Major-General Sir Hugh Massy Wheeler, commanding the Cawnpore Division, was the last of a dying breed. Born in Ireland in June 1789, the son of an East India Company officer who had married the daughter of the first Lord Massy, he joined a sepoy regiment at the age of sixteen and had been in India virtually ever since. In that time he had acquired a formidable reputation as a fighting soldier; his one regret was that he had never served as a staff officer, a circumstance he put down to the fact that he ‘had no Friends and… had nothing from Govt. that it could withhold from me’.
A more likely explanation was the scandal caused by his long-term relationship with the Eurasian wife of a fellow officer. Born Frances Marsden, the daughter of an Irish major and his Muslim bibi, she was just fifteen and more than eight months pregnant when she married Thomas Oliver, a Bengal officer of mixed descent, in 1810. Within four years she had had an illegitimate child by Wheeler and they had produced another six by the time Oliver’s death in Afghanistan, in late 1841, enabled them to marry. This time the bride, now forty-seven, was only six months pregnant. Yet a marriage certificate did not confer respectability – Eurasians were seen by the Anglo-Indian community as ‘promiscuous, uncultivated and a little ludicrous with their English lady-like affectations’ – and Mrs (later Lady) Wheeler was never a welcome guest in cantonment society. So apart did she keep herself that people assumed she was a full-blooded Indian.*
Wheeler’s military career had flourished, none the less, thanks to his reputation as a cool and courageous officer. For distinguished conduct in the three major campaigns of the 1840s he was appointed, successively, a CB, an aide-de-camp to the Queen and a knight. ‘My service has been extraordinary,’ he would say. ‘With the exception of my two years in Europe – when unemployed – I have had but three months’ General leave and was never absent on medical certificate.’ This two-year furlough in Europe followed his promotion to unattached major-general in 1854. On returning to India in the spring of 1856, he was appointed to the command of first the Presidency Division and then, three months later, the Cawnpore Division. Now sixty-seven, he was ‘short, of a spare habit, very grey, with a quick and intelligent eye; not imposing in appearance except by virtue of a thoroughly military gait’. Like Hearsey, his successor at Barrackpore, he was an old-style Company officer: the father of half-caste children, fluent in the vernacular, loved by his men, proven in battle – the ideal man to prevent Cawnpore from falling into the hands of the rebels. ‘Cawnpore is now the most anxious position,’ noted Lady Canning in her diary, ‘but every one speaks alike of Sir Hugh Wheeler and his brave spirit. There is not a better soldier, and all say, if any one can hold it, he will.’ He had, in the opinion of a subordinate, just one flaw: he placed ‘too much reliance upon the Easterns’.
News of the outbreak further north reached Wheeler on 14 May. He was in a particularly precarious position because his tiny European garrison – seventy invalids from the 32nd Foot and sixty-one artillerymen with six guns – was heavily outnumbered by its large native counterpart, all of whom were regulars. The latter comprised the 1st, 53rd and 56th Native Infantry, the 2nd Light Cavalry and two companies of Golandaze, giving an overall ratio of more than seventeen Indian soldiers to each European.* At first Wheeler was unperturbed, telling Canning on 16 May that the troops were ‘well disposed’. But he was not taking any chances.
The British station at Cawnpore, one of the largest in India, extended for six miles along the right bank of the Ganges and covered an area of ten square miles. It lay in a rough semicircle between the city and the river, with the military cantonment forming its southern arm. On 20 May, in response to a telegram from Calcutta to begin immediate and obvious preparations for the ‘accommodation of a European force’, he selected two large barracks in an open space at the centre of the cantonment. They were both brick-built, with walls at least 18 inches thick, and consisted of a central row of rooms flanked on both sides by inner and outer verandas; only the inner rooms had doors and window screens. The larger of the two barracks, a former dragoon hospital, was thatched and measured about 60 feet by 350 feet; the smaller one, housing the families and invalids of the 32nd Foot, was tiled and no more than 50 feet by 190 feet.
To prevent a sudden attack, Wheeler ordered the construction of a rectangular trench around the barracks, with the earth thrown up on the outside so as to form a parapet. When completed this mud wall was barely three feet high, in places, and far from bullet-proof. It enclosed an area of about nine acres and contained, apart from the two barracks, a kitchen, four privies, a well, a large masonry godown, a soldiers’ garden, various huts and four underground powder magazines. The perimeter of the entrenchment was ultimately defended by just ten cannon, mostly 9-pounders, sited in three batteries:* one to cover the lines of the 53rd and 56th regiments to the south; one to cover the open plain that extended north-west to the lines of the 1st and the city beyond; and one to cover the artillery lines even further to the east, between the barracks and the Ganges River. Not far from the south-west corner of the entrenchment was another well and a row of nine half-finished barracks. The general’s intention was to use these barracks as a first line of defence, and they were left as they were; all the other buildings in the immediate vicinity were flattened.
