325. India’s Greatest Rebellion: The Siege of Lucknow (Part 4)

16:32William:Lawrence chooses the entire residency compound, 33 acres of bungalows and gardens rising from the gobty. And it's still there. You can go and see it today because the British, after this, preserve it, unconserved. They don't rebuild it. They leave it as a ruin to remind themselves of this time. And you go there, it's absolutely peppered with shell holes and bullet holes. and it looks like Beirut after the Civil War or something. And it's still there. So you can go and it is one place where you can really recapture what it must have felt like to be in the middle of this. It is the Lucknow Residency.

17:11Anita:It's one of those places like Jaliyah al-Abarg where they leave the pop marks in so that you can almost hear the bullets. I mean, it's an eerie place. And actually people who go there, I mean, when I went there many years ago, it's respectful. It's quite a respectful, you know, from Indians who go there to see what went on here. There is a sense of, God, they were brave, the people who were trapped here. Anyway, look, we're in May now and the news is getting worse and worse. Lawrence is fortifying his residency. What I mean by fortifying the residency is you dig ditches, so horses fall in or people fall in.

17:46Anita:It's not easy to climb up. You pile up, You make walls higher with sandbags. You drag in every cannon you can possibly find and you start putting away food and food that won't perish because you don't know how long you're going to be there. And Henry had all of this foresight, you know, that we'll need grain, we'll need ghee to cook in. That's a clarified butter that Indians use. We will need ammo more than anything. we'll need ammo because if we run out we are sitting ducks here so he is stocking in may as if he's stocking for the long winter that you know normally people have to be prepared for and he buries nearly and this is amazing 200 000 pounds worth i mean that's money in those times willie so i don't know how much that's worth today but treasure that he amasses like you know the dragon but he buries it in the residency gardens to save it from looters which is you know again

18:41William:some are really thinking ahead here and he also buries grain he's not just stockpiling stuff he's hiding some of it so halfway through the siege which is coming long after he's gone uh a whole store of grain just as they're running out and beginning to go on rations a whole store of grain that he's very early on gathered, buried and hidden is discovered and giving them, you know, months more time to hold out.

19:09Anita:So don't blow that ending again. Wait for it. That's a good fact. Some man cannot keep anything to himself. Okay. All right. So who's in the compound? We should talk about that. It's basically every European, every Eurasian. This is, you know, the product of those mixed relationships that we talked about.

19:27William:Of which there was an enormous number at this time.

19:30Anita:Yeah. You've got soldiers, you've got civil servants, you've got merchants, you've got wives, you've got children, you've got pets. I mean, what we're talking about is nearly 3 ,000 people packed into a tiny area of 33 acres, considering how many people they're trying to shove in here. Half of them, or just over half of them, are combatants, but half of them are just civilians who probably haven't ever had cause to pick up a gun. And are there sepoys who are loyal at this time? Because, you know, that's the problem.

19:58William:That's right. Now, this is unique. It's a tribute to Henry Lawrence that this is the case, because this is not the case in Delhi. There are no, other than a few Gurkhas, I think, from Nepal, there are no loyal sepoys at all in the Delhi mutiny. And one of the extraordinary features of the great uprising is that this is figures from when I wrote The Last Mogul 20 years ago. But I think it is that there's 169 ,000 sepoys in the Bengal army and 130 ,000 mutiny. So there's very, very few that don't. And a lot of those are not now. And the reason that they don't mutiny is that Lawrence treats them with respect and is tactful and doesn't force them to bite the cartridges and do all the other things, the kind of foolish old farts.

20:46William:That's exactly the word I was looking for. The foolish old farts. farts and down in mirror. Always here to help. Thank you, Anita. Raise the tone as well.

20:54Anita:Every time.

20:55William:So there is this large number of sepoys as well, packed into the residency, loyal and fighting on the British side. And this is important because it's often, you know, Victorian melodrama, it's whites against browns. And this is not the case. In war, as in peace, Latina is a very mixed and cosmopolitan city. So there are, in fact, three entire regiments of sepoys who remain loyal. loyal. They are the 13th, the 48th and the 71st Native Infantry. And without them, the residency would have fallen in a day. So this whole story hinges on the fact that these guys did not join the mutiny. Anyway, tell us what happens when the mutiny actually breaks out.

