Cawnpore & Lucknow

by Donald Richards

  The engagement was over in less than an hour and although successful Windham’s loss was appreciable considering the brief nature of the engagement, being sixteen killed and seventy-eight wounded. Despite their casualties, the troops returned to their former positions beside the Kalpi road in good heart, while Windham, on his return to headquarters, was relieved to find a message from Campbell announcing that he had broken through the mutineers’ cordon around the Residency and was on his way back with the refugees from Lucknow.

  Although General Windham had defeated one body of rebels, reliable intelligence was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain; what little information there was of Tatya Tope’s movements ceased altogether after several of Windham’s native spies returned to camp horribly mutilated at the hands of the fanatical Muslims. At 10.00 am the following day, a sudden cannonade on Windham’s right flank and centre signalled the beginning of a sustained attack on the brickworks. It was the teenage naval cadet Edward Spencer Watson’s first experience of artillery fire and it left an indelible impression upon his memory. ‘It was a beautiful day, very hot, and the sky was quite blue,’ he wrote. ‘The shell burst very high and a long way off from where we were, and the white smoke oozing out from it against the bright blue sky looked beautiful. It was the first shell that I ever saw fired in real warfare, and I shall never forget it as long as I live.’

  Taking advantage of whatever cover was available, the mutineers drove in the English pickets in a desperate attempt to carry the position. The attack was met by the 34th and a company of the 82nd on the flank, and by the 60th and the 88th in the centre, ably supported by large naval pieces known as ‘cow guns’, manned by seamen from HMS Shannon who soon came under fire themselves. ‘The shot knocked up the dust about a hundred yards ahead of us,’ wrote Watson, ‘and came tearing along at a tremendous pace right between our two guns. Luckily no one was standing in the way, or they would have been eased of their legs very quickly.’

  Unfortunately for Windham, after an hour the gun crews’ ammunition began to run short when the frightened bullock drivers deserted their charges which, as Cadet Watson remarked, ‘were quite dangerous to go near’. It was only with great difficulty that the heavy naval guns were dragged back to a position of safety.

  Now that artillery support had been reduced, morale collapsed and the men on Windham’s right flank began to fall back. Despite committing reinforcements which he could ill afford, the pressure from a numerically superior enemy proved too great to resist. The battle had already lasted several hours and when it was discovered to have largely been a feint to allow Tatya Tope to occupy the native part of the city, resistance crumbled altogether. Threatened on three sides by upwards of 25,000 mutineers equipped with forty cannon, General Windham was left with no choice but to abandon the brickworks and retire to the fort and the entrenchments. ‘Then it was a case of everyone for himself,’ confessed Edward Watson, ‘a tremendous fire pouring in on every side all the while.’ The withdrawal through the city was completed without sustaining a single casualty but in such haste that much of the soldiers’ kit was left behind to be plundered by the victorious sepoys.

  Mowbray Thomson wrote:

  The sound of the retreat threw a panic into the whole neighbourhood. From the native city came merchants with their families and treasure, seeking the protection of the fort; from the field, heiter skelter, in dire confusion, broken companies of English regiments, guns, sailors, soldiers, camels, elephants, bullock hackeries with officers’ baggage, all crowding at the gates for entrance.

  The situation in which Windham’s garrison now found itself was serious, for the enemy was in possession of the native quarter, a circumstance which Lieutenant Thomson had witnessed, precipitating a flood of refugees seeking the protection of the entrenchments. They were joined by groups of inexperienced young soldiers who thought nothing of discarding their weapons in their haste to reach a place of safety and promptly got drunk on wine stolen from the medical store. ‘Among the stores were some casks of beer and wine … some of the soldiers found this out, and by some means got at it and there were a great many cases of drunkenness among them,’ explained Edward Spencer Watson, ‘and the howling and noise they kept up through the night, as they were prisoners at the main guard, was enough to prevent anyone from sleeping.’ The naval cadet was careful to add, ‘The sailors remained very steady, not one case of drunkenness occurred among them.’