Wheeler was later criticized for not choosing the fortified magazine, six miles to the north, as his place of refuge. He ‘ought to have gone there’, wrote Brigadier Neill with the benefit of hindsight. But at the time Wheeler assumed that any mutinous troops would repeat the pattern of Meerut and quickly abandon the station for Delhi. The entrenchment was therefore designed to provide a temporary bastion for European residents in the event of an outbreak; not to withstand a siege. A withdrawal to the magazine, he reasoned, would deprive the sepoys of the calming influence of their officers and make a mutiny more likely, as would the removal of the Indian guard at the magazine.
Yet it was becoming increasingly obvious to Wheeler that nothing could prevent a rising. During the evening of 20 May a fire in the lines of the 1st Infantry was interpreted by Europeans as the ‘probable signal for revolt’, but the presence of the Ist’s officers and the arrival of the European artillery deterred an outbreak. That same night the 2nd Cavalry also showed signs of disaffection, excited by a message from a sepoy of the 56th that the Europeans were on their way to destroy them. It also came to nothing. The following day Wheeler ordered all women and children to move into the entrenchment, though some would return to their cooler bungalows by day; many officers preferred to sleep in their regimental quarter-guards to show the men that they had ‘confidence in them’. Wheeler had already asked Sir Henry Lawrence to send as many European troops as he could spare and was mightily relieved when Captain Lowe and fifty-five dusty men of the 32nd Foot arrived in carriages from Lucknow later that evening. Less welcome were the two hundred and forty sullen troopers of the 2nd Oudh Irregular Cavalry who accompanied them. But Captain Hayes, the doomed commander of the column, was more concerned with the ‘confusion, fright and bad arrangement’ he found in the entrenchment. He wrote:
People of all kinds, of every colour, sect, and profession, were crowding into the barracks. Whilst I was there, buggies, palki-gharrees, vehicles of all sorts, drove up and discharged cargoes of writers, tradesmen, and a miscellaneous mob of every complexion, from white to tawny – all in terror of the imaginary foe; ladies sitting down at the rough mess-tables in the barracks, women suckling infants, ayahs and children in all directions, and – officers too!… I saw quite enough to convince me that if any insurrection took or takes place, we shall have no one to thank but ourselves, because we have now shown to the Natives how very easily we can be frightened, and when frightened utterly helpless.
Under the circumstances, it is easy to see why General Wheeler was willing to disregard Lawrence’s advice and trust the most influential Indian in the district: Nana Sahib. A month earlier, with Azimullah Khan back from his nefarious tour of military stations, the Nana and his confidential agent had visited Lucknow. There they almost certainly conferred with leading figures of the ancien régime, including Begum Hazrat Mahal, the beautiful and fiercely ambitious junior wife of Wajid Ali Shah, who had advised the ex-King to reject Dalhousie’s ultimatum in the name of their nine-year-old son, Birjis Qadr.* The Nana was also ‘kindly’ received by Lawrence, who ‘ordered the authorities of the city to show him every attention’. But Martin Gubbins found the Maratha prince ‘arrogant and presuming’ and became suspicious when he departed suddenly for Cawnpore on ‘urgent business’. Gubbins wrote: ‘The Chief Commissioner concurred in my suspicions, and by his authority I addressed Sir Hugh Wheeler, cautioning him against the Nana, and stating Sir Henry’s belief that he was not to be depended on.’ Unfortunately there were many Europeans at Cawnpore, Wheeler among them, who had a high regard for the Maratha prince. None more so than Charles Hillersdon, the 35-year-old collector, who had been a regular guest at Saturday House and who regarded the Nana as a ‘great friend’. On first hearing of the rebellion at Delhi, the Nana had driven into Cawnpore to discuss the implications with Hillersdon, telling an officer en route that he ‘lamented the outbreak’ and thought it ‘most shameful’. To Hillersdon himself he offered Saturday House as a refuge for his young pregnant wife, Lydia, and their two small children. The collector gratefully accepted and, two days later, even asked the Nana if he would ‘forward his wife and children to England’. The Nana agreed but the opportunity never arose.
On 20 May Hillersdon moved his family into the Ewarts’ bungalow in the cantonment and sent an opium contractor with elephants to transport the government treasure to the entrenchment. But the sepoys guarding the treasury would allow only an eighth of the 800,000 rupees to be taken, insisting that they were ‘perfectly loyal and would guard the treasure to the last’. The collector consulted Wheeler, who wisely decided not to force the issue. Instead he agreed to Hillersdon’s proposal to ask Nana Sahib to bring a small force from Bithur to watch the treasury. Having received Wheeler’s assurance that Agra would pay his men, the Nana left Saturday House in the care of his nephew Rao Sahib and set off for Cawnpore during the morning of 21 May. Following his lead elephant were two brass guns and three hundred troops under the command of Jwala Prasad, a tall, thin Brahman with a whining, nasal voice and a pockmarked face. His men were no more impressive: elderly horsemen atop thin, bony mounts, clutching lances and rusty sabres; foot soldiers in a variety of uniforms, armed with pikes, lathis and ancient muskets. But Wheeler was glad to see them. ‘Their being Mahrattas,’ he told Canning on 22 May, ‘they are not likely to coalesce with others.’
