Sunday, 10 May 1857, was typical of the north Indian summer: heat, dust and wind combining to produce a suffocating, furnace-like atmosphere. At Delhi, the former Mogul capital, the mercury had risen above a hundred degrees by eight in the morning. It was the start of the hot season, and the only way a European could gain respite from the heat and flies was by having a cold bath or lying motionless in a room whose outer doors and windows had been sealed with ‘tatties’, grass-shutters kept constantly wet by Indian water-bearers so that the ‘hot wind, after passing through them, became quite cool’.
In the telegraph office, about halfway along the two-mile stretch of road that separated the city walls from the military cantonment, the staff had been at work since daybreak. But as telegraph offices closed on the sabbath between nine and four, Charles Todd, the assistant in charge, and his two young Eurasian signallers, Brendish and Pilkington, were about to return to their bungalows to rest.
As Brendish rose from his desk, the telegraph needle began to move. It was an unofficial message from the office at Meerut, a large military station about 30 miles to the north-east, and referred to ‘the excitement that prevailed there on account of the sentence that had been passed on the men of the 3rd Light Cavalry for refusing to use the new cartridges’. It stated that eighty men had been imprisoned and were to be blown away from guns. In fact, eighty-five Indian cavalrymen had been given sentences ranging from five to ten years for refusing to accept the same carbine cartridges they had always been issued with. But the ill-advised decision by the Meerut authorities to have the prisoners shackled in irons at a morning parade on 9 May had caused considerable discontent among their fellow soldiers. Despite this potential for trouble, the telegraph offices at both stations were closed at the usual hour.
On reopening the office at four, Todd discovered that the line to Meerut had been severed. He therefore sent Brendish and Pilkington across the bridge-of-boats to the north-east of the city to check the line at the point where the underwater cable emerged from the River Jumna. They found that they could signal back to the office at Delhi but not on towards Meerut, which confirmed that the break was beyond the river. With the sun setting at six-thirty, they decided it was too late to do anything further that evening and returned to the office.
At eight the following morning Todd set off in a gharry drawn by two ponies to locate and repair the break in the line. He was never seen again. At first Brendish and Pilkington tried to reassure Todd’s wife and child that he would soon return. But, as the hours ticked by, the two young signallers picked up fragments of alarming news from Indian messengers attached to the telegraph office. They learnt that mutineers from Meerut had crossed the bridge-of-boats and entered the city; and later that a regiment of native infantry from the Delhi garrison, which they had seen march past the telegraph office in the direction of the Kashmir Gate, had disobeyed orders and allowed their officers to be shot down by the mutinous cavalry. Around midday, with no sign of Todd and no official news, Brendish went outside and met a wounded officer making his way along the road to the cantonment. ‘For God’s sake,’ implored the officer, ‘get inside and close your doors.’ The warning was repeated by Indian fugitives from the city who said that the mutineers were murdering shopkeepers and that white men had little chance of survival. Fearful of their isolated position, Brendish and Pilkington proposed heading towards the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, where the officers and European refugees were congregating. But Mrs Todd was reluctant to leave without her husband, and it was around two when she finally agreed. Before departing, Brendish sent the following message to Ambala, 120 miles to the north: ‘We must leave office, all the bungalows are on fire, burning down by the sepoys of Meerut. They came in this morning. We are off. Mr C. Todd is dead, I think. He went out this morning and has not yet returned. We learned that nine Europeans are killed.’
When the occupants of the telegraph office reached the Flagstaff Tower, at around three in the afternoon, they found it full to overflowing. The main circular room, about 18 feet in diameter, was crammed with European refugees and their Indian servants, and so hot and airless that one observer likened it to a ‘Black Hole in miniature, with all but the last horrible features of that dreadful prison’. Despite his withered leg – which required a special boot – Pilkington was almost relieved when an officer asked him if he would return to the telegraph office with an escort of loyal sepoys to send another telegram to Ambala. He agreed, and the message was duly dispatched. It read:
Cantonment in a state of siege. Mutineers from Meerut – 3rd Light Cavalry – numbers not known, said to be one hundred and fifty men, cut off communication ‘The Electric Telegraph has saved us’ with Meerut; taken possession of the bridge of boats. 54th Native Infantry sent against them refused to act. Several officers killed and wounded. City in a state of considerable excitement. Troops sent down, but nothing known yet. Information will be forwarded.
It was the last transmission from Delhi. Later that afternoon the signaller at Ambala noticed the telegraph needle moving as if someone were trying to send a message. But as the sender refused to identify himself, the signaller assumed that it was somebody unfamiliar with the apparatus and that all the Delhi staff had been murdered.
From Ambala the news of the Delhi outbreak was flashed north to Lahore, the capital of the Punjab, and on to the other stations of that vital province that had been part of British India only since 1849. A rider was also sent to inform General Anson, the Commander-in-Chief of India, who was at Simla in the hills. The tidings from Delhi reached the civil station of Anarkali, on the outskirts of Lahore, during the morning of 12 May. With Sir John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, on his way to join his family in the Murree Hills, the senior civil authority in Lahore was Robert Montgomery, the judicial commissioner. An Ulster Protestant imbued with a godly sense of self-discipline and duty, Montgomery was at the same time a man of impulse, devoid of caution and circumspection.* It was just as well. Shortly after reading the telegram from Ambala, Montgomery received word from a Brahman spy that the four native regiments at Lahore were on the verge of mutiny. After a hastily organized meeting with his senior officials, he drove over to the military cantonment at Mian Mir to ask the military authorities to confiscate the sepoys’ ammunition.
