Sahib (37 page)

I believe I am entitled to the
Batta
for the fall of Lucknow – 38 Rupees – £3 2s od – and six months’ country
Batta
making altogether about £8 os od … If I receive this in any quantity altogether I intend sending most of it home. Unfortunately our officers dare not trust us with too much at once and will perhaps only give us £1 or 10s at once. Then there is the prize money for the fall and capture of Lucknow – I hear some of the men mention fabulous sums we are likely to get. Some say £30 per man! But I fear we shall never get 30s.
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He was right to be pessimistic. Sergeant Forbes-Mitchell wondered what had happened to ‘the plunder accumulated by the prize-agents’ at Lucknow, over £1 million in all. However:

Each private soldier who served throughout the relief and capture of Lucknow got prize-money to the value of Rs 17 8; but the thirty lakhs of treasure which were found in the well at Bithoor, leaving the plunder of the Nana Sahib’s palace out of the calculation, much more than covered that amount. Yet I could myself name over a dozen men who served throughout every engagement, two of whom gained the Victoria Cross, who
have died in the almshouse of their native parishes, and several in the almshouse of the Calcutta District Charitable Society.
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George Elers complained bitterly that the prize money for Seringapatam (1799) reached him only in 1807, ‘without one shilling interest, which was our due’. As a lieutenant he received £430, a captain got £800, a major £2,000, a lieutenant colonel £4,000, a major general £12,000, and the happy Commander in Chief the customary one-eighth of the whole sum captured. Major General Sir David Baird was disgusted with his £12,000, having told Elers that he expected ‘at the very least £100,000’. Elers explained that:

The wealth captured was enormous, and consisted of all sorts of property from every Court in Europe. There was splendid china from the King of France, clocks, watches, shawls of immense value, trinkets, jewellery from all nations, pearls, rubies, diamonds and emeralds and every other precious stone made up into ornaments – even solid wedges and bars of pure gold. A soldier offered me
one
for a bottle of brandy. Many of the officers received part of their prize-money in jewels at a fixed valuation. I saw an emerald in its rough and uncut state valued at £200. Many of our soldiers acquired by plunder what would have made them independent for life if properly managed. I heard that one of them soon after the storm staggered under as many pagodas as he could carry – to the amount, it was said, of £10,000.
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One soldier of HM’s 74th Foot found two of Tipu’s armlets, studded with diamonds ‘each as large as a full-grown Windsor bean’. He removed the stones and sold them to a surgeon, Dr Pulteney Mein, for rupees 1,500. When officers were urged to give up any loot for the general good, Mein retained the diamonds, kept them in a muslin handkerchief round his neck, and eventually got an annuity of £2,000 for them. He passed on £200 a year to the soldier, ‘which the poor man did not live long to enjoy’.
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When John Shipp wandered round the fort at Huttras after its capture he:

found the prize agent hard at work trying to keep our lads from picking and stealing, but if there had been a thousand
of them, all as lynx-eyed as could be, it would have been just as hopeless. I have heard of a private in the Company’s foot artillery, who got away with five hundred gold
mohurs,
worth £1,000 … Indeed, considering the dreadful shrinkage which prize money undergoes, and the length of time that goes by before the little that is left is paid out, it is no wonder that the men help themselves if they can.
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In short, large amounts of valuable items simply vanished before they ever reached the prize agents. When the British took the fort of Rheygur in 1818 they were chagrined to discover that much of the money it had apparently contained had been spirited away. A legal action, which dragged on until 1831, established that much of the cash had been carried off, on orders, by members of the surrendered garrison:

Bhumboo Bin Gunga Sindee deposed that he was in Rhyegur during the siege and surrender; Gamanging, a Jemadar, gave him three bags containing money, which he tied up in his cummerbund, and took them to his house in Champee, twelve miles from Rheygur; he kept them for fifteen days, when a sahib of the Company heard of it, and took him and the bags to the Kutchery at Gorgaum.
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Some of the loot remained in the hands of the men who had ‘found’ it, at least for a time, but much was passed straight on to officers, who generally bought it cheaply and did not declare it to the prize agents. William Russell saw this happen when he was in the Kaiserbagh at Lucknow just after its capture:

The shadow of a man fell across the court from a gateway; a bayonet was advanced cautiously, raised evidently to the level of the eye, then came the Enfield, and finally the head of a British soldier. ‘None here but friends,’ shouted he.