  The Sikhs in the fort were astonished that British soldiers could behave in such a fashion. Some patted the redcoats on the back reassuringly as they streamed past in disorder telling them, ‘Don’t fear! Don’t fear!’ It was said that one old Sikh veteran standing by the gate exclaimed, ‘You are not the brothers of the men who beat the khalsa.’

  Such was the confusion that William Shepherd, who had returned to Wheeler’s old entrenchment with the 84th, began to fear that he would find himself besieged for a second time. ‘The confusion and panic which prevailed that evening in the entrenchment baffles description,’ he wrote. ‘It was perhaps fortunate that the enemy had not followed up their advantage … our men were so harassed and knocked up with the day’s work that they would have been unable to repulse them.’

  Despite his difficulties, unencumbered with women and children and well stocked with provisions, ‘very, very different was the position of General Windham from that of Sir Hugh Wheeler five months previously,’ commented Mowbray Thomson.

  General Windham’s whole force was now concentrated behind the new defensive system which Thomson had so tirelessly supervised, and Windham felt certain that the position could be held pending Sir Cohn Campbell’s return. In his latest despatch the 48-year-old General took pains to reassure Campbell’s headquarters staff: ‘In retiring within the entrenchments, I followed the general instructions issued by your Excellency, conveyed through the Chief of Staff; namely, to preserve the safety of the bridge over the Ganges, and my communication with your force, so severely engaged in the important operation of the relief of Lucknow. As far as possible I strictly adhered to the defensive’.

  Windham’s troubles were not yet over for at noon the next day Tatya Tope launched two attacks which fortunately were met in equally determined fashion by troops led by Colonel Walpole and Brigadier Wilson, the latter sustaining a mortal wound in an attack on a battery of six guns. By nightfall the British were back in the fort having abandoned the civil station and suffered 315 casualties in an engagement many in the garrison referred to as ‘Windham’s Mess’. The General, however, looked upon the action as something of a triumph and wrote in his despatches:

  On the left advance, Colonel Walpole with the Rifles, supported by Captain Green’s battery, and part of the 82nd Regiment, achieved a complete victory over the enemy, and captured two 18-pounder guns. The glory of this well-contested fight belongs entirely to the above-named companies and artillery. It was owing to the gallantry of the men and officers under the able leadership of Colonel Walpole and of my late lamented relation, Lt. Col. Woodford of the Rifle Brigade and of Lt. Col. Watson of the 82nd, and of Captain Greene of the Bengal Artillery, that this hard-contested fight was won and brought to a profitable end. I had nothing to do with it beyond sending them supports, and at the end, of bringing up some myself.

  On 29 November a rain of shells fell upon the entrenchments heavier than any experienced by Mowbray Thomson and William Shepherd in the first siege. Fortunately it was of short duration, for once Peel’s naval guns had the range, little time was lost in silencing Tatya Tope’s artillery. After Windham’s defeat on the 27th, the rebels had diligently searched Cawnpore for European and Sikh stragglers. One incident moved the soldiers of the 64th of Foot to impotent fury, when it was disclosed that two wounded officers of their regiment had been captured and hung from the same banyan tree that Neill had used to hang sepoys.

  Nana Sahib and Azimullah Khan were no longer in the vicinity of Bithur, but Bala Rao, Jwala Prasad and Rao Sahib had returned to the Europea
n quarter of Cawnpore which was now little more than a smouldering ruin. Few shops were open and, wrote Nanak Chand, ‘Low caste men looted the roti godown [bread stores]. Some servants marched about armed with matchlocks, looting on behalf of their zemindars.’

  Around 60 miles to the north-east of Cawnpore lies the city of Lucknow, the capital of Oudh. In 1858 William Russell wrote: ‘There is a city more vast than Paris, as it seems, and more brilliant.’ It did, however, possess a sprawling maze of narrow streets and alleys, the home of 600,000 people, occupying an area of 12 square miles; it was bordered on its northern side by the River Gumti, and on its southern face by a canal which encircled that part of the city. To the east, the Residency, a large impressive structure built on high ground overlooking the river and the city, had been the home of several residents appointed by the East India Company; in April 1857 it was occupied by Sir Henry Lawrence, the 51-year-old Chief Commissioner of Oudh.

