Cawnpore & Lucknow

by Donald Richards

  Sir Hugh Wheeler lost no time in gathering the hundred or so able-bodied civilians and equipping them with weapons to take their place along the perimeter of the entrenchment under the command of the Company’s officers. Like the others, William Shepherd accepted his orders without complaint. ‘How vivid is the recollection to me of this night,’ he wrote many years later, ‘being the first time I was called upon to perform military duty.’

  Among the more effective were a group of twenty-five railway workers led by Robert Garrett, an Anglo-Irish railway engineer who had been given the task of evaluating a proposed line of track in Oudh. Finding himself stranded in Cawnpore, he formed what became known as the Railway Rifle Corps. Armed with hunting rifles or shotguns, and each a proficient marksman, they took their places in three of the unfinished barrack blocks, and were to prove their value when keeping watch from the frameless windows of the outer barracks.

  It was a railwayman by the name of Murphy who was to earn the dubious distinction of becoming the first European casualty of the uprising in Cawnpore, and the only one to be buried in a coffin surrounded by his ‘friends and companions with the minister performing the usual ceremony’. Henceforth the dead would be disposed of in a much cruder fashion without even the dignity of a burial service.

  Precisely at 10.30 am on 5 June, as recorded by the Commissary clerk, an explosion of noise from an 18-pounder cannon signalled the beginning of a period of torment for the besieged community scarcely to be imagined. The dreadful screech that accompanied the iron ball as it plummeted close to a group of women and children standing near the hospital barrack building gave rise to a chorus of screams and shrieks. ‘The consternation caused among them was indescribable,’ remembered Mowbray Thomson, ‘and every man rushed off to his place on the trench’s perimeter, many of us carrying in our ears, for the first time, the peculiar whizzing of the round shot, with which we were to become so familiar.’

  ‘I had no idea before of the very great report a bursting shell makes, and when so close as only a wall between, it was dreadful,’ wrote William Shepherd. ‘I cannot forget the frightful stir it caused some.’

  For the rest of that first day the defenders sat behind a pitifully shallow rampart of earth, exposed to a scorching wind and the burning rays of the sun, in the expectation of an attack by cavalry or infantry at any moment. ‘Waiting for the assault,’ wrote Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, ‘not a man closed his eyes in sleep, and throughout the whole siege snatches of troubled slumber under the cover of a wall, was all the relief the combatants could obtain.’

  Just as great a cause for concern was the limited supply of food – gone were the luxuries which even the lowest military rank could enjoy. Delicacies such as tinned salmon and herring were nothing more than a memory. Most private soldiers and their families had to be content with a ration of flour and split peas made up into a passable imitation of porridge. It was barely sufficient to satisfy a gnawing hunger but civilians who were not part of the perimeter guard were left to fend for themselves – an oversight which the head Commissary clerk thought quite unfair, particularly so when he had been on sentry duty for several hours with barely an opportunity for providing a meal for himself or his family.

  ‘We had no food from home as our servants could not bring us any,’ complained William Shepherd, adding with resignation, ‘but there was so much anxiety and fear that no-one felt like eating.’

  Later, the monotonous diet would be varied by the introduction of horse soup, and on one memorable day, recalled by Mowbray Thomson: ‘The entrenched people were so fortunate as to shoot down a Brahminee bull that came grazing within limits where his sanctity was not respected.’ Before that welcome occasion, Lieutenant Thomson could write with honesty: ‘We had not a single good meal since entering the entrenchment, from the first living on half rations.’

  In spite of their hunger, the garrison gave no sign that they were prepared to negotiate and after several days of fruitless activity, the Nana’s resolve to prosecute the siege was only strengthened by the knowledge that many other mutineers were on their way to join him.

  To the few like Amelia Horne who dared to stand at the barrack’s verandah and gaze out across the plain: ‘The whole surrounding country seemed covered with men at arms, on horse and on foot, and they presented a most formidable appearance,’ she wrote. ‘They seemed such fearful odds to keep at bay from our Lilliputian defences.’

