Whether his confidence was shared by Mrs MacMahon, the Eurasian wife of an English sergeant major in the 53rd NI is questionable. Shopping in the native bazaar, she was accosted by a sepoy of her husband’s regiment out of uniform. ‘You will none of you come here much oftener,’ he told her with quiet menace, ‘you will not be alive in another week.’ Mrs MacMahon later reported the threat but her tale was quietly put to one side in the interest of maintaining good relations with the sepoys.
The Collector’s 21-year-old pregnant wife, Mrs Lydia Hillersdon, expressed her concern on the turn of events in typical fashion when writing to a relative in England. ‘Fancy us, the governor of the country, obliged to shelter ourselves behind guns.’ Then in an abrupt change of mood, she added:
Oh! How I wish we were with you, and out of this horrid country. May God spare us and may we live to see each other again … I send you some of the dear children’s hair. We trust to our Father who governs all. Tell dearest G—— to keep the two little books Bishop Wilson gave me for my sake, and never forget that in the midst of life we are in death … Oh, it is a hard trial to bear.
A week later, that same lady was writing with obvious relief: ‘with God’s blessing, one might say, the storm has now blown over and things are mending.’
It was not a belief held by Mrs Elizabeth Sneyd. On her way to visit her sister in Calcutta, she was obliged to spend the night in Cawnpore. Accommodation was difficult to find, for the one good hotel had been taken over by the Nana Sahib’s retainers, but she did secure ‘a most dirty room’ normally occupied by the manager’s clerk, for herself and her daughter-in-law. The meal put in front of them was no better, in her opinion, than the ‘stale left overs of the native soldiers’. The conduct of the sepoys in the compound, usually polite, she found ‘very strange and uncourteous’. ‘These men did nothing but point and laugh at me among themselves whilst talking a great deal together in an undertone.’ Elizabeth Sneyd confessed that she felt a ‘presentment of evil’, and she and Lousia Sneyd lost no time in resuming their journey to Calcutta.
In the last weeks of May the probability of a major insurrection could no longer be discounted and an appeal was sent to Sir Henry Lawrence in Lucknow begging for a company of European soldiers. Despite the difficulty of sparing even a single man, Sir Henry responded by immediately despatching a Company of the 32nd and a squadron of Oudh Irregulars led by Captain Fletcher Hayes, his Military Secretary, with instructions for him to report on the situation as he found it.
The reinforcement reached Cawnpore during the evening of 20 May having covered the 48 miles in less than twelve hours.
Cawnpore remained in a state of uneasy calm but the grisly sight of two European corpses floating down the river was reason enough for the Eurasian head clerk of the Commissariat department to regret the decision which brought his wife and two daughters to Cawnpore. ‘Alarming reports continued to fly about the station daily,’ wrote William Shepherd, nicknamed ‘Jonah’ by his family, ‘and we lived in perpetual anxiety and dread.’
Appreciating that the community’s nerves were stretched to breaking point, General Wheeler sought to lessen their fears by inviting those that desired it, to enter the barrack buildings. A great crowd did so, bringing their bundles of possessions and looking for all the world ‘like so many travellers bound for a far country’, commented Amelia Horne. To the vivacious eighteen-year-old Eurasian girl, it seemed rather exciting, if perhaps a trifle uncomfortable, to be sleeping on the balcony of the barracks with so many other people. She could hardly believe that anything worse could happen. The 32-year-old William Shepherd decided to remain in the town, but although refusing to give way to panic, he was sufficiently concerned to arrange for Indian dresses to be supplied to his wife and children.
Mrs Kate Lindsay, in expressing the fear she felt for her three daughters in a letter to her sister Jane Drage, pointed out that ‘if our 3 native corps were to rise, which I pray to God to avert, we must all I am afraid perish.’ Then, perhaps recalling that she had returned to India against advice and the tearful wishes of Caroline, she ended by begging her sister: ‘Pray for us my dear Jane. My hand shakes. I am hardly able to write.’ She was not alone in anticipating the worst, for in a letter to her aunt, Caroline confided: ‘I have often and often wished I could be transported back to England and all my friends, but we must hope it is all for the best.’
