A History of Britain, Volume 3 (43 page)

On 30 June an attempted counter-attack under Sir Henry’s command was ambushed disastrously at Chinhat by rebel troops led by, among others, the fighting Maulvi, Ahmadullah Shah, who, although wounded in the foot, pursued the retreating British. When the badly beaten force returned under heavy fire to the Residency, it was obvious that the ensuing siege was to be grim and lengthy, for it was at least two weeks before relief could be expected. In the event, it took 87 days to arrive. Ahmadullah’s shelling of the old Machi Bhawan fort to the west of the Residency had forced its evacuation: 118 British troops had been killed; 54 wounded had been brought back to the Residency and lay on litters, given laudanum or alcohol to dull their senses while shattered limbs were amputated. Bandages ran out and had to be improvised from torn clothing. Sir Henry himself died of a shell wound received while inside his quarters.

By 2 July the rebels were in control of the old city. Ahmadullah Shah, the holy prophet, had set up his own headquarters at the bungalow of a
munshi
(Brahmin teacher), was hugely popular with the poor and was challenging the authority of the Begum of Awadh, Hazrat Mahal, who wanted to make her young son the new nawab, accountable only to Bahadur Shah in Delhi. The city itself was close to anarchy. A nervous member of the old upper-class Lucknow elite described how the streets were run by armed gangs:

They went round to the doors of the wealthy and gave threats and exacted money … they took halwa and puri and sweets from the shops; they reviled all sorts of people. They took gunpowder and other explosives from the firework makers and paid them inadequately. There was a pile of hay in the garden of the school Kothi to which they set fire and thus produced bonfires which lit the city. They brought Mir Baqar Ali who lived at Pakka Pul and cut him into pieces at the gate of the Bara Imambara with the sword. No-one can say why they committed that sacrilege … they moved about with naked swords in their hands.

From the Residency look-outs, golden Lucknow seemed to be mantled in smoke, din and terror. Conditions inside were rapidly deteriorating. Along with a crowd of the women, Katherine and Bobby were living in the old women’s quarter, the Begum Kothi. The summer heat was almost
unendurable,
and its punctuation by torrential rain made things even worse. The stench from the overflowing latrines triggered vomiting. With hay and water at a premium, bullocks and cavalry horses staggered around the compound mad with thirst before dropping dead. So many rotting carcasses piled up that men had to be detailed to wrench the remnants from the carrion crows and kites and bury them – not least because they were a breeding ground for millions of huge flies. As soon as any food, even the ‘black greasy dal’ (lentils) that so turned Katherine Bartrum’s stomach, was set out it was instantly covered by a seething, buzzing mass. In the earlier stages of the siege, Deprat, a French merchant, had given away his supplies of canned, truffled sausages. The lucky ones at Gubbins’s house got Sauternes and even champagne as well as tinned salmon, carrots and rice pudding. But that all disappeared. Soon the champagne was reserved for those about to undergo amputations, a whole bottle drunk in a few gulps by the unfortunate patient. Desperate for a smoke, men pawned or traded pieces of clothing or their gold watches for a cigar, and the auctions of clothing and possessions that had belonged to the dead were the scene of hot bidding. Pet dogs were shot to save food.

After a month of this, the mask of Victorian dignity cracked open. The death rate from wounds, cholera, dysenteric diseases and smallpox rose to 10 a day. Drunkenness, usually from bottled beer, was common. There were duels and suicides, and a lot of screaming. No one cared any more what they looked like. Boils and carbuncles appeared on many faces. To the shock of some of the more demure, wives and mothers abandoned their corsets; let their hair down; and went around in whatever was loose enough and cool enough to stop them becoming unhinged by the heat and terror. Paradoxically, enduring months of these conditions inured the inmates to the incoming shells and bullets. A direct hit, after all, was in the hands of God. A slow death from one of the infectious diseases seemed worse. L. E. Rees, a British merchant from Calcutta who had taken part in the defence of the compound, was probably not just bragging when he claimed that ‘Balls graze our very hair, and we continue the conversation without a remark; bullets race over our very hair and we never speak of them. Narrow escapes are so very common that even women and children cease to notice them.’ Much more frightening was the possibility that tunnels had been mined under the Residency and that in the dead of night they might find the compound alive with sepoys coming up from below. Mrs Clark, Katherine’s travelling companion, had given birth on the day of a sepoy attempt to break into the Residency, and now she and the baby were dying. When she asked Katherine, whose son Bobby was himself sick with cholera, to prepare her things as she was going on a long
journey,
they were dutifully laid out before she died, the baby following shortly afterwards and her elder child two weeks later.

