Immediately after the termination of the war in the Crimea, the British army was involved in a new crisis in India. In May 1857, a regiment of the East India Company’s army in Bengal mutinied and killed several of its officers. The mutineers then fled to Delhi, capital of the former Mogul Empire, and proclaimed the last emperor’s descendant, Bahadur Shah, as ruler. The example of the mutineers was quickly followed by most of the other regiments in Bengal. Many Europeans were killed and the survivors took refuge under the protection of the East India Company’s few European regiments and those of the British army stationed in India.
A main centre of resistance to what became known as the Indian Mutiny, or Great Mutiny, was at Lucknow, capital of the province of Oudh, from which many of the mutineers originated. In the Residency, seat of the British administration, Brigadier-General Sir Henry Lawrence organized a defence with a scratch force of Europeans and loyal Indian troops. It was greatly outnumbered by the besieging mutineers, who subjected the improvised fortifications to constant bombardment; Lawrence was killed by one of the mutineers’ shells. The survival of the Residency’s defenders turned on the success of a relief operation. A small relief column, commanded by Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, managed to break through on 25 September but it was not strong enough to drive the besiegers away. In November Major-General Sir James Outram, who had taken command, learnt that a second relief column, under Lieutenant-General Sir Colin Campbell, was approaching. Outram decided it was essential to send someone out of the city to meet Campbell and guide his soldiers to a spot where they might successfully penetrate the mutineers’ lines. The man chosen was a clerk, Kavanagh, who was decorated with the Victoria Cross for his bravery, one of the few awards of this highest of all honours to a civilian. Colin Campbell, to whom he delivered the vital intelligence, was one of the most famous fighting soldiers in the British army. He had commanded the 93rd Highlanders at the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea in 1854, where its steadfastness earned it the title of the ‘thin red line’; one of the rare senior Victorian soldiers to rise from the ranks, he died Field Marshal Lord Clyde.
Campbell’s column, led by pipers playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming’, managed to break through to the Residency on 16 November and to evacuate its occupants to safety on the 22nd, although Havelock died from dysentery that morning. With strong reinforcements, Campbell recaptured the city in March 1858, by which time the Mutiny was in its last throes. By June of that year it was effectively ended. The British government then dissolved the East India Company and imposed direct rule on the sub-continent, which was exercised through a Viceroy until the grant of independence in 1947. The Mutiny had, however, shaken British confidence, and henceforth the Viceregal government was always supported by a European garrison large enough to hold the Indian Army in check.
On November 12 Campbell had reached the Alumbagh [one of Lucknow’s gates] and, halting there, decided on the line of his advance to the Residency. Instead of advancing direct on the city, and fighting his way through loopholed and narrow lanes, each one a mere valley of death, he proposed to swing round to the right, march in a wide curve through the open ground, and seize what was known as the Dilkusha Park, a great enclosed garden, surrounded by a wall 20 feet high, a little over two miles to the east of the Residency. Using this as his base, he would next move round to the north of the city, forcing his way through a series of strongposts, the most formidable of which were the Secundrabagh and the Shah Nujeef, and so reach the Residency. And the story of the fighting at those two points makes up the tragedy and glory of the Relief of Lucknow.
Outram, of course, was not the man to lie inertly within his defences while Campbell was moving to his relief. He had already sent plans of the city and its approaches, with suggestions as to the best route, to Campbell by means of a spy, and he was prepared to break out on the line by which the relieving force was to advance. But if Campbell could be supplied with a guide, who knew the city as he knew the palm of his own hand, this would be an enormous advantage; and exactly such a guide at this moment presented himself. A civilian named Kavanagh offered to undertake this desperate mission.
Kavanagh was an Irishman, a clerk in one of the civil offices, and apparently possessed a hundred disqualifications for the business of making his way, disguised as a native, through the dark-faced hordes that kept sleepless watch round the Residency, and through the busy streets of Lucknow beyond. He was a big-limbed, fair man, with aggressively red hair, and uncompromisingly blue eyes! By what histrionic art could he be ‘translated’, in Shakespeare’s sense, into a spindle-shanked, narrow-shouldered, dusky-skinned Oude peasant? But Kavanagh was a man of quenchless courage, with a more than Irish delight in deeds of daring, and he had a perfect knowledge of native dialect and character. He has left a narrative of his adventure.