The concern felt by the civilians was not shared by Sir Hugh Wheeler for on 3 June, confident that he had averted an insurrection in Cawnpore, he returned a detachment of the 84th of Foot and Madras Fusiliers which had arrived from Benares six days before, to Lucknow. Fortunate indeed were these eighty soldiers for with the telegraph down and every road infested with rebels, the letters they carried with them were the last before the town fell into enemy hands.
In defence of the General’s action, it must be said that his confidence had received a boost on 21 May when in response to an invitation from Charles Hillersdon, the Nana had agreed to take part in discussions relating to the defence of the community in the event of a sepoy rising. The decision to involve the Nana, however, was regarded with the deepest suspicion by many of Wheeler’s junior officers. ‘Always hitherto we have been fighting against open enemies,’ complained a young ensign to his mother, ‘now we cannot tell who are friends, who enemies.’
Nanak Chand, the agent for a banker in Cawnpore, also had serious doubts regarding the Nana’s intention. ‘The Nana will keep up appearances,’ he wrote, ‘for if the troops [the rebel sepoys] get defeated, he will get a good name and a chance of restoration of his pension; and if the troops prevail and the Government is removed, then he will be the master of the country … it is certain that the bad characters with him are bound to make trouble.’
Sir Hugh Wheeler may have been confident that the Nana’s presence would have a restraining influence on the behaviour of the sepoys, but he was not unmindful of the responsibility he had for the safety of the civil community, and in response to their increasing anxiety, it was agreed that a common refuge should be made available to all those scattered the length and breadth of the station.
There were two possible locations. The Magazine, a building of sweltering heat with its high walls, was 3 miles upstream and would have to be occupied before the mutiny broke out if the garrison was to have any chance of reaching it without a costly engagement. The second, concerned a number of single-storey barrack blocks, some of which were still under construction. Of these, two of the largest were brick built with walls almost 2 feet thick, one of which housed the families of the invalid soldiers, and the other with a thatched roof contained the sick of the 32nd of Foot.
These buildings stood on an open-plain close to the Allahabad road and although Wheeler was later criticized for taking up such an exposed position, there is some evidence that he had been influenced by a statement from Lord Canning that reinforcements would reach him by 15 June. If this was so, then the position he selected would have been the nearest to the road along which the relief would have marched, but even so Wheeler’s choice of a defensive position did not meet with universal approval. Amelia Horne, in her memoirs, writes:
It appears that more than one officer had attempted to disuade General Wheeler from taking up the position he did. Their opinion from the beginning was that the spot and buildings would never stand a siege. Even those who had little pretensions to military tactics perceived the utter insecurity of the place, and pointed out that the magazine was better adapted to defence. It stood on the river bank and had huge walls of substantial masonry.
The one redeeming feature of Wheeler’s chosen position lay in the fact that the compound possessed an inexhaustible supply of water from a well, and the site itself was close enough to the General’s residence to enable him to exercise control once labour had begun on the construction of the defence perimeter. Unfortunately, the earth had been baked by the sun to a hard clay and there was not the water to soften it. Despite strict supervis
ion, the native workers were only able to excavate trenches ‘deep enough to give shelter from high angle shrapnel, and narrow enough to minimise the chance of a common shell dropping into it’. The unfortunate artillerymen found that their positions beside mounds of round shot were without protection of any kind.
Days of frenzied activity were viewed with amusement by the Nana’s agent.
‘What do you call that place you are making out in the plain?’ asked Amizullah Khan of Lieutenant Daniell who had been a frequent visitor to the Nana’s palace.
‘I am sure I don’t know,’ replied the young cavalry officer.
‘I think you should call it the Fort of Despair,’ suggested Azimullah.
‘Oh, indeed not,’ came the confident rejoinder. ‘We will call it the Fort of Victory.’