  At first, the rebel guns were sited too far from their targets to permit of any degree of accuracy and did little more than terrify the women and children with the noise of bursting shells, but reinforced by the introduction of large-calibre guns from the Magazine, a destructive bombardment of Wheeler’s entrenchment and barrack blocks began on 7 June.

  The artillerymen serving the Nana’s cannon were, in the main, pensioners of the East India Company, and as the heavier 24-pounders were dragged closer to their target, they were able to inflict considerable damage to the defence works. ‘By noon on Sunday they got ready a cordon of seven batteries,’ wrote Amelia Home, ‘which opened such a hot and incessant firing on us that captain Moore remarked that he had never known such heavy and continued cannonading.’

  It was the European volunteers in their exposed positions who bore the brunt of these bombardments and in just seven days, as recorded by Mowbray Thomson, ‘fifty-nine artillerymen had all been killed or wounded at their posts … the howitzer was knocked completely off its carriage – one or two of them had their sides driven in, and one was without a muzzle.’

  Within a few hours of the rebel artillerymen’s concentrated fire, the greater part of the barricades had been beaten down and not a door or window frame in the two barrack blocks remained intact. Lying on the floor of his crowded room, William Shepherd was jolted out of a fitful sleep by the rush of air as an 18-pound cannonball crashed through the window, removed the hat from the head of a clerk in the Collector’s office, hit the inner wall, rebounded into a corner and fell with dire consequence on an ayah dozing there. Miraculously the baby on her lap was unhurt but the legs of the unfortunate woman were shattered, and, related the Commissary clerk, ‘She died within the hour from loss of blood and pain.’

  ‘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,’ reported Amelia Horne, ‘windows and doors were soon shot off their sockets, and the shot and ball began to play freely through the denuded buildings.’

  Considering the horrors they were experiencing, the conduct of the majority of the women was remarkably courageous. At first, the unaccustomed sights and sounds were too great to bear in silence and Mowbray Thomson recalled that a chorus of terrified screams from the women and shrieks from the children would greet the arrival of each round shot. But as the days passed most accepted the situation with resignation and strove to keep their fears to themselves. Indeed, during this period of the siege, only one person seems to have behaved in a less than credible manner. Thomson was openly contemptuous of the man and noted with disgust that ‘while women and children were daily dying around him, not even the perils of his own wife could arouse this man to exertion.’ He did not disclose the man’s name, but it is generally believed to have been Deputy Judge Advocate General, Edwin Wiggins, whose wife had ‘quite lost her reason from terror and excitement’.

  About 250 yards to the west of the entrenchment there existed a partially completed building originally intended for an addition to the sepoys’ barracks. It was here that the mutineers posted a number of matchlock men. They were all noted marksmen and from the roof and window openings at a height of some 40 feet, the snipers were able to command a great part of Wheeler’s encampment. Such was the accuracy of their musket fire that few defenders dared move out of cover for an instant without running the risk of becoming a target.

  Returning from a perilous expedition to the well, Wil
liam ‘Jonah’ Shepherd was grateful for the shelter of a heap of sandbags. Crouching low, he suddenly felt a tremendous blow to the base of his spine, which stretched him senseless on the ground. A spent musket ball had cut through several layers of clothing to penetrate an inch deep into his flesh. Seeking help, he was relieved to find that the wound was not as serious as he had first thought, and he could afford to smile at the surgeon’s observation that ‘nobody ever lives after getting a bullet in the part you have got, and as you have escaped this, you will live very long indeed.’ ‘Jonah’ Shepherd was probably no less thankful to find that he was to be spared trench duty for a time, enabling him to spend a few days with his family. Lieutenant Swynfen Jervis of the Bengal Engineers was not so fortunate. Scorning to run through a hail of musketry, he walked ‘with his back straight and his head held high’ across the compound as musket balls kicked up the dust around his feet. ‘Run! Jervis, Run!’ Came the anxious shouts from a group of his fellow officers. The young subaltern, however, scornful of the sepoys’ aim, ignored their advice and, commented Mowbray Thomson, ‘suffered the consequence of his own foolishness with a bullet through the heart’.