The general would have been less optimistic if he had known about the secret contact that Jwala Prasad had already established with disgruntled members of the 2nd Cavalry, particularly Subedar Teeka Singh, an Oudh Rajput, whose hut was used for regular meetings. In true Maratha fashion the Nana was preparing for all eventualities: if the troops remained loyal – or even if they mutinied and fled the station – he hoped to be rewarded by the restoration of his father’s pension and titles; but if the mutineers remained and beat the British he might well be restored to the Peshwa’s throne.
On 1 June six of the 2nd Cavalry’s ringleaders – Subedar Teeka Singh, Havildar-Major Gopal Singh and four sowars – had a secret two-hour meeting on a Ganges riverboat with Nana Sahib and his younger brother, Bala Rao. Bala was now thirty, a tall, dark man with a broken nose, bad skin and no front teeth; physical defects that can only have exacerbated his lisping fits of rage when he did not get his way. With the formal greetings out of the way, Teeka Singh told the Nana: ‘You have come to take charge of the Magazine and Treasury of the English. We all, Hindus and Mahomedans, have united for our religions, and the whole Bengal Army have become one in purpose. What do you say to it?’ ‘I also am at the disposal of the army,’ replied the Nana. The meeting ended with the soldiers convinced that the ‘Raja of Bithur’ would join them when the time was right.
Hillersdon heard about the rendezvous from one of his clerks. He confronted the Nana, who explained that he had been trying to ensure that the troops remained ‘firm and loyal’. This appeared to satisfy Hillersdon, who told his subordinates that the Nana had merely been ‘remonstrating’ with the sowars ‘on the part of the government’.
At the entrenchment, meanwhile, news of the rising at Lucknow and the slow progress of the Delhi Field Force had dashed hopes that an outbreak could be avoided. ‘Our weak position here with a mere handful of Europeans places us in very great danger, and daily and hourly we are looking for disasters,’ wrote Emma Ewart, the wife of Colonel Ewart of the 1st Infantry, on 1 June. ‘It is supposed that the Commandants here have shown wonderful tact and that their measure of baldly facing the danger by going out to sleep amongst their men has had a wonderful effect in restraining them. But every body knows that this cannot last. Any accidental spark may set the whole of the three regiments of infantry and one of cavalry in a blaze of mutiny.’
Wheeler, however, had been cheered by a steady trickle of British troops from Calcutta. On 30 May, by which time seventy members of the 84th Foot had reached Cawnpore, he returned the half company of 32nd Foot to Lucknow. Four days later, with his garrison augmented by another thirty-four Europeans, he felt secure enough to send Lawrence another two officers and fifty men of the 84th. ‘This leaves me weak,’ he informed the Governor-General, ‘but I trust to holding my own until more Europeans arrive.’ On 4 June, in a letter to Sir Henry Lawrence, he admitted that the 2nd Cavalry was in ‘an almost acknowledgeable state of Mutiny and ready to start at any moment for Delhi’. The 1st Infantry, he added, was ‘sworn to join’ and they spoke of leaving that night or the next, ‘doing all the mischief in their power first, this to include an attack on our position’. Yet, wrote Wheeler, ‘I fear them not altho’ our means are very small’ and ‘the other two Native Infantry Corps may be carried off by the excitement to join the others’. He spent the rest of the letter criticizing Calcutta’s decision to appoint Sir Patrick Grant instead of him as Anson’s temporary successor. Grant was ‘long, very long my junior’, he complained, and it was his connection to Lord Gough, his father-in-law, that had ‘carried him over me on every occasion’. He would, he added, continue to serve to the best of his ability. But once ‘tranquillity’ had been ‘restored’ he would take the only course acceptable to his ‘professional Character and soldierly feelings’ – in other words resign.
Worn out by his heavy responsibility and constant exertions, his confidence in his Indian troops at an end, Wheeler now ordered all his officers to sleep in the packed entrenchment. But the colonels of the 53rd and 56th objected, and, as he considered their regiments to be the least disaffected, he let them and their officers remain.
At one thirty in the morning of 5 June three cracks of a pistol signalled the start of the long-awaited mutiny in the lines of the 2nd Cavalry. In the absence of Major Vibart and his officers, the sole obstacle to the rising was provided by Subedar-Major Bhowani Singh, a grizzled veteran of the Sikh wars and the only sowar to be readmitted into the regiment after its disbandment for cowardice in Afghanistan in 1840. On duty at the quarter-guard, he drew his sword and refused to hand over the colours and the regimental treasure-chest to the mutineers, saying he ‘would only obey and serve Government’. They eventually lost patience and knocked him out with the flat of a blade. Then, having gathered up the colours and the chest, they galloped off to a prearranged rendezvous at Nawabganj, north of the Ganges Canal, firing their pistols as they went.
On the way a delegation rode into the lines of the 1st Infantry and, speaking in the name of the subedar-major whom they had just left senseless in the quarter-guard, asked why the regiment had not yet joined them. The sepoys’ response was to buckle on their cross-belts and grab their muskets. At this point Colonel John Ewart appeared on his charger, having ridden alone from the entrenchment, shouting, ‘My children! This is not your way! Don’t do this!’ He had promised Wheeler that his men would mutiny over his dead body. Instead they ran round him, leaving him humiliated but alive. Ewart galloped back to the entrenchment and urged Wheeler to send Lieutenant’s Ashe’s half-battery of Oudh Irregulars, the only mobile guns, in pursuit. Wheeler agreed, but Ashe had hardly started when the general received word that the 53rd and 56th might break out at any moment and attack the entrenchment en route to Nawabganj. So Ashe was recalled.