The next few days were tinged with apprehension for the European and Eurasian families. The native labour had still to complete the defence works and whilst many officers demonstrated their trust in their men by sleeping in the native lines, the civilians hurried from their places of work to spend each night within the perimeter of the entrenchment. ‘Oh, such a scene, dear Fanny,’ wrote Emma Ewart on 27 May. ‘No one can say how or where the trouble is to end. Men, officers, women and children, beds and chairs all mingled together inside & out of the barrack, some talking and even laughing, some very frightened, some defiant, others despairing.’
It was a display of panic which dismayed Captain Fletcher Hayes the Military Secretary from Lucknow, who wrote:
Since I have been in India I have never witnessed so frightful a scene of confusion, fright, and bad management as the European barracks presented. Four guns were in position loaded, with European artillerymen in night caps, hanging on to the guns in groups looking like melodramatic buccaneers. People of all kinds, of every colour, sect and profession, were crowding into the barracks … buggies, palki-gharrees, vehicles of all sorts drive up and discharge cargoes of writers, tradesmen, and a miscellaneous mob of every complexion, from white to tawny, all in terror of an imaginary foe. I saw quite enough to convince me that if any insurrection took or takes place, we shall have no one to thank but our selves, because we have now shown to the Natives how very easily we can become frightened, and when frightened, utterly helpless.
That he did not exaggerate is borne out in a letter from Caroline Lindsay to her aunt.
‘You may imagine we were all rather in a fright, the scene of confusion and fright everybody was in was past description. We were all very glad when day dawned.’
The unfortunate Fletcher Hayes was to be treacherously murdered on the road to Fatehgarh, when on 1 June, with another Englishman, he rode to join the 2nd Oudh Irregulars. Attacked by the sowars, Hayes and Carey spurred their horses furiously away, but Captain Hayes, unlike the cavalryman, was far from being a skilled horse-man and he was quickly overtaken and cut down.
The festival of Eid had been celebrated by the Muslims on Friday, 22 May and the occasion passed without incident in Cawnpore, but beneath the surface ugly passions were stirring, and on the night of 4 June, a blaze of incendiarism and a tumult of sound from the lines of the 2nd Cavalry signalled the beginning of the long anticipated sepoy uprising. ‘We slept undisturbed on the night of the 4th June until about two hours after midnight,’ remembered William Shepherd, ‘when a great bustle and collection of people roused me from my slumbers. A motion of the hand pointing towards the 2nd cavalry lines accompanied by the words “listen”, was all the excplanation I could get.’
Despairingly, Colonel John Ewart, commanding the 1st NI, a regiment which had been raised as early as 1787, pleaded with his sepoys as they made a rush for the stack of muskets: ‘My children! My children! This is not your way,’ he pleaded. ‘Do not do so great a wickedness.’ Although a few did refuse to join the mutineers and remained to fight at the side of their British comrades, the time had passed when a moving appeal in fluent Hindostanee might have restrained them, and brushing aside Ewart but without molesting him, his men hurried after the cavalry to join Nana Sahib’s followers in sacking the Treasury.
When the 53rd and 56th NI followed on the heels of the rebellious 1st NI it seemed to those civilians who had taken refuge in the entrenchment that they had been spared the worst. Consequently, where before an air of gloomy despondency had taken hold, people now reminded each other that the sepoys had singularly avoided spilling the blood of their British officers, and that in a little more than a week the river would be high enough to permit the passage of steamers from Allahabad. In a letter to her aunt, Alice Lindsay wrote: ‘we are still quite in an uncertain state of mind as to what is to be our fate, we only hope and trust we may be defended from all evil.’
Indeed, Alice’s hope seemed at the time, to have some foundation for, intent on plundering the Treasury and one or two buildings in the city, the mutineers had left the Europeans in Cawnpore largely undisturbed.
The rebels were disorganized and as yet leaderless, but like the mutineers in Meerut, they decided to march on Delhi and declare support for their king.