  To the south-west, on the road to Cawnpore, stood the Alambagh, a pleasure ground and former palace of the kings of Oudh, whilst on both sides of the city’s walls was an accumulation of buildings the most prominent of which were the Kaiserbagh, the Sikanderbagh, and the Shah Najif. Beyond these edifices, south of the canal, were two other important buildings, the Martiniere a school for European and Eurasian children, and the Dilkusha, the palace of Wajid Ali Shah, who had been deposed by James Outram, the Company’s representative in Oudh, in February of the previous year.

  These limestone buildings, with their minarets and gilded domes, were among the most impressive in Lucknow and led William Russell of The Times to further praise when he wrote: ‘Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople, not any city I have seen, appears to me so striking and so beautiful as this; and the more I gaze, the more its beauties grow upon me.’

  1. ‘Thomas Henry Kavanagh being disguised as a native’. Oil on canvas by Louis William Desanges.

  (National Army Museum)

  2. ‘Sir James Outram’. Engraving by V. Froer of a photograph taken by an unknown person.

  (National Army Museum)

  3. ‘Gallant attack of Windham’s force on the Gwalior contingent’. Chromolithograph by D. Sarsfield Greene.

  (National Army Museum)

  4. ‘The chamber of blood’. Tinted lithograph by Vincent Brooks after Lieutenant C.W. Crump.

  (National Army Museum)

  5. ‘The hero of Lucknow’. A coloured stipple engraving of Major General Henry Havelock by A.H. Ritchie.

  (National Army Museum)

  6. ‘Lieutenant T.A. Butler winning the VC at Lucknow, 9th March 1858’. Oil on canvas by Louis William Desanges.

  (National Army Museum)

  7. ‘The house of the massacre’. Photograph after Lieutenant G.R. Miller, by Orlando Norie.

  (National Army Museum)

  8. ‘The battered barracks’. A tinted lithograph by Vincent Brooks after Lieutenant C.W. Crump.

  (National Army Museum)

  It was not a description which Amelia Home would have subscribed to – she detested Lucknow and wrote:

  The place held out no inducements. It was so different from anything I had ever seen, the houses so strange, the streets so narrow and the people so unlike those in Bengal that I used to feel as if I had got into another world … the streets are never known to be swept; and the flies abound in such numbers that sometimes the shops can only be opened at night.

  Within two months of her arrival, the pretty seventeen-year-old Eurasian girl had been accosted by boisterous youths in a manner which infuriated her stepfather and he decided to leave Lucknow with his family for Cawnpore.

  Signs of unrest began to surface in the city even before the uprising at Meerut and when a Doctor Wells of the 48th NI, feeling unwell, thoughtlessly sipped from a medicine bottle used by his Hindu patients, it was witnessed by a native apothecary who lost no time in informing the sepoys. Outraged by this slight to their caste, the sepoys took their revenge by burning down the doctor’s bungalow from which his wife and children only narrowly escaped with their lives. Shortly afterwards a mutiny by the 7th Oudh Irregular Infantry was only prevented by Sir Henry Lawrence when he ordered up a detachment of the 32nd of Foot backed by a strong force of artillery.

  Further indications of the widespread dissatisfaction prevailing came from posters exhibited in prominent parts of Lucknow urging all true Muslims to rise up and kill the infidels. At the Residency a sentry of the 32nd was approached by a fakir who after abusing him in a language the sentry did not understand, drew his hand across his throat, a piece of insolence which earned the punishment of a hundred lashes for the holy man. In what perhaps was something of an understatement, the Revd. Henry Polehampton, who had recently taken up employment there as Chaplain, wrote to his mother: ‘The sepoys and natives generally are just now in rather a disagreeable state of feeling towards us.’