A spy had come in from Campbell, and was to return that night, and Kavanagh conceived the idea of going out with him, and acting as guide to the relieving force. Outram hesitated to permit the attempt to be made, declaring it to be too dangerous; but Kavanagh’s eagerness for the adventure prevailed. He hid the whole scheme from his wife, and, at half-past seven o’clock that evening, when he entered Outram’s headquarters, he was so perfectly disguised that nobody recognized him. He had blackened his face, neck, and arms with lampblack, mixed with a little oil. His red hair, which even lamp-black and oil could hardly subdue to a colder tint, was concealed beneath a huge turban. His dress was that of a budmash, or irregular native soldier, with sword and shield, tight trousers, a yellow-coloured chintz sheet thrown over the shoulders, and a white cummerbund.
A little after eight o‘clock Kavanagh, with his native guide, crept to the bank of the Goomtee, which ran to the north of the Residency entrenchment. The river was a hundred yards wide, and between four feet and five feet deep. Both men stripped, crept down the bank, and slipped, as silently as otters, into the stream. Here for a moment, as Kavanagh in his narrative confesses, his courage failed him. The shadowy bank beyond the black river was held by some 60,000 merciless enemies. He had to pass through their camps and guards, and through miles of city streets beyond. If detected, he would certainly perish by torture. ‘If my guide had been within my reach,’ he says, ‘I should perhaps have pulled him back and abandoned the enterprise.’ But the guide was already vanishing, a sort of crouching shadow, into the blackness of the further bank, and, hardening his heart, Kavanagh stole on through the sliding gloom of the river.
Both men crept up a ditch that pierced the riverbank to a cluster of trees, and there dressed; and then, with his tulwar [sword] on his shoulder and the swagger of a budmash, Kavanagh went boldly forward with his guide. A matchlock man first met the adventurous pair and peered suspiciously at them from under his turban. Kavanagh in a loud voice volunteered the remark that ‘the night was cold,’ and passed on. They had to cross the iron bridge which spanned the Goomtee, and the officer on guard challenged them lazily from the balcony of a two-storeyed house. Kavanagh himself hung back in the shade, while his guide went forward and told the story of how they belonged to a village some miles distant, and were going to the city from their homes.
They were allowed to pass, ran the gauntlet of many troops of Sepoys, re-crossed the Goomtee by what was called the stone bridge, and passed unsuspected along the principal street of Lucknow, jostling their way through the crowds, and so reached the open fields beyond the city. ‘I had not been in green fields,’ writes Kavanagh, ‘for five months. Everything around us smelt sweet, and a carrot I took from the roadside was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted!’ But it was difficult to find their way in the night. They wandered into the Dilkusha Park, and stumbled upon a battery of guns, which Kavanagh, to the terror of his guide, insisted upon inspecting.
They next blundered into the canal, but still wandered on, till they fell into the hands of a guard of twenty-five Sepoys, and Kavanagh’s guide, in his terror, dropped in the dust of the road the letter he was carrying from Outram to Campbell. Kavanagh, however, kept his coolness, and after some parleying he and his guide were allowed to pass on. The much-enduring pair next found themselves entangled in a swamp and, waist-deep in its slime and weeds, they struggled on for two hours, when they reached solid ground again. Kavanagh insisted on lying down to rest for a time. Next they crept between some Sepoy pickets which, with true native carelessness, had thrown out no sentries, and finally, just as the eastern sky was growing white with the coming day, the two adventurers heard the challenge, ‘Who comes there?’ from under the shadow of a great tree!
It was a British cavalry picket, and Kavanagh had soon the happiness of pouring into Sir Colin Campbell’s ears the messages and information he brought, while a flag, hoisted at twelve o‘clock on the summit of the Alumbagh, told Outram that his messenger had succeeded, and that both the garrison and the relieving force had now a common plan. It is difficult to imagine a higher example of human courage than that supplied by ‘Lucknow’ Kavanagh, as he was afterwards called, and never was the Victoria Cross better won.