Meanwhile the 53rd and 56th regiments had been turned out by their officers and were on parade, underarms, near their respective quarter-guards with orders to shoot any mutineers who approached. There they remained until about six in the morning, when the two regiments were dismissed and told to have breakfast. Jemadar Khoda Bux, the senior Indian officer present with the 56th, had removed his uniform and was smoking a hookah in his hut when a havildar burst in and announced, ‘Jemadar, the regiment is turning out.’
Khoda asked by whose order and why, but the havildar did not know. So Khoda went outside and ‘saw that the havildar was dreadfully frightened, and was buttoning his coat’. Together they ran over to the company tent, where some men were ‘packing up their clothes, and others throwing them away’.
‘The 53rd is getting ready,’ they explained, ‘and so are we.’
‘Your regiment is the 56th,’ replied the jemadar, ‘what have you to do with the 53rd? It would be better for you first to shoot me and then do what you like afterwards.’
‘You are our senior officer,’ one said. ‘We will not kill you, come with us.’
Khoda agreed and said he would go and ‘get ready’. But, having left the tent, he headed straight for the entrenchment, ‘very slowly for about 100 yards’ and then as fast as he could run. There he sought out Colonel Williams and gave him the bad news. Williams wanted Khoda to accompany him and his adjutant back to the regimental lines so they could see for themselves. Khoda was horrified. ‘Oh! gentlemen,’ he exclaimed. ‘All the regiment has mutinied, and are your enemies. It is not right for you to go to them.’
Williams ignored him and, with his adjutant in tow, rode off towards the lines. With 300 yards to go, however, the officers were greeted with three musket shots that prompted them to execute a rapid about-turn and return to the entrenchment.
A little earlier the Indian officers of the 53rd had been summoned to the entrenchment by their commanding officer, Major Hillersdon, and asked whether the regiment was staunch. Jemadar Shaikh Salamat Ali recalled: ‘We told him it could not be depended on. Just then an officer of the 56th drove up with his family in a carriage and reported that the 53rd and 56th also had broken into mutiny and were plundering the regimental treasure chests… Hillersdon then ordered us inside the entrenchments.’ No sooner had the Indian officers departed than a party of mutinous sowars appeared in the 53rd’s lines and informed the sepoys, many of whom were tending to their breakfast fires, that their comrades guarding the treasury would open the gates only to their own regiment. Minutes later a havildar and a sepoy entered the quarter-guard, overwhelmed the subedar on duty and seized the treasure-chest and the colours. They then fled in the direction of Nawabganj, followed by a number of their comrades. But most of the 53rd’s sepoys had not yet mutinied.
As Wheeler scanned the activity in the 53rd’s line through his binoculars, Hillersdon tried to convince him that his men were staunch or they would have run off already. But other officers urged Wheeler to fire on the ‘mutineers’ before it was too late, and the clincher was provided by Lieutenant Ashe, who told the general that the only way to commit his artillerymen to the defence of the entrenchment was by ordering them to fire on their comrades. Finally, reluctantly, Wheeler gave his permission and Ashe’s three guns burst into life. ‘On this the regiment fled,’ recalled a sepoy who remained loyal, ‘with the exception of a few men who concealed themselves in the lines and in an adjacent nullah.’ Numbering about forty non-commissioned officers and men, they were eventually rounded up by two subalterns and brought into the entrenchment. But it quickly became clear that there was no room for these extra bodies – the two barracks were overflowing with Europeans and Eurasians, while their Indian servants were occupying every other inch of shade – and Wheeler was, in any case, not entirely disposed to trust them. So he mounted his horse and led most of the remnants of the 53rd and 56th regiments* to the empty artillery hospital, about 500 yards to the east of the entrenchment. When they complained that the position was a death-trap because it was exposed to artillery fire from all sides, Wheeler told them there was nothing to fear and asked them to ‘look after the rear of the building’. He then abandoned them to their fate. A short while later the subedar in command of the treasury guard arrived at the entrenchment with the startling news that the ‘Nana had plundered the treasury’. This was the first confirmation that Wheeler’s trust in the Maratha prince had been misplaced.
That morning, Nana Sahib had been visited in his temporary residence in Nawabganj by representatives of the mutineers – a sowar of the 2nd Cavalry and a subedar from the 1st Native Infantry – and given the option of a kingdom if he joined with them or death if he sided with the British. He is said to have replied: ‘What have I to do with the British? I am with you.’ Having sworn to be their chief, he instructed the mutineers to carry the government treasure to the nearby village of Kalyanpur, where he would join them for the march to Delhi. He then consulted his advisers. Azimullah Khan is said to have ‘pointed out the folly of proceeding to Delhi, where their individual power and influence would necessarily cease’. He wanted the Nana to recall the mutineers, take possession of Cawnpore and extend his authority as far as he could to the eastward. He was, he added, ‘thoroughly acquainted with the resources of the British’ and knew that the ‘number of Europeans in India was scarce one-fourth that of the Native army’.
