced to the attack covered by the fire of their many guns, he ordered his infantry to take cover. Then, at the critical moment, he ordered his whole line to charge. This was the last thing that the rebels expected. Taken aback, they broke at the first shock and the British bundled them back across the river, in which many of them drowned. In an effort to halt the pursuit, Tantia Topi set fire to the tinder-dry underbrush and made a disorderly retreat amid clouds of acrid smoke. The Battle of the Betwa cost him 1500 killed, an unknown number of wounded, and all his artillery. British losses came to 19 killed and 66 wounded.
The Rani of Jhansi
Jhansi became one of the Honourable East India Company's dependent princely states in 1817. When the Rajah died without issue in 1853, his Rani, 30-year-old Lakshmi Bai, requested that the succession should pass to her adopted son. That was not permissible under the law of lapse and the Company annexed the state. Despite its having granted her a handsome pension, the Rani remained bitter towards the Company and the British in general. When the 12th Bengal Native Infantry and the 14th Irregular Cavalry mutinied at Jhansi, she provided charismatic leadership for them and indeed every disaffected element across Central India. Reportedly she reneged on a safe conduct granted to the Jhansi garrison's British officers and their families, who were savagely massacred days after the mutiny, and mutilated her male prisoners, but no proof of either allegation exists. Many officers serving with the Central India Field Force had a high regard for her. The fact that she dressed and fought like one of her own cavalry troopers added to her glamorous image.
Morale inside Jhansi collapsed. The British breached its walls on 3 April. Three days of street fighting followed and Rose’s men showed the garrison no mercy. The Rani managed to escape, accompanied by a small escort.
Rose had incurred 343 casualties in the siege of Jhansi and his men were in serious need of rest. Reinforcements were now reaching India in large numbers and the arrival of several companies of the Highland Light Infantry made good his losses. On 25 April Rose began the 165-kilometre (103-mile) march on Kalpi, where the rebels had concentrated. The new arrivals must have found the march a horrific experience, for they made the first part of it through semi-desert with wells 13 kilometres (8 miles) to 16 kilometres (10 miles) apart in temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees.
Fighting in Kalpi
In Kalpi the Rao Sahib, nephew of the Nana Sahib, and the Nawab of Banda had sided with the Rani and Tantia Topi. The rebels undertook serious training, established a large supply depot, and their leaders agreed to engage the Central India Field Force at Kunch, 67 kilometres (42 miles) to the south. They would force Rose to fight with the desert at his back and believed that his defeat would spell complete disaster for the Central India Field Force.
Tantia Topi established a strong position to the south of the town, in an area consisting of temples, woods, and gardens presenting difficulties to an attacker. Unfortunately for the rebels, Rose had no intention of dancing to their tune. Having examined their position carefully, he decided that they were concentrating too much of their strength in the centre. His brigades made 22-kilometre (14-mile) approach marches under cover of darkness and at first light on 7 May fell on both enemy flanks. An hour’s fighting so unsettled the rebels in the centre that they began to retreat along the road to Kalpi. A mutinied regiment that remained perfectly steady, firing and retiring by sections in accordance with its training, covered this retreat. It evoked respect, but a charge by the 14th Light Dragoons rode over it, then destroyed an attempt to form a new rearguard. The rebel army degenerated into a running mob, abandoned its guns, and was pursued by the British for 11 kilometres (7 miles). Over 600 rebels were killed and many more wounded at Kalpi. The British loss came to 62 killed and wounded, but Rose was compelled to grant his men 24 hours’ rest in which to recover. He had himself fallen from his horse four times during the day as a result of heat exhaustion.
The British march in pursuit from Kunch to Kalpi was even worse than that from Jahnsi to Kunch (see the previous section). At one time half the 25th Bombay Native Infantry had fallen out, so you can imagine what the newly arrived British troops, less used to Indian temperatures, went through.
Luckily, reinforcements arrived with a column operating on the opposite side of the Jumna river, including the 88th (1/The Connaught Rangers) and a Camel Corps consisting of 200 men of the Rifle Brigade and 100 Sikh policemen.