21:32Anita:Yeah. I mean, actually, just thinking about it, every image I've ever seen is white men and white chargers who are fighting. They never talk about these three regiments. Anyway, on the night of May the 30th, 1857, everything Henry Lawrence has been fearing and preparing for happens. So the sepoys at Marion Contonement, a few miles north of the city, they mutiny. Lawrence is having dinner when this is happening and he hears the sound of gunshots. And normally that would fill a room with panic, but not Henry Lawrence because he's prepped for this. So he calmly whittled remarks to his staff, it is begun.

22:09William:It's a great line. It is a Christmas.

22:13Anita:It's worthy of a movie, isn't it?

22:15William:Carry on up the Khyber. Absolutely. It has begun.

22:17Anita:It has begun. So he himself, and again, I think this does speak highly of him. He leads the charge and this drive against the mutineers to push them back into open country. Because now, I mean, just imagine the city of Lucknow is like an island of British authority being tossed around in a sea of rebellions. He just has to push them out. We should talk about the disaster at Chinhart. We should. Absolutely. Because that is coming up.

22:43William:So this is the one occasion when Lawrence gets overruled and it doesn't go well. So among the people in the residency are several characters, including someone called Martin Gubbins, who is in your nomenclature a fart. He's definitely not one of the kind of forward thinking liberals. and Gubbins is urging Lawrence to go out and fight. And so although they are a very small force, although they're aware that there's now quite a lot of mutineers milling around in Lucknow, Lawrence is overruled and they do indeed march out. And I think it's the morning of the 30th of June and 700 men, which is hardly an enormous army, march out of Lucknow to meet the rebels at this place called Chinhut.

23:26William:And of course, it's a trap.

23:27Anita:Yeah, but it's not a huge army, but it's almost half of their defence. I mean, we just said it was about 1 ,500, 1 ,700, depending on who you listen to.

23:36William:Exactly.

23:36Anita:That's almost half their fighting force protecting that residency.

23:39William:So they go out and the trap is sprung. They walk straight into it. The rebels are waiting. They've got their cannon. They've got their grape shot. And the 6 ,000 men waiting for them dug in, in position, the intelligence of the British hasn't warned them that all this stuff is waiting for them. So it's a rout. The survivors stagger back to the residency under withering fire. The rebels are shooting at their backs. And these are all, you know, individuals they can't replace. This is a disaster.

24:14Anita:Is this a deliberate trap that's been set, that they know that someone stupid enough is going to come try and chase them out if they show them what seems like a weak flank? Okay, so they are ready and they basically outmanoeuvre, they outthink. Exactly.

24:28William:There are two things, I think, to say before we go to the break. One is that in Lucknow, from the beginning, it isn't just the sepoys. The whole of the town, the whole of the province is entirely on their side. Everyone is furious about the annexation of the Arvid, and everyone is united against the Brits, except for these three regiments that we've talked about. And the other thing is that the rebel leadership led by Begum Hazrat Mahal from the beginning shows more good sense and more strategic thinking and more bravery and better planning than any other mutineer force. So this is, you know, you've got the best of the Brits against the best of the rebels.

25:09William:The Brits have prepared for this, but the rebels are much better prepared, much better armed, much more strategically planned. And so what we are limbering up to, I suppose, is, you know, the fight of 1857. This is the moment when the best of both sides are facing each other and no one knows how it's going to turn out.

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27:45Anita:Welcome back. So just before the break, Willie described this as the best of both sides facing off against each other. And sadly, at Chin Hood, you have a woman who seems to have checked, if this is a chess game, the British forces. And that defeat at Chin Hood changes everything. So July 1857, you can say that is the date that the siege of Lucknow, the thing that Henry Lawrence has most been fearing, is about to begin. And he already begins it with depleted forces. Almost half of his fighting force that were meant to be protecting that compound had been led out into an ambush set up by this strategically thinking woman.

28:20Anita:And it's because of some sort of eejit, not Lawrence himself, but an eejit with a brilliant name, Gubbins, that he loses half of his fighting force. Do you wonder, actually, Willie, is that where gubbins come from in sort of slang, British parlance? All that gubbins is all that rubbish. Or if you've got gubbins around you. Yeah. Is that where it comes from?