The Nana could see the sense of this argument and before long had set off in pursuit of the mutineers on his state elephant. It was almost midnight when he found them camped in their thousands around the dâk-bungalow at Kalyanpur, 11 miles north of Cawnpore. As he stepped down from his kneeling elephant, Teeka Singh and his fellow officers appeared from the dâk-bungalow to welcome him. He told them he understood their reasons for proceeding to Delhi but asked them to think for a moment what they were leaving behind: most of the treasure, the magazine, the quantities of powder and ammunition moored at various ghats,* and a small but growing British garrison. Why not overwhelm the British at Cawnpore before they became too strong? Then they could march to Delhi in triumph.
At first the rebel officers rejected the plan. But the Nana’s agents swung the balance by spreading reports through the camp that their master would double the mutineers’ pay and provide them with free food if they agreed to return to Cawnpore. As an added inducement they were each promised a gold bracelet worth 100 rupees for destroying Wheeler’s entrenchment. Sensing the men were in favour, Teeka Singh hailed Nana Sahib as the new Peshwa and was rewarded with the appointment of subedar-major of the army. The camp was immediately dismantled and, with the Nana’s elephant at their head, the four mutinous regiments headed back to Cawnpore.
No sooner had they arrived at the camping ground between Nawabganj and the Ganges Canal, with horns blaring and kettle-drums thumping, than the Nana commandeered a house next to the theatre and began to issue a string of orders and edicts. He appointed Jwala Prasad as brigadier of the army, Azimullah Khan as collector and his elder brother Baba Bhutt as judge. Baba was about fifty-five years old, tall and heavily built, with a high forehead, a long nose and big eyes behind heavy spectacles. He was believed to have been suffering from the early stages of leprosy, though the red patches on his face may well have been a birth-mark.
In addition the Nana ordered a body of his Maratha troops under Tatya Tope to raise a flag at the old Residency in Nawabganj to mark the start of his rule, sent groups of sowars into the city to plunder and murder all Christians who had not yet taken refuge in the entrenchment, and ordered the immediate execution of any Indian found harbouring Christians. A Rajput resident of Cawnpore recorded the consequences: ‘Some Christians, who had taken refuge in the shops in the City, were shot by the troopers, who set on fire the shops they had taken shelter in. Two or three Christians were also massacred opposite the abkaree godowns. A lady and gentleman, with a child, who had hid themselves in a bungalow… were found and taken by the sowars and sepoys to the Nana, by whose orders they were shot on the plain.’
The Nana’s chief priority was to destroy Wheeler’s entrenchment, which was now packed with about nine hundred souls, most of them European.* Having ordered the guns in the magazine to be sited within range of the entrenchment, he sent General Wheeler a formal letter notifying him that an attack would commence at ten that morning, 6 June. Wheeler was shocked, having thought the mutineers well on their way to Delhi, and at once ordered all his officers to report to the entrenchment. ‘With such expedition was the summons obeyed,’ recorded Lieutenant Thomson of the 53rd, ‘that we were compelled to leave all our goods and chattels to fall a prey to the ravages of the sepoys; and after they had appropriated all movables they set fire to the bungalows.’
With the perimeter secured, Lieutenant Ashe and thirty volunteers† went out with the three horse-drawn guns to reconnoitre. Five hundred yards from the entrenchment ‘they caught sight of the enemy, in possession of one of the canal bridges, close by the lines of the 1st Native Infantry’. Heavily outnumbered, Ashe ordered an immediate withdrawal to the entrenchment. They arrived back at the trot, but without one officer, Lieutenant Ashburner of the artillery, whose horse had bolted into the sepoy ranks. He was killed instantly. Lieutenant Thomson recalled:
Shortly after the return of Lieutenant Ashe, the first shot fired by the mutineers came from a nine-pounder, on the north-west; it struck the crest of the mud-wall and glided over into the puckah roofed barrack. This was about 10 o’clock A.M.; a large party of ladies and children were outside the barrack; the consternation caused amongst them was indescribable; the bugle-call sent every man of us instantly to his post, many of us carrying in our ears, for the first time, the peculiar whizzing of round shot, with which we were to become so familiar. As the day advanced, the enemy’s fire grew hotter and more dangerous, in consequence of their getting their guns into position. The first casualty occurred at the west battery; McGuire, a gunner, being killed by a round shot… Several of us saw the ball bounding toward us, and he evidently saw it, but, like many others whom I saw fall at different times, he seemed fascinated to the spot.
The uproar at the start of the bombardment had been mainly caused by senior military wives like Mrs Ewart, who had chosen to avoid the cramped conditions of the barracks by living in canvas tents. As the first cannonballs fell, they grabbed their screaming children and dashed for the relative safety of the tile-roofed barrack, which was already full to bursting point. Stepping over the Eurasians who were crammed along the outer verandas, they made for the relative safety of the inner rooms, where they were generously received by their European friends and acquaintances. Those with less influence, however, were forced to scurry from room to room in a vain search for space. Even in moments of crisis the strict seniority of Anglo-Indian society had to be upheld.