‘Come along, Bill. There’s only some offsers, and here’s a lot of places no one has bin to!’

Enter three of four banditti of HM’s—Regiment. Faces black with powder, cross belts speckled with blood, coats stuffed out with all sorts of valuables. And now commenced the work of plunder under our very eyes. The first door resisted every sort of violence till the rifle-muzzle was placed to the
lock, which was sent flying by the discharge of the piece. The men rushed in with a shout, and soon they came out with iron caskets of jewels, iron boxes and safes, and wooden boxes full of arms crusted with gold and precious stones. One fellow, having burst open a leaden-looking lid, which was in reality of solid silver, drew out an armlet of emeralds, and diamonds, and pearls, so large, that I really believed they were not real stones, and that they formed part of a chandelier chain.

‘What will your honour give me for these?’ said he. ‘I’ll take a hundred rupees on chance!’

Oh! wretched fate. I had not a penny in my pocket, nor had any of us. No one has in India. His servant keeps his money. My Simon was far away, in the quiet camp … 

‘I will give you a hundred rupees; but it is right to tell you if the stones are real they are worth a great deal more.’

‘Bedad, I won’t grudge them to your honour, and you’re welcome to them for a hundred rupees. Here, take them!’

‘Well then, you must come to me at the Head Quarters camp tonight, or give me your name and company and I’ll send the money to you.’

‘Oh! Faith, your honour, how do where I’ll be this blessed night? It’s may be dead I’d be, wid a bullet in me body. I’ll take two gold mores’ (mohurs at 32s each) and a bottle of rum on the spot. But shure, it’s not safe to have any but ready money transactions these times.’

The man gave them each a small jewel ‘as a little keepsake’, but left with the necklace. All around the scene of plunder was ‘indescribable’. Yet when, the following month, the formal sale of property was held under the supervision of the prize agents, Russell ‘saw nothing of any value, and it struck me that the things that were sold realized most ridiculously large prices’.
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Things had been rather better organised in Delhi. There, reported Mrs Muter:

agents who had been elected before the capture were diligently employed gathering the booty, but the greater portion was lost through the ignorance of its whereabouts … 

For a short period it became a most exciting pursuit, and my husband was actively and successfully engaged. After an
early breakfast, he would start, with a troop of coolies, armed picks, crowbars and measuring lines. A house said to contain treasure would be allotted for the day’s proceedings, and the business would commence by a careful survey of the premises … By a careful measurement of the roofs above and the walls below, any concealed space could be detected. Then the walls were broken through, and if there was a secret room or a built up niche or recess it would be discovered, and some large prizes rewarded their search.

On one occasion I had asked a few friends to lunch, expecting Colonel Muter home, when a guest informed me that there was no chance of his return as a large treasure he could not leave had been found. It was late when he came back with thirteen wagons loaded with spoil, and, among other valuables, eighty thousand pounds … 

We heard rumours from time to time that some of the searchers amongst those no one would have suspected of the crime, had ‘annexed’ to themselves articles of value.
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Edward Vibart was amazed by his own restraint. At Delhi he and his men ‘found some thirteen or fourteen wooden boxes filled with all kinds of gold and silver articles, coins and precious stones of more or less value, and took them to the prize agent’. This worthy, perhaps nonplussed by Vibart’s honesty, allowed him to take a handful of jewels which he subsequently had set in gold ‘as presents to my relations’. It remained ‘a matter of regret to me that I did not take advantage of such an excellent opportunity to select something of greater value’.
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Another of those who indulged in some annexation, this time at Lucknow, was Captain Charles Germon, whose wife Maria proudly recorded that: ‘Dear Charlie came home quite lame … He brought me some beautiful china and a splendid punch bowl, all his own looting.’
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It is evident that, while looting had always been common in Indian warfare, British attitudes during the Mutiny encouraged it on an unprecedented scale. The long legal dispute that followed the seizure of prizes by the Army of the Deccan in 1817–18 showed that courts were then properly anxious to differentiate between the enemy’s public property (which could legitimately be seized), and the private property of enemy combatants (which could not). There
was no such niceness during the Mutiny. And although, as we saw at Seringapatam, soldiers had sold loot to their officers well before the Mutiny, there were repeated attempts to reduce looting, and at least some officers took their responsibility for prizes seriously.

