Sahib (33 page)

T. A. Heathcote’s careful analysis of officers of the Bengal army over the period 1820–34 shows that:

They were predominantly drawn from the ranks of the British middle class, and some were from working-class families. A few were from titled families, but these were either younger sons who had to make their own way in the world, or from the nobility and landed gentry of Ireland, which was much less
affluent than that of England. Out of 2,000 officers, one was the son of a marquis, four were sons of earls, one the son of a viscount, six sons of barons, and sixty-six sons of baronets. Only one officer succeeded to a peerage, the second son of the Earl of Carnwath. Six officers inherited baronetcies, but only three were eldest sons. On the other hand, a large number of officer’s mothers, and rather fewer of their wives, were the daughters of titled families.
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Many officers came from military and naval families, and almost as many were in the Church, for it was no easy matter for the Reverend Quiverfull, himself dependent on the patron of his living, to find gentlemanly occupations for his sons. At the other social extreme, a number of officers had tradesmen for their fathers, including three hairdressers, two hatters, a grocer, a saddler, an upholsterer, four drapers, four booksellers and a Nottingham hosier who obtained Bengal cadetships for two of his boys.

However, the contrast with officers of the Queen’s army was not as stark as was once thought. Across the period perhaps a quarter of British officers came from the nobility and gentry, with what one officer called ‘private gentlemen without the advantage of birth or friends’, making up most of the remainder. It was not, then, the case of the Queen’s service being full of noblemen’s sons and the Company’s of tradesmen’s, more of a very broad spectrum with the former tending to congregate at one end and the latter at the other, but with some overlap: one of Havelock’s boys was in the Company’s service, and another then a lieutenant in HM’s 10th Foot, won the VC during the Mutiny.

When HM’s 32nd Foot embarked for India in May 1846, its officers included three sons of landowners, eight of officers or former officers, and fourteen of a variety of middle-class occupations, including sons of a bishop, two clergymen, an Indian judge, and an East India Company civil servant, a colonial administrator, a Canadian businessman, a City merchant, a West India merchant and a bank manager. When the regiment fought at Lucknow it included three officers who had risen from the ranks, its adjutant, paymaster, and a Company commander, Captain Bernard McCabe, commissioned for gallantry at Sobraon, where he had planted a colour of HM’s 31st
on the Sikh rampart. The abiding difference was that most of the officers of HM’s 32nd could have afforded to buy their first commissions, and most of those in the Company’s service could not. When we see just how important money was to the Company’s officers we should not be in the least surprised: most of them would not have entered that service had they had sufficient money in the first place.

Until 1798 officers of the Company’s army were commissioned without the need for any formal training. That same year ten East India cadetships were created at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, where gunner and sapper officers were trained for the royal service. Although the number was later increased it could not satisfy demand, and in 1809 the Company formed its own military seminary at Addiscombe. The syllabus of its two-year course closely followed that of the Royal Military Academy, and although it was intended primarily for engineer and artillery cadets, some of its graduates went to the infantry, though there was no more an obligation for them to do so than there was for young men destined for the royal infantry and cavalry to attend the Royal Military College, established at Sandhurst in 1796. There were frequent fights in the town, and cadets often got themselves into trouble in which drink, money and women were usually involved. In 1833, John Low, having helped his scapegrace nephew Alec out of ‘some little debt’, heard that Alec’s brother was in worse trouble: ‘Robert Deas was expelled from Addiscombe at the beginning of the Christmas vacation, for repeated acts of drunkenness & it was only two days ago that we heard that the Directors had confirmed the sentence.’
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There was briefly a military college at Barasat in Bengal where cadets were taught drill, tactics and Hindustani, but such was its endemic indiscipline that it only survived from 1804–11. This did not much improve the behaviour of the newly commissioned. The depot at Chinsurah was home to most ensigns arriving in Bengal: it was a ‘dull, dreary, mildewy-looking place, without any possible entertainment except snipe shooting in the neighbouring rice-fields, where snakes abounded and bad fever was to be easily caught’. There was a church twenty yards from the verandah in front of the officers’
quarters, its inviting clock used so often for unofficial pistol practice that it was stopped for ever at 11.15.
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Some cadets were commissioned before they reached India, but others had to wait until they arrived there, when they might, like Albert Hervey, receive a commission within a matter of days or, like the luckless Fulwood Smeardon, have to wait some time. When the Company’s army was expanding at a pace, an ensign’s commission and first promotion could follow quickly: Richard Purvis was an ensign on 18 August 1804 and a lieutenant on 21 September the same year. Thereafter promotion was strictly by regimental seniority, which meant that it tended to be slower than in the British army. There was an obsessive interest in seniority: Lieutenant George Rybot described one of his brother officers as ‘a walking army list’, and another subaltern carried an army list throughout the Second Sikh War ‘to scratch out the men as they are knocked over’.
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One consequence of promotion by seniority was that the Company’s officers tended to be older than those in HM’s service. In 1855 the average age of serving majors in the Company’s armies was forty-nine, while for HM’s regiments in India it was forty-two. This slow promotion meant that colonels might be in their sixties and generals in their seventies, giving a measure of support to the frequent assertions of Queen’s officers that the Company’s senior officers were simply too old.

