The Relief of Lucknow (1859)
By Tim Sullivan
August 2009
An engraving of the painting by Thomas Jones Barker (1815-82).
Find a copy of this painting in the National Portrait Gallery
http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw08481/The-Relief-ofLucknow-1857
My name is Tim Sullivan and I am one of the historians in the Education team at
Sovereign Hill.
In our Outdoor Museum at Sovereign Hill, we have some wonderfully evocative
pictures illustrating great events in the history of the British Empire.
Often these pictures are engravings or lithographs copied from great works of art
depicting these great events. They were often mass-produced because they were so
popular in the drawing rooms, parlours and public buildings of people around the
Empire—including the central Victorian goldfields—in the mid-19th century.
These pictures helped remind people of the achievement of the British people, of
their military successes, and the pre-eminence of British cultural life.
They are very useful in helping us understand what the people of the time were
interested in knowing, what they were commemorating and celebrating, and in
decorating their homes and workplaces.
They weren’t so different from us in doing that. The pictures, photographs and
paintings—the images of all kinds that we surround ourselves with—represent some
part of a story that is important to us. They are mementoes of previous experiences
lived or imagined, of people and events, and they are often beautiful to look at.
The lithograph I would like to talk about today is an engraving of a famous painting
by Thomas Jones Barker. It is called The Relief of Lucknow, and was produced by
Barker in 1859.
It is a scene from an important conflict in the history of the British Empire and India: a
conflict called the Indian Mutiny (it is sometimes called the Indian Rebellion) of 185758.
India in 1858 was a part of the British Empire. It was ruled by the British East India
Company, a trading enterprise which would compare with some of the global
companies we know of today. It was a hugely successful trading company that
acquired raw materials in India to feed manufacturing mills in England, which in turn
produced goods which were shipped around the world and even back to India.
The Company’s trade was so important to British industry that the Company ruled
India with the support of the British Government. The Company had its own Army
which was supported by some regular units of the British Army.
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They recognised that maintaining civil law and order was important for its business
success. Many Indian people were employed by the Company in administering its
affairs, and serving in its Army. Many more people depended for their livelihoods on
the Company’s business.
There was a lot of mutual interest in these arrangements, but many Indians saw the
Company’s rule for what it was—an occupation of their homeland and rule by a
foreign power. So the relationship was underpinned by a mutual convenience rather
than love.
The conflict that erupted so unexpectedly in 1857 was called a ‘mutiny’ at the time
because it began when Indian infantrymen, serving in the British East India
Company’s Army and based at a place called Meerut, refused to obey the orders of
their British officers because they believed the black powder cartridges they carried
as ammunition were greased with animal fats to keep them waterproof.
In order to open the cartridge to load their muskets, soldiers had to bite the end off
the cartridge with their teeth. In doing that, they would be consuming some of the
grease. This offended the religious principles of the Muslim soldiers who believed the
cartridges were coated with pig fat, and the Hindu soldiers who believed they were
covered in beef fat.
At Meerut on 10 May 1857, 85 Indian soldiers were convicted of mutiny and
sentenced to ten years in gaol with hard labour for refusing to undertake a musket
firing drill. Many of them had been loyal in Army service for many years.
The next day, soldiers and civilians broke into the gaol and freed the prisoners, and
killed many British East India Company soldiers and officials and British civilians.
The uprising spread through the Ganges Valley, and British residents fled to gather
together in safer areas, however many were killed—sometimes horribly. There were
many stories of treachery and ghastly massacres of British civilians and troops that
horrified the British public reading about these events.
In Lucknow, one of India’s most beautiful and historic cities, 1500 British and Indian
soldiers and the remaining British population of men, women and children gathered
in an old part of the town known as The Residency. On 4 July, The Residency was
besieged by approximately 10,000 rebel troops—a siege that would last until 25
September 1857 when a relief column of 3000 troops led by Major-General Sir Henry
Havelock and reinforced by troops under Lieutenant- General Sir James Outram,
broke through the besieging forces and entered The Residency.
But the relieving force had been so depleted by casualties from fighting and disease
that it was not fit enough to fight its way out. A second column of 25,000 troops
under the Commander-in-Chief in India, Sir Colin Campbell, relieved Lucknow’s
besieged garrison on 16 November 1857. The wounded and ill were withdrawn, the
fit soldiers joined Campbell’s force to crush the uprising, which was finally brought
under control in May 1858.
