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By Root 1147 0

part of the safe-passage offer were gathered together and forced into a nearby bibighar, the flat-roofed single-storey building built to house the native mistress of an English officer. Here, with very little food and in unspeakable conditions, the relatively healthy attempted to nurse the many sick and wounded, tormented by the July heat and jeered at by their gaolers. Finally, after almost two weeks of imprisonment, a group of mutineers approached the building, forced the muzzles of their muskets through the shutters and opened fire. This was too inefficient to act as a final solution, so, late in the afternoon of Wednesday, 15 July, five men, two of them butchers in their aprons, opened the doors of the building and went to work. One of them emerged twice from the building to get a new sword, because he had broken the blade. Within an hour, the screams had come to an end. Wives, daughters and more than a hundred children had been dismembered. The next morning, as a crowd of spectators looked on, a team of scavengers was sent into the building and, to their astonishment, discovered among the human remains a few women and children huddled against the wall, covered in the blood of the corpses among whom they had spent the night. Seeing the open door, two women ran outside and threw themselves down a well in the yard. The scavengers then threw the limbs, torsos and heads of the dead after them. The children who had survived the night were either thrown alive into the well after them, or decapitated.

The well was 50 feet deep and 9 feet across, but the rebels were afraid that not all the corpses would fit down the shaft. So they chopped some up and used the pieces to fill the gaps.

The next scene in what the historian Sir Charles Crosthwaite later called ‘the Epic of the Race’ took place at Lucknow, capital of the province of Oudh, some 50 miles away. Nineteenth-century European visitors had been astonished by the opulence of the city, adorned as it was with columns and gilded domes, gardens and fountains. ‘Not Rome, not Athens, not Constantinople: not any city I have ever seen appears to me so striking and so beautiful as this,’ an awestruck foreign correspondent wrote of the place at the time; ‘the more I gaze, the more its beauties grow on me.’ This luxury long predated the arrival of the East India Company, but, unsurprisingly, its traders liked what they saw. At first they had treated the province as a buffer state against the Mughal Empire, to protect Bengal. But, as the Company’s confidence grew, they began to assume control, through the usual arrangements of installing local residents (representatives) and engineering the succession of pliant nawabs. (One of these, a visitor reported, ‘would surprise visitors by appearing dressed as a British admiral or as a clergyman of the Church of England’. The nawab’s main object of affection was an English drayhorse, which he fed so extravagantly that the wretched animal could hardly move.) By the mid-1850s the province of Oudh – often called ‘the granary of India’ – provided the British with a steady income, a little of which was used to keep the nawabs sweet. The British community maintained retinues of servants, played cricket and croquet, worshipped their God, held horse-races, entertained each other to dinner, staged amateur theatricals and kept bands which had been taught European tunes.

When the revolt struck Lucknow, the party ended. The following extracts are taken from different days in the 1857 diary kept by an English clergyman’s wife:

It is impossible to describe the horror of the last few days. Captain and Mrs Macdonald and their children were murdered, the poor babies snatched out of their parents’ arms and cut to pieces before their eyes …

I walked round our fortifications last night with James; they are wonderfully strong, and the engineers say we can hold out against any number as long as provisions last …

Poor Miss Palmer’s leg was shot off this afternoon …

Very heavy firing all day: ten Europeans wounded: five buried this evening …

Poor Mr Polehampton