Beschreibung:

The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals The Third Mahratta War medal for the battle of Kirkee to Lieutenant-Colonel James Morison, 2nd Madras Light Cavalry, captured the day following the action at Kirkee and imprisoned for five months in Wasota Fort Army of India 1799-1826, 1 clasp, Kirkee (Cornet J. Morison, 2nd Cavy.) short hyphen reverse, officially impressed naming, rim nicks and bruises, otherwise very fine £10000-12000 Footnote Only five Kirkee clasps to European recipients, the only other officer being Cornet Hunter (Ritchie 1-34) who was taken prisoner with Cornet Morison. The other three recipients must have been wounded or sick to miss the action at Poona. James Morison, the son of James Morison of Greenfield, Land Surveyor, was born at Alloa on 16 June 1789 and held a commission in the Clackmannan Local Militia before being admitted to the Madras Establishment in July 1810. He was granted his Cornetcy in January 1812 and joined the 2nd Madras Cavalry the November following. In 1817 the Governor-General, Lord Hastings, declared his intention to hunt down the Pindarries in the Deccan and invited the Mahratta princes to join him. It was, however, a diplomatic fiction that the great princes did not connive at the crimes of their own licensed robbers, the Pindarries, and at the isolated Mahratta capital of Poona, agents of the Peshwa, Baji Rao, began to stir up trouble by disseminating seditious propaganda among the Sepoys of the small British garrison. The British Resident, Mountstuart Elphinstone, having uncovered various plots against his life hatched by the Peshwa, knew that the small number of Company troops at hand were encamped in a vulnerable and indefensible position, but he had to refrain from doing anything that might suggest that war was inevitable until he knew the outcome of machinations at Scindia’s court at Gwalior. After living on the brink of destruction for many days, British reinforcements arrived in the shape of the Bombay Europeans and Elphinstone ordered the garrison to a stronger position four miles away at Kirkee, though he himself remained at the Residency. Then finally, on 5 November, the Peshwa, ‘confused by the fumes of indolence and debauchery and by the conflicting counsel of soothsayers and astrologers’, launched his army of 26,000 men against the 3,000 British and Indian troops under Elphinstone and Colonel Burr at Kirkee. Meanwhile, apparently unaware of events at Kirkee, Morrison, accompanied by Cornet Francis Hunter, the senior of the two by four months, and a party of one Havildar and twelve Sowars, was ‘travelling near Poona’ and arrived at Worlee which lay some twenty miles from the city. Here they were surprised by ‘a strong party of the Peshwa’s troops consisting of some hundred horse and some Arabs’. Hunter and Morison were offered safe conduct to the ‘British Camp at Poona’ but declined the ‘advantage, by which their followers who had claims to their protection, could not benefit’. Taking up a position in a choultry they constructed ‘a breastwork of their baggage’ and ‘defended themselves with honourable perseverance against a vast superiority of numbers for several hours.’ At length, Hunter’s detachment, reduced in strength by several casualties, ran out of ammunition, and was obliged to surrender after ‘the enemy got to the top of the building which they occupied and fired upon them, through holes made in the roof, when further resistance was evidently unavailing.’ The native troops were allowed to go free, but the two officers were taken prisoner, and for some days the British enclave at Poona assumed the worst. It transpired, however, that they had been incarcerated in the fort of Kangoree in Concan. Later they were moved to the fortress of Wassoola where they endured the remainder of their ‘rigid confinement of five months’ until liberated by troops under Major-General Pritegler on 6 April 1818 (London Gazette 28 August 1818). Morrison’s ‘gallant