Among the least privileged inhabitants of the two barracks was Amy Horne, the pretty Eurasian girl who had left Lucknow with her family the previous March. She wrote later:
The site of our entrenchment was surrounded by large and substantial buildings, from three to eight hundred yards distance, occupied by the rebels, and from roof and window, all day, a shower of bullets poured down upon us in our exposed position. Shell likewise kept falling all over the entrenchment, and every shot that struck the barracks was followed by the heart-rending shrieks of the women and children, who were either killed outright by the projectiles, or crushed to death by the falling beams, masonry, and splinters. One shell killed seven women as it fell hissing into the trenches and burst. Windows and doors were soon shot off their sockets, and the shot and shell began to play freely through the denuded buildings.
By the afternoon of the first day the rebels had set up five batteries – fourteen guns in all, most of them heavy* – to the north and west of the entrenchment. At first the British tried to give as good as they got, one shell from their single howitzer killing two sowars, five sepoys and a dozen bazaar-wallahs who had come to watch the fun. But the garrison had to conserve its limited supply of ammunition and, in any case, the rebels’ heavy batteries were beyond the reach of all but one of its guns. Emboldened by the cover of darkness, the mutineers would creep to within 50 yards of the mud walls and pepper them with musket fire. Particularly vulnerable was the detachment of sixteen railwaymen holding the fourth of the nine unfinished barracks beyond the entrenchment perimeter. ‘Creeping up by hundreds under the cover of these walls,’ wrote Lieutenant Thomson, ‘the sepoys pressed so heavily upon the occupants of barrack No. 4, that the general soon found it necessary to strengthen them with a military command. Accordingly Captain Jenkins, of the 2nd Cavalry, headed this fine volunteer force… Foiled in all their efforts to surprise this party, the sepoys in a few days occupied barrack No. 1, and thereupon Lieutenant Glanville, of the 2nd Bengal Fusiliers, was posted with a detachment of sixteen men in barrack No. 2, which, as it was only 200 yards from the intrenchment, became the key of the position.’ When Glanville was wounded, he was replaced first by a Captain Elmes and then by Thomson himself, who recalled:
It was most harassing work to stand hour after hour, watching for the approach of the rebels. By daylight we did manage to get a little rest, as one or two were sufficient then to keep the look out; and as well as the sun with its intense heat would permit, we used to squeeze down between the sharp edges of brickbats and get a nap, sweeter than that often obtained in beds of down, though I am sure that in a whole fortnight I did not get two hours of consecutive sleep… Our greatest apprehensions were always excited when they ceased to fire, as this was invariably the prelude to a coming attack. Then, we seventeen men had to hold that barrack No. 2 against a black swarm compassing about us like bees, and had it not been for their most surprising cowardice in attack, we could not have held the place for four and twenty hours.
The one saving grace of this out-picket duty was that it removed the participants from the ‘sickening spectacles’ occurring daily in the entrenchment. At one point two young girls, aged about eight or nine years, were left by their parents in an inner room of the thatched barrack because it was considered to be relatively safe. The ‘agony’ of the parents, wrote Amy Horne, ‘when they returned and found that a shell had come through the roof and torn their dear ones to pieces’, was almost unbearable. ‘Bones, brains and flesh were strewed all over, and not a step could you take without treading on some portion of their remains.’ Almost as appalling was the early demise of Charles Hillersdon, the collector, who had so misjudged his ‘good friend’ Nana Sahib. Sometime during the second day of the siege, Hillersdon left his post in the main guard to speak to his pregnant wife Lydia. To gain some privacy he led her out of the inner room she shared with Mrs Ewart in the tile-roofed barrack to the southern veranda, away from the rebel guns. This final miscalculation cost him his life because the rebels had just set up a new battery in the lines of the 56th. As he stood talking with his wife, a roundshot came arcing from this direction and caught him full in the stomach, spattering his horrified wife with blood and entrails. Her own demise was not long delayed: during the night of 9 June a heavy roundshot hit the inner veranda off her room and buried her in a pile of rubble. She was dragged out, but her skull had been crushed and she and her unborn baby died within a couple of hours. Their resting place was a cooking pit that had been dug in the soldiers’ garden next to the barrack. Most of the other early casualties, including her husband, were buried in sections of trench and covered with chunks of rock-hard earth from the parapet. But there was not enough time or room to bury all the corpses this way, and it was eventually decided to dump them at night into the reserve well near the unfinished barracks. By the end of the siege, according to one who was present, the well was choked with more than two hundred and fifty bodies.
For Emma Larkins, the wife of an artillery major, death seemed inevitable. In a note to her sister of 9 June – one of the few letters written during the siege to survive* – she began:
I write this, dearest Henrietta, in the belief that our time of departure is come – the whole of the troops rose here and we took refuge in a barrack. We are so hemmed in by overpowering numbers that there seems no hope of escape, only about forty European soldiers are left of one hundred and twenty men, a sad, sad number to hold out against such an awful enemy… Jessie, Emily and Georgie cling to us. Dearest George has been well up till today but he is, I grieve to say, obliged to abandon his post. This is to me a grief. Many brave men have fallen today, the siege has lasted four days!