It was late September before two relatively small relieving forces, one led by the new chief commissioner of Awadh, Sir James Outram, the other by Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, managed to join up and cut and shoot their way through to Lucknow. Havelock was coming via Kanpur, where there had been a terrible massacre of the entire British community. Nana Sahib, the Peshwa (ruler) of the Mahratta and the political and strategic leader of the uprising, along with his field commander Tantia (Daddy) Topi had given a promise of safe conduct to evacuate downriver the besieged British inside Kanpur, only to have them, mostly women and children, shot up and sliced to pieces once they were aboard the boats. Some 200 survivors were taken back to Kanpur, imprisoned and then in their turn killed, the bodies thrown into a well. After Havelock retook Kanpur, the officer left in charge of the town, the ferocious Colonel James Neill, ordered that any sepoys taken prisoner be executed – some of them blown from cannon – and had the well filled in and dedicated as a shrine to the first ‘martyrs’ of Albion. But the onward advance to Lucknow of Havelock’s troops right through the heart of sepoy-held territory cost them many casualties. One of them, as she learned, was Katherine Bartrum’s husband, the surgeon Robert, who had been shot through the head on the threshold of the Residency’s defences while going to help one of the wounded.

But the great rebellion had been contained. It could only grow or die away and it never succeeded in spreading beyond the heartland of Awadh, the northwest provinces and northern Rajasthan. Although this was itself a huge area – and took the British until the end of 1858 and in some cases well into 1860 to pacify completely – it was decisive for the fortunes of the empire that both eastern Bengal, notably Calcutta at one end and the recently conquered Punjab at the other, remained loyal. The relatively speedy recapture of Delhi in September 1857 was also crucial in persuading undecided peasants and townsmen to stay neutral. And there were some native soldiers who were actually eager to fight the rebels: not just the Gurkhas from Nepal but the Sikhs, who were delighted to return the punishment they had received at the hands of the Awadhi sepoys during the Sikh wars of 1845–6 and 1848–9. Despite the relatively good relations between Hindu and Muslim sepoys (carefully cultivated by Bahadur Shah), some traditional ethnic and regional feuds remained a much stronger force than any kind of embryonic anti-colonial pan-Indian solidarity.

Before he got to Kanpur, James Neill had undertaken a lightning march from Calcutta to pre-empt serious trouble at Benares. Neill’s savagery
in
burning villages and ordering mass executions of those suspected of collaborating with the rebels worked. The terrorized countryside around Benares remained quiet, and the holy city became the forward station for advances on Allahabad and Kanpur. If the telegraph had been the wrong kind of listening device to pick up early signals of discontent (listening to the mullahs, the native postmen and the gossips and fortunetellers in the markets would have been more to the point), the cables did now make a difference to containing the damage. Governor-General Canning was able to wire the home government about his critical manpower shortage quickly enough for Palmerston to divert a regiment intended for China (where of course it was going to punish the Ch’ing coastguards for insulting the flag) to the Indian theatre.

After the relief of Delhi in September, Bahadur Shah, a pathetic fugitive, was found together with his two sons and grandson by Major William Hodson, a cavalry officer, in the beautiful tomb of his ancestor Hummayyun, 16 miles from the centre. A very unlikely arch-villain, in his incarceration he quickly turned into a pitiable anachronism: stared at, photographed, ridiculed, certainly not forgiven for what had been done in his name.

The euphoria inside the Residency that greeted the arrival of Havelock and Outram was short-lived: the sepoy army closed in around them once more, making it apparent that this had been not so much a relief as a new stage of imprisonment. An attack on the Baillie Gate by the Maulvi came perilously close to success. In November a second relief attempt was made to break the siege, under Sir Colin Campbell, heralded by pipers playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming’; he managed to hold an exit route open long enough to evacuate the civilians. After six months of extreme privation the 400 surviving women, children and male civilians, including Katherine and Bobby Bartrum and 1000 sick and wounded soldiers, finally left the compound. Over the winter, however, fresh rebel troops mobilized by
taluqdars
closed in again. Ahmadullah led a series of attacks on the walled defences from December right through to the end of February. It was only when Campbell brought a huge army of 25,000 in March 1858 that the city was finally taken and what was left of the Residency liberated. On 15 June 1858, Ahmadullah Shah was killed in action, then beheaded; his ashes thrown in the river. Even when all the major cities in the Ganges valley had been restored to British rule rebel rajahs held out in their small but heavily armed forts; some of them were never, in fact, subdued. Hit-and-run raids were staged on isolated outposts by mounted partisans belonging to the irregular armies of Raja Beni Madho, who was rumoured to have died in November 1859 fighting the
Gurkhas
in Nepal along with the orchestrator of the Kanpur massacre, Nana Sahib. The already legendary Rani Lakshmi Bhai of Jhansi, said to have been surprised while resting her horses and drinking sherbet, was shot in the back as she was charging back into action, a sword in each hand, the reins of her pony held in her teeth. She died in a mango grove after giving her gold anklets and pearl necklace, taken from the Maharajah of Gwalior, to her soldiers.