  ‘It was considered unsafe for Europeans to visit the crowded parts of the city,’ commented Mr L.E.R. Rees a Calcutta merchant, ‘yet … every evening I used to ride towards the Muchee Bhawn, armed of course, without however meeting with any accident. On one occasion, my pistol dropped, and a man politely picked it up. Yet a lowering, sullen, obstinate look was discernible on almost every countenance.’

  Following the uprisings at Meerut and Delhi, no one doubted that the current mood of disaffection would shortly spread throughout Oudh. Sir Henry Lawrence, for one, made sure that should the ‘devil’s wind’ blow across Lucknow, he would not be caught unprepared. Families in the outlying stations were instructed to leave for their own safety and proceed to Lucknow, a move which did not at first find favour with Mrs Huxham, an officer’s widow. ‘We lived in a miserable state of suspense,’ she wrote. ‘The heat was terrible, but as the days passed on and the city was apparently tranquil, we began to think that we had been needlessly alarmed, and entertained hopes of being allowed to return to our own homes.’

  It was a vain hope for preparations for a state of siege were already in place. Trenches had been dug in the immediate vicinity of the Residency, gun emplacements constructed, provisions stockpiled and ammunition suitably stored in protected magazines. Civilians were enrolled as armed militia and trained by NCOs from the 32nd. When these men were first brought together at the commencement of the siege, the chances of making them act in an efficient body was, wrote Captain Anderson, ‘a hopeless task. There were men of all ages, sizes and figures … but had it not been for our volunteers, we should never have been able to garrison the place.’

  That such measures had been taken none too soon was confirmed by a trusted sepoy, who confided to Captain Thomas Wilson of the 71st NI that the firing of the 9.00 pm gun on the last Saturday in May was to be the signal for the sepoys to burn their huts and murder their British officers. When that day dawned and the evening gun eventually sounded, Lawrence was at dinner with friends, and mindful of the sepoy’s warning the diners around his table waited in expectation. The silence which followed the single report was broken by the voice of the Chief Commissioner. ‘Wilson, it would seem that your friends are not punctual.’ But before he or anyone else could reply, there arose a confused babble of voices intermixed with musket shots. All thoughts of dinner were cast aside and from the Commissioner’s verandah his guests were alarmed to see that the customary velvet blackness of the night sky had been diminished by a lurid blood-red glare. Fortunately, the sepoys were too busily engaged in burning and looting the officers’ bungalows to approach the Residency or the diners in Sir Henry’s bungalow.

  ‘At the Residency, we were all very anxious; all that we could see were bright flames rising up from the cantonments,’ wrote Captain Anderson, ‘and every now and then we heard the report of a gun, followed by a rather sharp musket fire.’

  ‘The sight of the burning bungalows was awful,’ echoed Mrs Case, ‘and we could do nothing but watch the flames with beating hearts, and listen tremblingly to the booming of the cannon.’

  Along the road halfway between
the Residency and the city, Mr Rees, who had come to Lucknow on business, challenged the approach of a horseman from the vantage point of a terraced roof.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, conscious of the uproar from the native lines.

  ‘A friend,’ came the answer. ‘I carry a message to the Residency’.

  ‘What news then?’

  ‘Good news,’ called the stranger.

  ‘Well, what good news?’

  ‘The bungalows are being burnt and the Europeans are everywhere being shot down.’ With that the shadowy figure galloped off into the darkness, leaving an astonished Rees to speed his departure with a musket shot.

  The next morning Sir Henry Lawrence rode out with 300 men of the 32nd and four guns towards the race course where the mutinous 71st were bivouacked at Mudkipur. A few rounds from his artillery were enough to disperse their camp and the sepoys were joined in their flight by most of the 7th Cavalry. In a pursuit of 10 miles, sixty prisoners were taken, and it was afterwards discovered that the entire native cavalry and almost the whole of the native Irregular troops had gone over to the mutineers.

  By that afternoon, it was clear that the insurrection had been welcomed by the civilian populace when thousands of Muslims left the mosques to parade through the streets of Lucknow with banners proclaiming their faith, whilst the budmash of the city swarmed through the bazaar looting and ransacking, attacking Europeans and forcing merchants to close down their businesses.