Major Larkins was just one of many senior officers who were suffering from the fierce heat, lack of sleep and over-exertion. Wheeler was relying increasingly on his son and aide-de-camp, Godfrey, an officer in the 1st Infantry, and spent much of the time slumped on a mattress in the small room he shared with his Eurasian wife and two teenage daughters. His handsome 51-year-old deputy, Brigadier Jack, a celebrated artist and veteran of both Sikh wars, had already succumbed to the remorseless sun and incessant cannonade, as had Sir George Parker, the cantonment magistrate, and Colonel Williams of the 56th. Williams had been wounded by a piece of shell, but it was the heat that finished him off during the night of Sunday, 8 June. Left in the ruins of the outer veranda during the hours of daylight, much to the horror of his wife and daughters, his body was finally buried the following night in a section of trench. Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Wiggins, the deputy judge advocate-general, remained healthy enough, but that was because he ‘never showed himself outside the walls of the barrack, nor took even the slightest part in the military operations’. Of the senior officers only Majors Vibart and William Hillersdon (younger brother of Charles, the collector) continued to take an active part in the defence of the entrenchment.
But the officer who came to embody the defiant spirit of the garrison, its leader in all but name, was Captain John Moore of the 32nd. A tall, fair Irishman with pale blue eyes, he had been left at Cawnpore with the regiment’s invalids, a sure sign that his colonel had less than complete confidence in him. If so it was Lucknow’s loss and Cawnpore’s gain because Moore had all the qualities required of a leader in such a predicament: courage, vigour, sensitivity and determination. He was officially in charge of the outlying pickets in the unfinished barracks, but he came to oversee all aspects of the garrison’s defence, making visits at least once a day to all the pickets, batteries and even to the terrified families in the barracks. ‘His never-say-die disposition nerved many a sinking heart to the conflict,’ recalled Lieutenant Thomson, ‘and his affable, tender sympathy imparted fresh patience to the suffering women.’ His wife was of a similar stamp, and often came across with him to the unfinished barracks where Thomson and his men ‘fitted up a little hut for her, made of bamboo, and covered over with canvas’, where ‘she would sit for hours, bravely bearing the absence of her husband, while he was gone upon some perilous enterprise’.
Despite suffering from a broken collarbone, the result of a fall from his horse before the siege began, he never shirked his responsibilities and could invariably be seen, his arm in a sling and a revolver in his belt, leading and directing his men from the front. He placed scouts on top of one of the barracks to watch the movements of the enemy, and whenever they gave the signal that the rebels were trying to advance nearer, he would ‘go out with about a dozen Europeans in the midst of the most brisk firing’ and expel them ‘from their covert’. But his boldest foray was a midnight raid to spike the two 24-pounder howitzers that made up the rebels’ most destructive battery. He and twenty volunteers, wearing dark clothes and with their faces blacked, crept on all fours along the unfinished barracks, across a drainage ditch and over the open ground that led to the battery. At a distance of a couple of hundred yards they opened fire, killing a dozen rebel gunners and causing the remainder to flee. Then they closed on the guns and drove spikes through their torch holes. The suspense felt by the remainder of the garrison, as they awaited the outcome of the raid, was almost unbearable. ‘We knew that the number of sick and wounded was large,’ wrote Amy Horne, ‘and the idea of seeing the small number of our defenders reduced by 20, including a first rate officer, threw us into agonies of fear, every sound was hushed in no time, the stillness of death seemed to be upon us, and the very infant to understand its danger. Captain Moore came back sooner than we expected, he was about only an hour, but Oh! That hour was an eternity to us.’
Nana Sahib, who had set up his headquarters at Duncan’s Hotel, just a few hundred yards beyond the wrecked battery, was furious that the sleeping gunners had failed to prevent the attack and immediately sacked the battery commander, Nizam-ud-Daula, the brother of Nunne Nawab,* the leading Muslim noble at Cawnpore. He also decided to move his camp to the open ground in front of Savada House, a large decrepit mansion standing on a promontory a mile to the south of the entrenchment. Here he set up a two-gun battery, manned by Ashe’s irregulars, and pitched his opulent tents in a grove of mango trees a short way off. Teeka Singh’s sowars and a regiment of sepoys were camped behind him along the road, guarding against the approach of British reinforcements from Allahabad.
Though Nana Sahib was the nominal head of the rebels at Cawnpore, in reality he had to defer to rebel officers like Teeka Singh of the 2nd Cavalry, Radhay Singh of the 1st Native Infantry and Gungadeen Missur of the 56th Native Infantry who had taken command of their respective regiments. This sharing of power between military officers and traditional elites was repeated in every centre of rebel authority – Delhi, Lucknow, Bareilly, Jhansi, Kalpi and Cawnpore – and was the main reason the rebels failed to capitalize on their initial superiority of numbers. For without unity of command it is very difficult to conduct successful military operations. At Cawnpore a determined assault by the whole rebel force would have quickly overwhelmed the tiny garrison. But it was never made because the rebel commanders lacked the conviction, or the courage, to order it. In the opinion of Jonah Shepherd, the Eurasian head clerk of the Commissariat office at Cawnpore, the mutineers were ‘a most cowardly set of men, particularly the Cavalry, for very often attempts were made to charge upon us, and notwithstanding the very large number of people collected on the enemy’s side… they seldom dared courageously to come out, for whenever they advanced, a few charges of canister would soon disperse [them]’.