Ensign Alfred Bassano, of HM’s 32nd Foot, was at Multan in 1849 during and after its capture:

Three sections of my company were detailed to occupy Mulraj’s house. Here we kicked up the devil’s delight. Wine was there in abundance. But we spilt most of it to prevent the men from getting drunk. We also rummaged about, finding boxes full of gold and silver coins, strings of pearls and bars of gold said to be worth fifty pounds each. Major Wheeler calculated that we had at least fifty thousand pounds-worth of gold! Officers in the fort fingered a little, including Brigadier Harvey, who was reported officially, but none of our officers cribbed anything of real value except a few curious gold coins of which we made no secret. We had too great a regard for our characters and commissions to be tempted into roguery. But the Governor General has, however, decided that Multan is to be looted for the benefit of the troops. So I look forward to some prize money.
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Other soldiers in his regiment were, however, not as scrupulous. Private Robert Waterfield recalled that:

one man, a Nottingham chap, who was loaded with gold from head to foot – how to escape the prize agents he hardly knew … acting on the impulse of the moment he ran with his head full butt against the corner of a house, which made a severe cut in his head. The blood ran all over his face, and he reported himself as having received a severe injury from accident. A
dhooly
was brought, and he was conveyed out of the fort, a few thousand pounds richer than he went in.

Waterfield rose from bed to see his company march into camp: ‘Some of them could scarcely walk, for their boots were crammed with gold
mohurs.’
Waterfield’s brother, a corporal in the same company, was on quarter-guard that night, so had no chance to steal anything himself, but the lads on guard were all given a cut by their
comrades: ‘My brother had a great deal given to him, for he presented me with 200 Rupees … the equivalent to £20 British.’
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Sergeant John Pearman had mixed fortunes after the battle of Gujrat in 1849. He went into town with half a dozen troopers. They ‘came across an old money changer and made him tell us where he had put his money, but he would not say, until we showed him our pistols, when he gave us a bag of gold, about one quart, with silver’. An officer at once appeared and told them to take the bag to the prize depot, but ‘we walked off and left him to do what he liked with it … He could not tell what regiment we belonged to as we were in white shirts and drawers and pugerie caps.’ The following day he stole a fine Arab horse, although its groom begged him ‘Nay, nay sahib, nay
puckeroe
[steal].’ He sold it to an officer for two flasks of grog and 100 rupees, and immediately converted the cash into drink.

Even better luck beckoned when he was riding out on reconnaissance with Private Johnny Grady, and they came across a two-bullock hackery with a chest of rupees aboard. Both men filled their saddle holsters with gold coins and blew up the rest. He maintained that this was

the only way to get prize money, for the Company only gave us six months
batta:
£3 16s od in all. We made what we could and did very well, that is if we had not spent it in a very foolish way.

He thought that HM’s 10th Foot had done best of all, although Sergeant Williams had been given a hundred lashes and reduced to the ranks for stealing a valuable sword, its gold hilt encrusted with diamonds. Williams had passed the sword on to a private, who tossed it down a well to avoid detection: it is probably still there.
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Garnet Wolseley had strong views about looting. ‘Throughout my soldiering career I have never been a looter,’ he declared.

Not from any squeamish notions as to the iniquity of the game, for I believe that, as a rule, to the victor should belong the spoils of war, but in the interests of order and discipline. It is destruction to all that is best in the military feeling of the British army for the officer to pillage alongside the soldier, and possibly to dispute with him the ownership of some valuable
prize … I have no hesitation in saying that the loot secured by the rank and file of our army in Lucknow at that time was very injurious to its military efficient and affected its discipline for a considerable time afterwards.
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