Beschreibung:

The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals The Indian Mutiny medal to Captain John Moore 32nd Light Infantry, the senior officer of his regiment massacred at Cawnpore Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (Capt. J. Moore 32nd L.I.) small edge bruise and a little polished, otherwise very fine £5000-6000 Footnote John Moore ‘one of the finest field soldiers who ever served England’ and ‘one of the most disgracefully ignored by historians’, was commissioned Ensign in H.M’s 32nd Regiment on 1 November 1842, and left Ireland with his regiment for India in 1846. Promoted Lieutenant on 3 April of that year, he took part in the Second Sikh War, being present at the siege of Mooltan, the surrender of Cheniote, and the battle of Goojerat. In 1852 he served under Colin Campbell in the Swat Valley. In 1854, the 32nd marched from Peshawar to Kasauli, near Simla, where it remained until October 1856, when it was ordered to Lucknow. Cawnpore was reached en route in December and a depot was established consisting of three officers’ families, those of Moore, Lieutenant F. Wainwright and Ensign Evelyn Hill; some eighty-five non-commissioned officers and men, about fifty women, and sixty children, about a third of whom were orphans. The main body of the regiment then proceeded forty miles up the road to Lucknow where it was destined to provide the backbone of the Residency’s defence a few months later. Thus the month of May 1857, found Moore commanding the regiment’s ‘invalids’ at Cawnpore, where Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler faced the same dilemma as other garrison commanders in the North West Provinces - to show faith in the native troops or to prepare for the worst. The course he was eventually persuaded to take fell between stools. Fearing the consequences of removing the Sepoy guard from the fort, and stock it for defence, he prepared an entrenchment on a dusty plain to the east of the city, about a mile from the Ganges, surrounded by a parapet only four feet high of loose earth, and gathered inside meagre supplies for just twenty-five days, an act which indicated distrust but lacked safety. Amid considerable panic, some four hundred European women and children, Eurasian clerks and tradesmen and their families, together with the native Christians crowded into two barracks, one thatched and one with a pukka roof, within the entrenchment, where they were to come under the critical eye of Captain Fletcher Hayes (Ritchie 1-79). At night the military officers often with a sense of deep foreboding left the entrenchment and returned to their regiments . On 5 June 1857, the 2nd Bengal Cavalry mutinied at Cawnpore. The garrison’s three native infantry regiments followed suit next day, and a deputation of mutineers rode out to the estate of Dhondu Pant, who was shortly to become infamous in Victorian Britain as the arch-fiend Nana Sahib. With amazing self-assurance, the British at Cawnpore, who politely referred to him as the Maharajah of Bithur (a title not recognised at Calcutta), believed that Nana Sahib would assist them in maintaining law and order. Nana Sahib however was a bitter and ambitious man. He was an adopted son of the last Peshwa of Bithur, Baji Rao II, and dreamt of enjoying the same elevated position in the world as his father. Quickly persuaded that he had nothing to gain by continuing to support the British, he was advised by Azimullah, his agent who had represented his interests in London, that he ought not to go to Delhi, the hub of the rebellion where he, a high born Brahmin, would be subordinate to the decrepit Mohammedan king. It would be far wiser to rally around him the Cawnpore regiments, quickly dispose of Wheeler and the other eight or nine hundred occupants of his pitiful entrenchment, and establish a new independent kingdom from which he might hold sway over vast tracts of India. Thus, on 6 June Wheeler was informed that his entrenchment would soon be under attack by rebel forces fighting in the nam