The loyal band of Indian troops at the artillery hospital held out until the afternoon of 9 June, when a rebel roundshot wrapped in a flaming rag set fire to the building’s thatched roof. As flames ripped through the compound, Pay-Havildar Ram Buksh and a couple of sepoys from the 53rd ran across the 500 yards of plain to seek refuge within the European garrison. Ram Buksh recalled: ‘The Major then told us he could do nothing for us, there being an order of General Wheeler prohibiting any native from entering the entrenchment. He therefore recommended us to provide for our own safety, and made over a certificate to me, in which the names of all the men of the 53rd, who were in the barracks, are mentioned.’
Prevented from joining their officers, their position untenable, the sepoys abandoned the hospital compound and spent the night in a nearby ravine. ‘Next morning,’ remembered Sepoy Bhola Khan of the 53rd, ‘we went to a village named Poorwa, about a mile east of the barracks. The zemindar of the village not allowing us to enter, we went into a mango grove, close by. After this, our party broke up in different directions. I went in the direction of Jajmow alone; some distance further on, my musket was taken from me by villagers.’ Bhola Khan eventually joined up with the British relief force at Fatehpur, via Benares and Allahabad. Some, like Ram Buksh, made it in safely to their villages; others were captured by mutineers, ‘brought back to Cawnpore and after being beaten & plundered were let go’.
In the early hours of 10 June, the day after the loyal troops had departed, a lone horseman appeared at the gallop from the direction of the mutineers’ camp. As he got closer, the sentries on the northern wall of the entrenchment opened fire, wounding his horse. But still he kept coming until, almost at point-blank range, a voice shouted out, ‘Cease fire!’, allowing the stricken horse to clear the parapet with a single leap. Its rider, ‘in a most distressed and exhausted condition’, was no sowar but Lieutenant Augustus Boulton of the 7th Cavalry, ‘to whom’, wrote Thomson, ‘even our desperate fortunes presented an asylum’. He was the sole European survivor of the mutiny at Chobeypur in which four of his fellow officers had perished, but in effecting his escape he had been shot through the cheek by a pistol ball which had gone on to shatter a number of teeth. ‘He joined the outpicket under Captain Jenkins,’ recorded Thomson, ‘and although a great sufferer from the wound in his cheek, he proved a valuable addition to our strength.’
Boulton had leapt from the frying pan into the fire, but at the time he considered himself fortunate. He was among friends and had a chance, however small, of survival – which was more than could be said for those Christians unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Cawnpore rebels. Of the many hundreds brought before the Nana and his advisers during this period, only a handful of Eurasians were spared.* The rest were simply led away and shot or hacked to death. By far the worst atrocity involved about a hundred and twenty civilian fugitives† from the British station at Fatehgarh, most of them women and children, who had been intercepted at Bithur by sowars of the 2nd Cavalry as they tried to escape down the Ganges in boats. With their hands tied behind their backs and linked by a long rope, they finally reached the Subedar’s Tank at Cawnpore during the evening of 11 June. ‘It took us a long time to get there,’ recalled Hingun, the deputy collector’s ayah, ‘for the ladies and children were without shoes and stockings, and their feet were bleeding.’ Allowed only a handful of water each, the fugitives refused to go any further and were allowed to spend the night in the open near the tank. Next morning a fleet of bullock hackeries arrived to take them the remaining three miles to the Nana’s camp.
On reaching Savada House they were herded into the large central room and, though starving, thirsty and exhausted, were relieved to be out of the blistering June sun. Meanwhile a conference was held in the Nana’s tent to decide what to do with them. According to witnesses, the Nana was against murdering the fugitives and wanted to keep them as hostages. But Bala Rao was equally adamant that they should die, and he was backed by Azimullah and Teeka Singh, the commander of the cavalry, who warned that if the Nana did not give the order to kill them, he would. Finally the Nana gave way and a triumphant Bala emerged from his brother’s tent to make the necessary arrangements.
It was mid afternoon when the fugitives were led out on to the plain in front of the house and told to sit in a large trench in two lines, the men at the back and the women and children in front. Their few remaining native servants, including Hingun the ayah, were pulled away and made to watch proceedings. Both sides of the trench were lined with about three hundred soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry and 1st Native Infantry, with a vast crowd of low-caste jullads and bazaar riff-raff jostling at their rear. Bala Rao, Azimullah and a number of other senior rebels had assembled on a nearby platform. When all was ready, Bala ‘called out aloud, saying it was the Nana’s orders that the Europeans should all be massacred’. In desperation, a European gentlemen ‘asked him not to kill them, but keep them in confinement, and said that there would be no good derived from murdering them, and that England would never be emptied of Europeans’. But Bala would not be swayed and, on his order, the soldiers opened fire with carbines and muskets. After a succession of volleys, the troops withdrew and allowed the jullads into the trench to finish off the wounded.