As the sepoys of the 53rd busied themselves with looting and setting fire to the abandoned bungalows, the Nana began to consider his own position. As yet he had done little to associate himself with the uprising, but Azimullah Khan was all too conscious that for the rebels to succeed, the British would have to be destroyed in their trenches, and in order to accomplish this before the garrison could be reinforced, the mutineers must be brought back from Delhi. His argument won the day and perhaps fearing that any decision to the contrary might end in his own death, Nana Sahib agreed. After securing the Magazine, he mounted his state elephant and hurried up the Grand Trunk Road to induce the mutineers to return to Cawnpore.
Two days later, rising columns of smoke from the European quarter of the city signalled the return of the rebellious sepoys who had marched no further than Kalyanpur, the first stage on the road to Delhi. News of the Nana’s involvement – for it had been on the strength of his promise of extra pay and a gold bracelet that had brought about the return of the sepoys – was greeted with groans of despair by the Anglo-European community.
Leaving his room to take up a post in the entrenchment, William ‘Jonah’ Shepherd looked upon the anxious faces of his wife and children and reflected bitterly on his folly in not sending them earlier to a place of safery.
Equally conscious of their vulnerability, the soldiers crouching behind the spoils thrown up in exavating the shallow trench, cursing the position chosen for them by their Commanding Officer. Instead of brick walls and an abundant store of ammunition and weapons which would have been available in the Magazine, accommodation for a community of more than 800 was now to be provided by two barrack buildings, one of which had a roof of thatch, and the other of tiles.
The perimeter to be defended had little in the way of shelter apart from the barrack blocks. Surrounding this area of approximately 200 square yards was the trench having a parapet over which it was said, ‘any cow could jump’. On the north side, facing the river, a small bastion referred to cynically as ‘The Redan’ was commanded by fifty-year-old Major Edward Vibart, assisted by Captain Jenkins. A battery consisting of a mortar and two 9-pounders, brought in from Lucknow by Lieutenant Ashe a few days after Fletcher Hayes’s ill-fated departure, covered the section in front of the native lines, whilst in the south-east Lieutenants Delafosse and Burney were in charge of three 9-pounders with a field of fire across the plain separating the cantonment from the city. A small brass 3-pounder completed the garrison’s artillery strength.
The community now considered itself under siege and the last letter to leave Cawnpore for Lucknow was dated 1 June. It had been written by Mrs Emma Ewart to her sister in England:
Dearest Fanny. You will scarcely be able to realise the fearful state we are in – we can scarcely do so ourselves. No one can say how or when the trouble is to end, Mrs H [Lydia Hillersdon] is a sweet and amiable companion in affliction – We shall stick close to
each other as long as it pleases God to spare us. Last night after much fatigue of mental torture, and several nights of imperfect rest, I fell into a state of stupefaction. Body and mind alike refused to be longer active … Such nights of anxiety I would never believes possible … another fortnight we expect will decide our fate & whatever it may be I trust we shall be enabled to bear it … If these are my last words to you dearest Fanny you will remember them lovingly and always bear in mind that your affection & the love we have ever had for each other is an ingredient of comfort in these bitter times.
For a few days the mutineers devoted the whole of their attention to plundering the city. Europeans and Eurasians were the obvious targets but even the dark-skinned natives were subjected to the unwelcome attention of the rebels. ‘Sowars are wandering in the streets,’ noted Nanak Chand, ‘and are giving rifles at doors of houses and extracting money from people by threatening them.’ Then, whilst the garrison strove to improve the state of their defences, General Wheeler received word from the Nana that he was about to attack.
Chapter 4
THE STORM BREAKS
Within an hour of receiving news of the Nana’s intention General Wheeler ordered all the officers who had strayed from the entrenchment to return immediately and, wrote Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, ‘with such expedition was the summons obeyed, 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. Very few of our number had secured a single change of rainment; some like myself, were only partly dressed.’
The main objective of the rebel artillery was the destruction of the two barrack buildings and the entrenchment, which offered a rudimentary shelter to the 900 European and Eurasian men, women and children, of which only 210 were European soldiers, with a sprinkling of loyal native officers and sepoys. To achieve this, wagons loaded with shot and powder from the Magazine abandoned by General Wheeler were soon to be seen making their way across the sandy plain in a steady procession towards the rebel batteries.
Cawnpore & Lucknow Page 5