Henry Havelock

Henry Havelock relieved Lucknow, could not lift the siege, and died inside it eight days after the second column arrived. He was a Sunderland solicitor's son who read for the bar, took a commission instead, and spent thirty-four years in India as a junior officer because he had no money for promotion - he was a captain at forty and a colonel at sixty. He was also a Baptist of a conspicuous kind who preached to his own men and baptised them, and his teetotal company was known in the army as Havelock's Saints, half in mockery. The rising of 1857 gave him a field command at last. He marched a small column up from Allahabad in July, won a series of actions in extreme heat, and reached Kanpur two days after the killing of the European women and children at the Bibighar; what his troops did afterwards to prisoners was brutal and officially sanctioned. He fought Tantia Tope at Bithur, crossed the Ganges, and cut his way into the Lucknow residency in September with too few men to escort anyone out, so the relief became a second siege. He died there of dysentery on 24 November 1857. He was promoted major-general and made a baronet by telegraph in the last weeks of his life, and the news of the baronetcy reached England after he was dead, so it was converted to a pension for his widow. His son Henry Marshman Havelock won the Victoria Cross in the same campaign. Britain made him a national hero within months - the statue in Trafalgar Square went up in 1861 and there are Havelock streets across the former empire. Later assessments are harder, both on the reprisals at Kanpur and on the decision to enter Lucknow without the strength to evacuate it.

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