  Thomson himself very nearly became a casualty when, while assisting a comrade to hobble across an exposed stretch of ground, he was also truck by a spent ball. Fortunately, the injury proved to be nothing worse than an ugly spreading bruise and he was spared a protracted spell in hospital where the chance of being crushed by falling masonry was almost as great a risk as facing a rebel sniper.

  Unable to silence the mutineer’s guns with their own ineffectual artillery, the besieged accepted the hopelessness of the situation with resignation. The women in particular bore their discomfort with a degree of fortitude typical of the early Victorians. It was always possible for their menfolk to involve themselves in the excitement of battle, but for the women there was neither privacy nor relief from the terrible heat of a tropical sun, nor could they obtain a moment’s respite from the torment of a myriad of flies or the acrid smell of urine and body odour. The suffering of their kin was bound to effect even the most hardened of military veterans. The spectacle of small children sucking strips torn from goatskin water carriers, in an attempt to moisten their parched and swollen mouths, was one which Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson never quite forgot. Whilst the sight of his five-year-old daughter Polly, struggling within herself to ‘smother the emotions that arose from feelings of hunger, thirst, and fear’, caused William Shepherd’s heart to ‘bleed often to the core’.

  Some, like the Collector’s wife, Lydia Hillersdon, had the horrifying experience of seeing their husband killed in front of them. On 7 June Charles Hillersdon was conversing with his wife when a round shot struck him full in the body and his eviscerated remains collapsed at the feet of his horrified wife. Lydia herself survived just two nights before a ball brought down the ceiling of her refuge and buried her beneath an avalanche of rubble.

  The greater part of the unfinished barracks beyond the entrenchment had been in the possession of the rebels since the beginning of the siege. After several determined sorties, however, the nest of snipers was dislodged and two of the buildings were occupied by detachments from the garrison. Number 4 block was held by a dozen young men from the Railway Rifle Corps with no experience of soldiering, but they made such good use of their breech-loading rifles that for three days every rebel attack was repulsed without supervision from a professional soldier until the arrival of Lieutenant George Glanville of the 2nd Bengal Fusiliers.

  Their comrades in block No. 2 were equally effective in the defence of a room just large enough for the deployment of seventeen men, first under the command of Captain Jenkins, and after he was wounded, Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson.

  Constantly raked with musketry and subjected to the occasional cannon shot, the men who made up the numbers in barrack blocks 2 and 4, fought on a killing ground where prisoners were despatched ‘without reference to headquarters’. The defenders of the block commanded by Mowbray Thomson were particularly hard pressed, losing three quarters of their strength in the first few days. One of the early casualties was Robert Garrett. The circumstance of his death is unclear, but it is likely that he fell victim to either a shell or one of the snipers who crept up at night shielded by the heaps of bricks that littered the unfinished barrack blocks. Such was the importance of these barrack blocks to Wheeler that daily casualties there were immediately made good by volunteers, some of whom had a good knowledge of military weapons, although most of them were civilians whose only experience had been sniping at wildfowl.

  To supply these positions with food and ammunition was a highly dangerous business, but there was no lack of volunteers prepared to run the gauntlet by taking advantage of whatever cover there was between the entrenchment and the barrack block. ‘Two men of the picket, who acted as cooks, performed this dangerous journey daily when they went for our miserable dole of food,’ recorded Mowbray Thomson. ‘If ever men deserved the Victoria Cross these poor fellows did.’

  The surgeons who sometimes accompanied them seldom lacked employment, for every stretch of ground or pile of bricks not covered by the defender’s field of fire was occupied by mutineers who kept up a continuous musketry from doors, windows and even the ditches which faced the half-built barrack blocks. Occasionally, when the ’Pandies’ became too troublesome, a party of some thirty powder-blackened desperadoes, armed with the new Enfield rifle, would sally forth to drive the rebels into the open where Delafosse’s artillery swept them with grape.