28:39William:I think it's very possible because what you must remember is that this story, which I suspect will be new to about 80 percent or 90 percent of our listeners. They will not know the details of this story. This was a story which every Brit knew backwards 100 years ago. It was one of the most famous stories about the imperial, well, is it the right thing to call it? The imperial adventures. That's how the British looked on it. And kids were brought up on this stuff. This was very, very familiar names. Henry Lawrence, Gubbins. These people were types of virtue and vice or of brilliance and hopelessness.

29:17Anita:So you would have loved to get a Henry Lawrence action figure, but not so much a Gubbins. Anyway, let's talk about how this siege begins. And many times sieges begin with a gradual strangulation. You cut off things and slowly make life as unbearable as you can until people give up. But not this one. This one is a violent slam into the gates of the residency. So they are barred on the evening of June the 30th. But the very next day on July the 1st, Lawrence signaled that the garrison at the Muchibhavan should blow up the fort and retreat to the residency. At midnight, the Mutshebovan garrison, they make a silent, perilous march.

29:55Anita:And it is so dangerous because it's a city that is entirely held by the rebels. So they have to do this sort of silently in the shadows, not making a sound, not letting anything clank, sticking to the side of walls, surrounded by people who want to kill them. And they slip into the residency. But that lights a fuse, quite literally, because the massive fort explodes behind them, signalling the end of British control over the city. And also, Willie, it is the soundtrack for the next 87 days because not a single hour, and this is right, isn't it? Not a single hour is not punctuated by the sound of explosions or gunfire.

30:34William:This is the hardest fort of all the different sieges or extended conflicts of 1857. And it's a nightmare scenario because the residency compound wasn't an isolated fort. You know, it was this rambling set of bungalows on the side of a river. And it's surrounded by the dense urban fabric of Lucknow. And there are many houses overlooking it. So these immediately find themselves turned into snipers' nests. There are snipers on the roofs. And if the Brits want to cross a courtyard or go from an outlying bungalow to the main residency building for dinner, they're likely to get shot. It's totally perilous.

31:13William:And as we said, the rebels are incredibly efficient. The snipers hit people accurately. And we're going to see in a second that they also have great skills as sappers, which are more later. Anyway, the siege, which begins in the end of June, and now it's early July, is marked very early on by a catastrophe for the besiegers. Because in the very early days, on the 2nd of June, the ultimate disaster takes place for the British. Anita, tell me what happens.

31:50Anita:Well, look, it is a disaster, and it involves a man we've been talking about a lot, and that's Henry Lawrence, who is not only a really smart tactician and somebody who understands the people, but he's also this shining beacon that as long as we've got Lawrence, we'll be okay. So he's in his room in the residency building and he's trying to figure out with his top men how they're going to ration the food because they are not going to starve. That's his vow. They are not going to let a single person starve. This is not going to be gone for all over again. and suddenly a howitzer shell which is fired by a rebel battery smashes through the wall not through the window through the wall and explodes right in the room and you can imagine these things you know that they are designed to let loose an absolute fountain of shrapnel and one of these pieces of shrapnel goes right through his thigh and shatters the bone it is an agonizing injury that is going to leave him, William, how much pain for how long?

32:55William:So he only lasts two days. But being Lawrence, he doesn't just sort of retire to his hospital bed. He sits there giving orders, making plans between doses of laudanum to try and instill the pain. And he gives his final instructions to his slightly unimaginative successor, who's called Brigadier John Inglis. And one of the last things he does is to famously dictate his own epitaph, a very Victorian epitaph. Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. And the following day after dictating that, he dies on July the 4th. And his last words are, never surrender. Let every man die at his post, but never surrender.

33:34William:It's such a Victorian melodrama, isn't it?

33:36Anita:It is honestly, it is such a Victorian thing. But you can also, I mean, whether he said it or not, and let's just say he said it.

33:42William:Oh, no, I think we have good records for this. This is one of the things, yeah, no, he did actually say it.

33:46Anita:Well, what a guy, what a guy. But you know those words are going to be the thing that is in every newspaper when they get back. This man, total hero. But right at the moment of his death, it is a crushing, absolutely appalling psychological blow for the people who are inside this enclave that he created to protect them. So the garrison loses their leader, their man on top. They lose with him prestige. It's like, you know, the king is almost, if we go back to that chess analogy, have they won? Have they taken the king? So the true ordeal, though, this is not just gone when Lawrence goes, because now everybody who's left has to work out how they're going to survive.