Just before Katherine Bartrum was due to take ship back to England from Calcutta her son, Bobby, became seriously ill: nothing that a four-month sea voyage wouldn’t take care of, the doctors assured her. The day before she sailed, Bobby died on board the
Himalaya
. Katherine went home alone, remarried, had three more children and died of tuberculosis in 1866.

As the fighting petered out, the debate about how to treat the rebel provinces, and more generally India altogether, heated up. In Britain, the bloody dramas of Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow had already been relayed by reporters like William Howard Russell, but then sado-masochistically embellished to feed the publishers’ need for sensationalism. For some years it was generally believed that lily-white Victorian women, the ‘angels of Albion’, had been raped and sexually mutilated, although there was no evidence whatsoever of such abuse. The Royal Academy show in 1858 included a painting by Sir Joseph Noel Paton called
In Memoriam
, showing a group of the Lucknow heroines and babes in pallid, pink-eyed distress (but otherwise in remarkably good shape) with ‘maddened Sepoys hot for blood’ about to penetrate their refuge. Some of the critics thought the painting too indelicate for the public gaze; others believed it was a modern icon that merited a memorial chapel to itself. But in response to protest, Paton overpainted the dusky assailants with kilted Highlanders coming to the rescue.

Photographers, too, very rapidly got into the act. Robert and Harriet Tytler, both keen photographers, took pictures of some of the scenes around Lucknow with which they illustrated Harriet’s account. But the most commercially savvy photographic reporter was the Italian Felice Beato, who, even before it was physically safe, rushed to Delhi, where he took 60 pictures and then went on to Lucknow, where he followed Sir Colin Campbell’s assault on the city and took another 60 images – some of them among the most extraordinary albumen silver prints of the 1850s. The sites were chosen for their familiarity to the avid Mutiny-readers both in Calcutta and in Britain: the Kashmir Gate in Delhi; the well of the martyrs at Kanpur; the ruined room at Lucknow in which Sir Henry Lawrence had been fatally wounded; the massively pitted walls of the
Lucknow
Residency. Most shockingly of all, Beato took elaborate pains to construct a photograph of the courtyard of one of Lucknow’s fabled walled pleasure gardens, the Secundra Bagh, where 2000 rebels were slaughtered during Campbell’s first attack. To reconstruct the scene Beato disinterred bones to scatter them about the yard, although some seem to have been those of horses and bullocks rather than humans. All these places acted as the Via Dolorosa of the passion play of the Mutiny. Although enormous areas of Indian Lucknow, including many of its old pleasure gardens, palaces and mosques, were brutally razed so that oversized boulevards could be built (not least for easy access by troops), the half-destroyed remnant of the Residency was to be preserved for imperial posterity, the Union Jack flown (until midnight on 14 August 1947) over the shattered, blackened ruins.

All these images stoked the fires of retribution. At the Cambridge Union, Charles Trevelyan’s son, George Otto, heard an undergraduate orator brush away suggestions of clemency by proclaiming ‘when the rebellion has been crushed out from the Himalayas to the Comorin, when every gibbet is red with blood, when every bayonet creaks beneath its ghastly burden, when the ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags and flesh and shattered bone, then talk of mercy [may be heard]. This is not the time.’ He was roundly applauded by the undergraduates. The first wave of British troops, along with their generals, were prepared to satisfy this demand for revenge, blowing sepoys from cannon and giving no quarter. But given the intensity of the passions, the race hatred against the ‘damned niggers’ and the genuinely dreadful things that had actually befallen the British in Kanpur, Delhi and Lucknow, it is surprising that more were not dealt with so savagely and sadistically. Much of this was due to Canning’s own creditable determination to master the instinct for indiscriminate revenge. He was horrified, for example, when he learned that William Hodson, who commanded a troop of irregular Sikh horsemen, had murdered the two sons and the grandson of Bahadur Shah after they had surrendered to him. Although he suffered ridicule in both Calcutta and London as ‘Clemency Canning’ for ordering local officers to stop arbitrary and summary executions and the burning of villages, he believed this was the pragmatically, as well as morally, correct response. Throughout the trauma he had agonized behind walls of dispatch boxes on what had gone wrong; whether there was some point that might not have been reached, something that might have been attended to, that would have avoided the butchery. Once it had happened, his concern had been to contain the rebellion within the Ganges valley; and this had happened. Now he had no intention of jeopardizing the future
stability
of the empire by alienating all of India. When he was severe – declaring the whole of Awadh to be forfeited land, for instance – it was only so that he could promise
taluqdars
who made submission in a timely fashion that they would have their lands, titles and districts back again. Punishment was the prelude to reassurance and restoration. As it happened, he had two allies in Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, who wrote to him: ‘Lord Canning will easily believe how entirely the Queen shares
his
feelings of sorrow and indignation at the un-Christian spirit shown – alas! to a great extent here by the public towards Indians in general and to sepoys without discrimination!’