The scene that is the subject of this podcast shows the artist’s imaginative
reconstruction of that eagerly-awaited meeting between Havelock, Outram and
Campbell when the siege was relieved. Havelock did not live long afterwards: he
was so worn out by the effects of dysentery and exhaustion from the fighting march
to Lucknow that he died there on 23 November 1857.
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After the Rebellion or Mutiny, the rule of the British East India Company was ended
and replaced by British civil and military institutions. The Company’s Governor
General was replaced by a Viceroy with much greater powers and appointed by the
British Government to represent the monarch, Queen Victoria.
The British India Army was reformed so that British units were better equipped and
organised, and the Company’s Army was disbanded. Indian troops still served in the
British Army, and there was more opportunity for Indian non-commissioned officers
to lead Indian troops in those units.
The many incidents of courage and resistance by British civilian and military
personnel, as well as the victorious moments in the battles of the Mutiny were
commemorated in popular art and public statues of the new heroes. It seemed like
British power and determination had succeeded again. But the Indian Mutiny may
well have been the beginning of the end of British rule in India which achieved its
independence in 1947.
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The Intellect and Valour of Britain (1864)
An engraving of the painting by Thomas Jones Barker (1815-82).
This scene is the artist’s imagining of a gathering of the most significant people in
Britain’s political, military, technological and cultural life. It is a mid-19th century
‘dream team’ celebrating Britain’s contribution to the civilisation of the world.
The group at the far left under the picture of a young Queen Victoria includes British
heroes from the wars on the Northwest Frontier of India in the 1840s:
Sir John Lawrence, an enlightened administrator in the region and later a
Viceroy of India;
his brother, Sir Henry Lawrence who was killed in the Siege of Lucknow
during the Indian Mutiny in 1857;
Sir Henry Havelock who led the relief of Lucknow in 1858; and
Captain Sir William Peel who won the Victoria Cross in the Crimean War and
died at Cawnpore from wounds received during the Indian Mutiny in 1858.
Next to them, a group of distinguished parliamentarians, reformers and writers,
including
Benjamin Disraeli, a favourite of Queen Victoria’s and Prime Minister in 1868
and from 1874-80);
the famous historian of Britain, Lord Macaulay;
Earl Derby, three times Prime Minister (1852, 1858-59 and 1866-68); and
Lords Brougham, Dundonald, Lyndhurst, Stanley and Lytton
Towards the centre, a group comprising
Lord John Russell, Prime Minister from 1846-51 and 1865-66;
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the great Liberal, William Gladstone, four times Prime Minster from 1868-74,
1880-85, 1886 and 1892-94;
Viscount Palmerston, Prime Minister from 1855-8 and 1859-65; and
Richard Cobden, the great advocate of free trade and critic of the unpopular
Opium Wars in China and the Crimean War.
Slightly to the right of centre a group including:
Charles Dickens, the immensely popular novelist, essayist and writer—creator
of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Great
Expectations;
the Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, famous for the poem The Charge of the
Light Brigade and his romantic works on the legend of King Arthur; and
the artist Daniel Maclise
And between them, some of the leading scientists of the day:
Michael Faraday, who made great discoveries for the application of magnetic
fields;
Richard Owen, inventor of the term ‘dinosaur’, a giant in the field of
palaeontology and evolution and a fierce opponent of Darwin’s revolutionary
theory of natural selection (published in On the Origin of Species, 1859);
The physicist, Sir David Brewster, explaining his invention of the lenticular
stereoscope; and the geologist Sir Roderick Murchison.
On the far right of the picture, the largest group comprising military and engineering
identities including:
Sir James Outram and Sir John Inglis, commanders in the relief of Lucknow in
1857-58;
General Sir Hope Grant, who commanded forces in the Opium Wars in China
and the Wars on the Northwest Frontier of India of the 1830s and 1840s, and
in the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58;
Lord Elgin, a Governor General of Canada and later a Viceroy of India, but
remembered for his arrogant destruction of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace
during the last of the Opium Wars in China in 1860;
Field Marshall Sir Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, a much decorated veteran of
the Peninsula Wars, the Opium Wars in China, the Wars of the Northwest
Frontier, the Crimean War and finally the Indian Mutiny; and
Field Marshal Lord Gough, General Sir Archdale Wilson, the surgeon Sir
Benjamin Brodie, and engineers Robert Stephenson and Sir William
Armstrong, seen explaining his innovative cannon.
And finally, slightly behind that group, another including
Sir Charles Barry, the architect who designed the rebuilding of the Houses of
Parliament in London after they were destroyed by fire in 1834;
the missionary and explorer of Africa, Dr David Livingstone; and
the novelist Charles Makepeace Thackeray
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