34:27Anita:So we've got lots of diary entries from inside the residency that tell us how bad it was. It's not just when you are under siege, the fear of shrapnel taking your leg or killing you or a sniper in the night. It is the fetid squalor of not having hygiene, of not having clean food, of having mealworms wriggling around in the sacks that you've put away. And on top of that, we just remember we're talking about July to August, which in India is hot as Hades. It's awful. And you've got the monsoon rains, which are fast approaching or have even started. And you've got this packed, packed compound. And it doesn't take long, of course, for the sanitation system to collapse.

35:13Anita:There are animals rotting. So, you know, horses and camels, because they don't get fed if humans need to be fed first. And the stench of all of this. and back that up with the incessant bang, bang, bang, pound every day for 87 days. And this sort of sitting in the smell of gunpowder and rot and misery and flies, of course, it's a breeding ground of cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and you know that the children are going to go first of all. I mean, the first person, and you've done more than most people on this, looking at those first-person testimonies, it's heartbreaking, right? They know that this is not something that they might survive.

35:59William:What is so wonderful about being a historian working on this is there are these very rich sources. There have always been the very rich British sources, but it turns out there are actually pretty good sources for the Indian side too. Delhi has the best because the British gather them scrupulously with the view to hanging anyone mentioned inside them. So it's a sort of an archive for execution, if you like. But Rudrankshu Mukherjee has found all sorts of stuff from the rebels in Latna too. So we know individual characters on both sides in a way that we don't for most of colonial history. And so this is one of those periods when suddenly the light turns on.

36:36William:You can see everything. You know the individuals, you know the different families, the sepoys, the rebel leaders, Begum Hazrat Mahal, her rivals. She has a whole face-off with the Mulvies because a lot of the Mulvies think they should be leading this as a jihad, which is interesting.

36:54Anita:Well, it's interesting. A similar thing happened in Delhi, didn't they? They wanted to turn it to a jihad and everyone ignored them. It was like they chance it every time. Everyone just says, shut up. We've got more problems than you can.

37:04William:Well, there were enough of them, though, to be a major force. And we'll come across the Delhi jihadis who were something I was writing this book immediately after 9-11. So when I started finding the word jihad in the Persian sources and the Udu sources, it was something which immediately screamed out in a way that it wouldn't have perhaps to earlier generations of historians. But anyway, what happens in the residency in Latina now to return focus onto that is that following the vulnerability of the buildings that we've seen, Lawrence himself being killed in only day two of the siege. The children and the women are sent down to these underground chambers called taikanas, which were built by the British, not for defensive purposes, but to escape the heat.

37:52William:They discovered what the Persians knew before them and the Mughals knew before them, that if you want to survive the Delhi heat, you build underground chambers, often quite luxuriously. They're not just cellars, they're places to live in high summer. If you can't get up to the hills, if you can't escape, go underground. And when the women and children go down there, suddenly, one day, someone hears the sound of mining. And they become aware that the rebels, as well as fighting from the rooftops, as well as sniping from snipers' nests and pelting artillery into every inch of the residency, they are also using their sappers to mine underneath the residency, and they're about to explode a charge.

38:37William:So the British respond to this by countermining. So the next phase of this extraordinary conflict, which is one of the great dramas, this is why the Victorian British love this story so much, because it is just like a movie. And the British go down and build their own tunnels. And they've got an engineer, the chief engineer of Latina is a man called Captain George Fulton. And he's soon known as the wizard of the residency. And they play these games of cat and mouse, of mining and undermining. And there's this web of underground galleries where the next phase of the conflict takes place.

39:11Anita:Can I just, I mean, just trying to put myself in the heads of those women and children who are there underground. I mean, you talked about some of these fabulous accounts that we have from people who are there. One is Maria Germann, I'm not sure how you pronounce her name. She writes that, you know, we are a mass of filth, vermin and putridity. But on top of that, you've got crying children who are hungry. You've got the sound of the gunfire that we've talked about, the endless booming. But you've also got this tink, tink, tink, tink of an enemy pickaxe that is coming closer. You've got your own men sweating, hot, panicking because they know that if Fulton's plan doesn't work, these guys are going to break through.

39:54Anita:And they are also sort of firing off charges and tink, tink. It is an unending soundtrack of stress and tension. I mean, I just, I often try and imagine what it's like and the psychological impact on those poor people in those underground chambers appalling.