The Rao Sahib laid out the defences of Kalpi to the south of the town. They consisted of five lines of trenches providing a defence in depth based on a series of ravines running down to the Jumna. Rao Sahib calculated, correctly, that the Central India Field Force simply could not afford the number of casualties that it would incur in fighting its way through the complex. Having got this right, he got it wrong by throwing away his advantage and attacking the British lines at 10 a.m. on 22 May, believing that his opponents would be laid low by the noon heat. They weren’t, but the rebels pressed their attack so hard that they came within 18 metres (20 yards) of the guns. At this point Rose brought up 150 men of the Camel Corps. They dismounted behind a ridge and the General led them in a bayonet charge down the forward slope. The enemy gave way immediately, and although Rao Sahib mounted further attacks during the day, they were not pressed. Next morning, the British found that the mutineers had abandoned the town and its arsenal during the night.
Ending the mutiny at Gwalior
As the Central India Field Force had taken its final designated objective, Sir Colin Campbell decided to break it up. In what he intended - prematurely - to be a farewell speech, Rose summarised its achievements. These included:
● Capturing over 100 guns
● Marching 1600 kilometres (1000 miles)
● Regularly beating an enemy who outnumbered it many times
● Restoring law and order across a huge area
● Taking several fortresses
● Tramping through deserts and jungles
Hardly had the force begun to disperse than it was recalled. The loyal Mahrajah of Gwalior had had to flee when his army mutinied and joined the rebels whom the British had recently defeated at Kalpi. Tantia Topi was in command of the new rebel army - which says more about the shortage of suitable candidates than it does about his CV as a general. Sir Colin Campbell reacted quickly and despatched three converging columns into the area, including the Central India Field Force.
Movement took place at night due to thermometer-bursting temperatures.
On 16 June Rose ejected the rebels from the Morar Cantonments, 8 kilometres (5 miles) east of Gwalior city. The following day the approach of a second column under Brigadier General M.W. Smith resulted in a cavalry combat at Kotah-ki-serai. During this a trooper of the 8th Hussars shot one of his opponents, little realising that he had inflicted a mortal wound on the Rani of Jhansi (see the section ‘Action in Jhansi’, earlier in this chapter, for more on her). The rebels never recovered from her loss. On 19 June Rose took some dominant ground overlooking Gwalior. Below them, the mutineers were visible in full flight, flinging away their weapons as they ran. Rose sent his cavalry and the 2nd Brigade in pursuit, now under the command of Brigadier General Robert Napier. They caught up with Tantia Topi, who had managed to rally 4000 men, at Jawra Alipur on 22 June. When Napier’s cavalry, just 560 strong, bore down on the rebels in a dashing charge, the rebels took to their heels, abandoning 25 guns and everything else.
The Indian Mutiny was all but over. The surviving mutineers fragmented into armed gangs. Their demands lost them the support of local people and they were hunted down until, by the middle of 1859, the entire subcontinent was pacified:
● Tantia Topi (whose real names were several and too many to recount) fled into Rajputana after his defeat at Jawra Alipur and sought refuge with an old chum, the Rajah of Nawar. The Rajah had once been actively anti-British, but seeing the way the wind was now blowing he decided to earn himself some brownie points by handing him over. Tantia Topi went to the gallows on 18 April 1859.
● The Rao Sahib pretended to be a religious ascetic living in the jungles of the Punjab, but in 1862 he too was betrayed, tried, and hanged.
● The Nana Sahib was said to have sought refuge in Nepal, where he died in October 1858, but people claiming to be him made regular appearances for many years to come.
Waving Goodbye to John Company, 1860
Following the Great Mutiny the governance of India passed from the Honourable East India Company (popularly known as John Company) to the British Crown.
The Company’s European regiments became Queen’s regiments without the permission of their members. Normally, the men would have expected to receive their discharge from the Company’s service, then re-engage into the Queen’s service and receive a bounty. The change denied them this prize and they became undisciplined and insubordinate. At length, the government agreed to grant them a discharge and a free passage home. As over 10,000 of the 15,000 Europeans accepted the offer, this cost rather more than payment of re-enlistment bounties would have done in the first place. Both sides almost certainly ignored the proviso that on discharge the men were not permitted to re-enlist. The result was that in 1860 all the Company’s artillery batteries transferred to the Royal Artillery. Three cavalry regiments became the 19th and 20th Light Dragoons (later Hussars) and the 21st Light Dragoons (later Lancers). A number of infantry regiments also transferred to the Army List at the same time, becoming the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and the second battalions of several other regiments.
Because, or perhaps in spite of, the fact that they had spilled so much bad blood, the post-mutiny relationship that developed between the British and their Indian subjects was a good one that lasted for the remaining 90 years of the Raj. A shortage certainly never occurred in volunteers for the Indian army that fought in so many wars for the Queen Empress and then the King Emperors.