  In these operations no one worked harder than the thirty-year-old Captain John Moore of the 32nd of Foot. Mowbray Thomson described him as being a ‘soldier of commanding presence, light haired, and blue eyed, whom no toil could weary, no danger could daunt’. Despite the handicap of having one arm in a sling, the result of a broken collarbone sustained in a fall from his horse, the tall Irish captain led many sorties against the mutineers, and when not venturing out with a party of volunteers, made sure that the weaker links in the garrison’s chain of defences were suitably strengthened. ‘His never-say-die disposition served many a sinking heart to the conflict,’ enthused Lieutenant Thomson, ‘and his affable and tender sympathy imparted fresh patience to the suffering women.’

  Following on from one encounter with the sepoys, Lieutenants Daniell and Thomson heard the sounds of a desperate struggle in an adjoining room. Rushing in, they were confronted with the sight of Captain Moore pinned to the ground by a powerful sepoy who was on the point of cutting the officer’s throat. Without pausing in his stride, Daniell immediately transfixed the sepoy with his bayonet, to earn the grateful thanks of the Irish captain who, but for his timely intervention, would certainly have died. ‘In the manifold deaths which surrounded us in those terrific times,’ wrote Thomson later, ‘such hair breadth escapes were little remarked upon.’

  Commenting on the garrison’s desperate efforts to defend their entrenchments, Mowbray Thomson was convinced that if the rebels had only shown more enterprise or determination, ‘we could not have held the place for four and twenty hours’.

  On 9 June, the green flag of the emperor of Delhi was raised by a Muslim butcher who soon gathered a crowd about him to listen to a tirade of abuse against the infidels, whilst the Nana raised a red Hindu flag and distributed leaflets warning that every Hindu who did not ‘join in this righteous cause, is an outcast; may he eat the flesh of cows’. Despite the rhetoric used by both religious factions, it was not until two days later that the first mass attack against Wheeler’s entrenchment was launched. It was led by the sowars of the 2nd Cavalry – on foot on this occasion – supported by sepoys and malcontents from the city’s jail, in a screaming mob which streamed across the plain towards the perimeter defences.

  From his post near the hospital block Shepherd watched apprehensively as, in his words:

  some thousands of armed men spread about under every cover available, their muskets and bayonets only perceptible, and they fired as fast a
s they could load. Their batteries also threw in shot, shell and grape, and bullets came pouring in … tearing away tents and pillars of the barracks on every side. The din of this fearful cannonading resembled continuous claps of thunder in a tremendous storm.

  The assault was met with grim determination by men anxious to avail themselves of an opportunity to assuage their pent-up fury against the mutineers for the suffering of their womenfolk. Crouched behind the breastworks at an interval of fifteen paces, they wreaked such destruction that not one rebel succeeded in breaching the defences. For the rest of that evening and the whole of the following day, Nana Sahib’s followers were content to use the safer option of artillery fire which filled Wheeler’s entrenchment with choking clouds of black smoke and the whistle of iron fragments mixed with flying pieces of stone. Sheltering as best he could among the bricks which littered the floor of his barrack room, and expecting death at any moment, William Shepherd scrawled a pencilled comment on the wall:

  Should this meet the eyes of any who were acquainted with us, in case we are all destroyed, be it known to them that we occupied this room for eight days under circumstances so distressing as have no precedent. The destruction of Jerusalem could not have been attended with distress so severe as we have experienced in so short a time.

  It was at this stage of the siege that the garrison welcomed its one and only reinforcement in the person of Lieutenant Boulton of the 7th Native Cavalry. He had been engaged upon district duty in Lucknow to keep open the road from Fatehgarh and was the only English officer to escape with his life when the 48th NI mutinied. Uncertain of Wheeler’s position, he had waited for daylight before galloping madly through Nawabgunj, past the Nana’s cannons, before going on to clear the parapet of the entrenchment watched by an astonished sentry in one tremendous leap. ‘He joined the out picket and although a great sufferer from a gash in his cheek,’ reported Thomson, ‘he proved a valuable addition to our strength.’