By a happy coincidence, the commander of the Lahore garrison, Brigadier Stuart Corbett, was also a man of resolve. Though fifty-five years old – about average for a Bengal brigadier – he had ‘none of that incapacity to grasp strange incidents and new situations, none of that timid shrinking from responsibility, which is so often evinced by feeble minds, trammelled by the associations of long years of convention and routine’. He was, in short, not your typical time-serving Indian officer.
When Montgomery arrived at Mian Mir with the news from Delhi and the intelligence about the Lahore sepoys, Corbett was quick to appreciate the danger. The 4,000 or so Indian soldiers at Mian Mir outnumbered the Europeans by more than three to one. If they rose and took possession of Lahore Fort – which was garrisoned by half a regiment of native infantry and just one company of Europeans – there was every likelihood that they would be joined by the city population of nearly 100,000, most of them Sikhs and Muslims who had little love for the British (though, as it turned out, even less for the high-caste Hindus who dominated the Bengal Army). Corbett therefore agreed to Montgomery’s suggestion that he confiscate the sepoys’ ammunition, though he knew most of his officers would be outraged. He decided to ‘go the whole hog’ and disarm the Indian troops altogether after receiving further intelligence from the cantonment magistrate’s spies that the four Indian regiments intended to mutiny and seize the fort on 15 May, when the monthly relief took place and 1,100 armed sepoys would have been present. There was also an intimation that simultaneous risings would occur at other Punjab stations.
To disarm the sepoys, a general parade was ordered for the following morning. So as not to excite the suspicions of the sepoys, however, a ball hosted by the officers of the 81st Foot went ahead as planned. ‘The evening has passed very pleasantly,’ noted one young officer in his journal, ‘a perfect sham of smiles over tears. Half the ladies were not present and those who were there could barely disguise their anxiety, while we gentlemen had to give the brightest picture of the case possible, tho’ they must often have heard pieces of subdued conversations anything but hopeful.’
Shortly after daybreak on 13 May the four Indian regiments were drawn up in columns on the grand parade at Mian Mir. Facing them, at a distance of 350 yards, were the ten 6-pounders and two 12-pound howitzers of the European horse artillery, primed with canister and ready to fire. Behind the cannon were six companies of the 81st Foot with loaded muskets. Corbett and his staff rode to within a few yards of the European officers at the head of two central Indian columns. ‘The Brigadier soft-sawdered them,’ recalled a member of his staff, ‘saying what splendid regiments they were, how he loved them, how he longed to win their further honour and to keep their name unsullied, and so he was going to order them to show their loyalty in laying down their arms.’
Then came the critical moment. ‘Order the 16th to pile arms!’ commanded Brigadier Corbett. All European eyes were on the tall, black-faced ranks of the 16th Grenadiers – one of the ‘beautiful’ regiments that had fought under Nott at Kandahar – resplendent in white trousers, tight red coatees* with white cross-belts and black shako headdresses that resembled inverted coal scuttles. ‘Grenadiers,’ shouted their commanding officer, ‘shoulder arms!’ They did so. ‘Ground arms!’ It was done. ‘Pile arms!’ A few complied, most hesitated. But a quick glance at the black artillery muzzles must have proved decisive. All muskets, bayonets and swords were placed on the ground. ‘Stand away from your arms… Right about face… Quick march!’ And away they went unarmed. The 26th, which had been made a Light Infantry corps for sterling service under Pollock in the First Afghan War, followed suit, as did the 49th. Lastly the French-grey coated sowars of the 8th Light Cavalry, many of them veterans of the Gwalior and Sikh wars of the 1840s, were ordered to drop their sabres, pistols and carbines. They obeyed, before backing up their horses and riding off the parade-ground. A simultaneous disarmament of the Indian garrison of Lahore Fort was carried out by the remaining four companies of the 81st Foot.
The importance of Montgomery and Corbett’s decisive action was illustrated the following day when it was discovered that the disarmed regiments were planning to march that night and seize the magazine at Ferozepore, 45 miles to the south. A couple of hundred sepoys did manage to desert, but most were picked up by the civil authorities, both on the road and at Ferozepore itself. The previous evening an Indian regiment had mutinied at Ferozepore on seeing its comrades replaced as the magazine guard by a company of European troops. But the uprising failed to secure the magazine, and the mutineers fled.
By enabling the authorities at Lahore, in the words of one senior official, to ‘disarm the native troops before they had received one word’ of the uprisings at Meerut and Delhi, the telegraph messages played a key role in the preservation of British India. ‘The Electric Telegraph has saved us,’ wrote Donald MacLeod, the Financial Commissioner of the Punjab. He was right. If Lahore had fallen to the rebels, the rest of the Punjab would probably have followed suit. And if the Punjab – where the majority of European troops were stationed – had been lost, British India might not have endured. As it was, its survival was in the balance for many months to come.