It was, however, possible for the enterprising to gain accelerated promotion by leaving their parent regiments and joining irregular units. Charles MacGregor opted to serve in Hodson’s Horse after his own regiment mutinied, and, although he was not yet eighteen and had only a year’s service, he was soon able to report:

I am getting on in my promotion. I am now eighth lieutenant – in a month or two I should be seventh. If my luck keeps up, I shall, at this rate, be a captain in about four years more … I shall only be twenty-two, and having got my Company, I should be eligible for brevet promotions, CB-ships, and all kinds of things.
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The less swashbuckling might club together in a ‘subscription system’ to induce their seniors to retire early. Although the practice was
officially illegal, the authorities connived as it was one way of meeting the incessant torrent of demands for promotion. In 1836 Albert Hervey wrote:

At the present rate, many of us can never expect to be majors under thirty-five years service, and then what shall we be fit for? Nothing but the invalid or pension establishment! If our commanding officers of regiments were more effective, the army would be also; but at present the class of men in general at the heads of divisions, brigades and regiments are old and worn out, while the young and effective are becoming non-effective, from slowness of promotion. As we now stand there is little or no hope whatever except by purchasing out our seniors from our own resources. There is scarcely a regiment but what is made to suffer very heavy stoppages in liquidation of loans from houses of agency, or the famous Agra bank, of enormous sums borrowed to buy out some worn-out major or disgusted captain; and yet there is no alternative but to purchase out those above us. We require reform, and there is no mistake on the subject.
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The best account of the way the subscription system worked is to be found in the papers of Captain Willoughby Brassey, 2nd Bombay European Light Infantry, in the National Army Museum. He offered to retire from the service on receipt of the sum of 11,000 rupees from his juniors, expecting the senior lieutenant to stump up 1,800 rupees to become a captain, while other officers contributed according to an excruciatingly complex sliding scale which reflected the number of months of promotion gained. This sort of scheme was always vulnerable to impecunious youngsters, who would profit whether they subscribed or not, refusing to pay, when ‘the difference, as share calculated, must be charged to all subscribers to the step [up in rank] or paid out of any fund, as may hereafter be agreed upon’.
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When the Company’s army was transferred to the Crown after the Mutiny there was widespread disaffection amongst its soldiers, many of whom did not agree that the engagement they had undertaken with the one could be extended to the other without payment of a bounty. This was the so-called ‘White Mutiny’ so well described
by the historian Peter Stanley, which saw outbreaks of indiscipline across most ex-Company regiments and led to the execution of Private William Johnson, shot by firing squad at Dinapore on 12 November 1860, for disobeying a lawful command. Many men who had served with distinction in the Company’s Europeans left the service disgruntled, and many of those who soldiered on in the British army found that its ways were not their own: a sergeant narrowly escaped prosecution for saying Jack, will you loop up that tent?’ rather than ‘Jones, loop up the tent.’
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The Company’s artillery and engineers became part of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers; infantry regiments were embodied in the British line, and became battalions of county regiments in 1881; and the three recently raised regiments of Bengal European cavalry were translated into the 19th, 20th and 21st Hussars.
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When Private Frank Richards arrived in India in 1903 there were still a number of old Company soldiers about, much bemedalled, full of war stories and with an apparently limitless thirst. One assured him that ‘the soldiers under the old John Company before the Mutiny were far better off than what we were’. Taken, not unwillingly, to the canteen, he announced:

Sonny, soldiers of the old John Company drank rum and not shark’s p—s. In my old days it was a common sight by stop-tap to see practically every man in the Canteen as drunk as rolling f—s: yet if they had not been put in clink meanwhile they would all wake up in the morning happy as larks.
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All officers now bore the Queen’s commission: Addiscombe was closed down, and cadets who sought to join the Indian army trained alongside their British army peers at Sandhurst.
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The Secretary of State for India inherited the Company’s patronage, and from 1862 had the right to nominate twenty ‘Queen’s India Cadets’, the sons of worthy Indian officers and officials, to Sandhurst. Regimental promotion was ended by the formation of the Indian Staff Corps, an officers’ pool for each presidency, from which officers were selected to fill regimental, staff and political posts. Timed promotion now took an Indian army officer to captain after eleven years’ commissioned service, major after twenty, lieutenant colonel after twenty-six and
colonel after thirty-one years. Pay depended not simply on rank, but on appointment too, so that a lieutenant colonel might pick up 827 rupees a month as the pay of his rank and another 600 rupees as commanding officer of an infantry battalion. The three staff corps became one in 1891, and were abolished altogether by Lord Kitchener in 1903: thereafter officers were simply ‘Officers of the Indian Army’.

Although this is not a history of the Indian army, it would be incomplete and unjust without some reference to those locally recruited units which, start to finish, constituted the bulk of British military forces in India, and without whose courage and devotion none of this story could be told. The bulk of Indian regiments were infantry: in 1857 there were seventy-four in Bengal, fifty-two in Madras and twenty-nine in Bombay, as well as several irregular battalions. Until the Mutiny, regular infantry battalions had ten companies, each containing two British officers. After it there were eight companies in each battalion, with six British officers at battalion headquarters and one commanding each of the battalion’s two four-company ‘wings’. In the 1890s the Indian army led the way into the double-company organisation (a good decade earlier than the British) with four companies, each with a British company commander and one other British officer.

At the time of the Mutiny the Bengal army had ten regiments of regular light cavalry, with eight in Madras and three in Bombay. These regiments had some twenty-four British officers and 400 men, with each troop commanded by a British captain assisted by one other British officer. In addition, there were eighteen separate regiments of irregular cavalry in Bengal and seven in Bombay. The Madras army’s active campaigning had largely come to an end with the defeat of Tipu in 1799 and it raised no irregular horse of its own, although it could rely on the four regiments of cavalry in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s Contingent, a separate British-officered little army. Irregular regiments had only four British officers – commandant, second-in-command, adjutant and surgeon.

Irregular regiments were organised on what was called the
silladar
principle. Each trooper was paid more than his comrade in a regular regiment, but had to supply his own horse and equipment. In practice the regiments themselves furnished a recruit with horse and equipment of regulation pattern, for which he paid a sum called the
assami.
When he left the service he could keep his horse or have his
assami
refunded: if he deserted or was dishonourably discharged the money was forfeited. Monthly deductions were made from his pay to help him meet the cost of a new mount when the need arose. Horses which died or were killed on active service were replaced using a regimental fund to which all troopers subscribed. After the Mutiny the reorganised Indian cavalry followed the irregular pattern, and by 1903 all but three of the thirty-nine regiments were
silladar.
They consisted of a headquarters with a commanding officer and adjutant, and three squadrons (four from 1885) each with two British officers. The
silladar
system broke down during the First World War, and disappeared after it.