40:13William:And I think one of the things that's also playing on them is that they know by now what happened to the women and children in Kanpur who did surrender and were offered safe passage. And they know that they were all killed. And the rumours is that they were all raped and then killed. So they know there's no alternative but to bear this.

40:35Anita:I mean, they do see that they've got loyal sepoys. Because again, let's just remind you that what didn't happen in those other cities was that the sepoys stayed with the people. But you've still got, as Willie pointed out before, the 13th, the 48th, the 71st native infantry. And they are dying and falling alongside their British comrades. But they are also there, you know, sort of protecting these women. So, I mean, women and children. And that is such a horrifying, confusing picture, but some solace at least that you've got at least these guys are not leading us out into slaughter. So there is also that.

41:13Anita:So the residency is fighting, playing this cat and mouse underground game while also rotting in their own filth at the same time. And they don't know this, but there is a relief force on its way. Now, this road is really important. And anyone's from North India, you know this road. It is the main arterial still road in the north, the GT Road, we all call it, but it's the Grand Trunk Road. Who is on their way, Willie?

41:42William:None other than Major General Henry Havelock. Again, one of these names that, you know, everyone knew, which half the kind of suburbs of Britain are named after, and indeed a statue in Trafalgar Square.

41:53Anita:I mean, I literally just walked past it last night. We went out to look at the Christmassy lights and things. And there he was. There was Havelock.

41:59William:Yeah. So Havelock is your classic sort of Victorian, dour, Bible-reading Puritan. But he's just the man you need in this spot, because although he's a Baptist who you wouldn't really want at your fantasy dinner party, he absolutely is the person you want leading the relief column for saving you in this particular situation. And he has recaptured Kanpur, or Kornpaw, as he would call it. And I think that the British have heard this. I can't remember if there's a pigeon postal system or something, but the news, they know that this guy's on his way. He's on his way. They don't know where he is. They don't know the details, but they know there is a relief force coming with Henry Havelock in the lead.

42:42William:And he is there with a small but hard-bitten force of Scotch Highlanders. Again, exactly the kind of figures you need in a tricky spot. The 78 Roshabuffs, they're called, terrifying men in kilts and pipes. And Havelock crosses the Ganges into Aved on July the 25th. But his force is tiny. He's barely got 1 ,500 men. Remember, 700 men at the beginning of the story got defeated at Chinhut. So this is not a force to reckon with, despite the fact that Havelock is in charge of it. And he begins this impossible march to Kompon. Remember, this is territory which has risen up to a man against the British.

43:27Anita:Right. And so just to give you geography of this as well. I mean, so Karnpore is about 45 miles away from Lutlal. But it's through rebel territory where everybody hates you and wants to kill you. And it's in the middle of a monsoon where the roads are turning to sludge, swamps where you get stuck, wheels can't go any further. The thing that Havelock does have is the rocket fuel of vengeance because he is the man, after all, who's the first into Karnapur. He's seen the BB Co. He's seen what has happened. They are stirred to a man that they will not let this happen to the women and children of Lucknow.

44:03Anita:Again, yeah. Not on their watch. That is the thing that keeps them trudging through this relentless sludge on and on to Lucknow. The sun is unforgiving. There are bullets, of course, sure, but then there is sunstroke. Then there is cholera in the puddles of water that are being left behind. But Havelock, still, remember Karnpore. Keep on it, men. Keep going, men. That is the thing that kind of pushes them through. And he wins some significant victories on the way. I mean, now and tell us about, you know, is it Bishitra Ganj as well? It's another place where, you know, Havrlok has some success.

44:43William:No, he wins the battles, but each one of these victories sees his force shrink. Of course, he has casualties each time. So though he keeps on going, he realizes that, you know, even if he loses 50 men here and 50 men there, that this is a major blow to it. And eventually, by mid-August, when he's virtually on the outskirts of Lucknow, he realizes he can't do it. He just doesn't have enough men. The monsoon and the casualties have meant that even if he makes it to the residency, he's going to make no difference. So he makes this very difficult decision in mid-August to fall back to Kampo. And inside the residency, the hopes are dashed.

45:21William:They get close enough to hear the guns.

45:24Anita:They're so close. And then they go back. Yeah. Oh, imagine. So what do you do if you're in the residency? They were just here. They're just here. Fulton and all of the men who are digging underground. It's okay. It's okay if we can just hold out a little bit. And then they retreat. So what can they do? They have to cut their rations, right? Because they don't know when they're going to come back. One of the really interesting little tidbits you get is that one of the first things to run out is the tobacco. So the men, they resort to smoking dry leaves just to keep their spirits up. The walls are crumbling around them.

45:57Anita:Fulton, the engineering genius in September, is killed by a round shot. Now, imagine losing the genius of the tunnels. right? You've already lost the king, if you like, but now you've also lost the most effective knight on the board. I mean, it's the wrong way around for chess, forgive me, but you know what I mean. Henry Lawrence going was a huge blow, but Fulton going, you must feel entirely unprotected. So you've got spirits sinking in that sludge of the monsoon. People emaciated, sick, cholera, no idea if anybody is going to save you. Just each day, can you eke out the rations enough just to wake up the next morning?

46:45Anita:That's what it feels like. And then we can introduce another major figure in this story, Willie, Sir James Uttram. Now tell us about Uttram.

46:53William:So what the British have on their side, of course, is they've got the coast. Bengal has not gone up. The mutiny has spread as far as Bihar. It's gone as far as Putnam, but it doesn't go further. And And so the British can be reinforced from the sea. And a regiment arrives from, I think they've been on the China coast or sailing off to Shanghai or Hong Kong, one of these places. So quite early on, by September, new British troops are arriving in Calcutta and heading up through the Grand Trunk Road along the road towards Kanpo. and they're under the command of this, another of these sort of dur, Bible bashing Victorian heroes, as they are remembered.

47:38William:Sir James Utram is in charge. So he arrives in Kampur to find that Havelock has returned, having given up. And Havelock says, this is what happened at the Bibigar, we cannot let that happen again. So no sooner has Havelock's force got back to Kampur than they turnaround but this time they've got Uttram with him and there's what another of these sort of classic moments of Victorian drama because in this very Victorian way Uttram says no Havelock has done the hard work to him should go the glory of relieving luck now I will accompany the force merely as a volunteer serving under him till we are inside the walls so Havelock's back in charge

48:19Anita:what a guy what a guy I mean you can imagine it's full of this sort of stuff this story

48:25William:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

48:26Anita:Okay, so they march. How many of them this time, Willie? Because numbers matter.

48:30William:So there's a lot more now. I can't remember the exact figure, but Uhtrim's brought a proper army. And this time there's no stopping them. They smash through the rebel lines. And on the morning of September the 25th, the final push begins. They're inside the city of Lutnau. It's a maze of narrow lanes, fortified palaces and canals. Now, Anita, tell us what the rebels had expected and why that taken by surprise.

48:54Anita:Yeah. So, I mean, again, if you're talking about strategy, I mean, you just get it all in this siege. The rebels had quite sanely expected the British to attack via the open roads because, you know, that's what they're used to, the British march on open roads. That's how they do it. They're in formation, you know, very disciplined. And they'd set up batteries to mow them down as they approached. But Havlock and Uhtrim instead skirt the city to the Charabag Canal. So through this maze, they navigate their way to the Charabag Canal. And the fighting that then takes place at the Charabag Bridge becomes absolutely desperate.

49:30Anita:The bridge is swept away by rebel grapeshot. It's then stormed by the Madras fusiliers who are led by Havelock's own son. I mean, there's sort of the weight of this pressure and the family dynasty legend that gets born here at Lucknow. Once across, the Column has to navigate an absolutely death trap city. So these narrow streets, this maze, and William, excellent word, it's like a complete labyrinth to get to the residency. So they need to know where they're going. They need to get through these tiny narrow gullies with sniper sites just everywhere because there's all buildings sort of butting against each other.

50:13Anita:And it does seem as if it's a suicide mission, doesn't it, Willie? I mean, it's just a nightmare for them.

50:18William:But again, very important to get the whole feeling of the avenging angels that the Highlanders see themselves as. These guys believe that they are saving the angels of Albion from molestation. And they're just going berserk. They're storming houses, banning everyone inside. The casualties for the British are horrific, but the casualties among the rebels are also unbelievable. And as the day turns to dusk on September the 25th, the relief column becomes separated. The heaven guns and the baggage train get left at the Motimahal. But Havelock, Uttram with the Highlanders and the Sikhs, because they've got Sikhs with them too.

51:04William:The Sikhs, again remaining loyal, run a gauntlet of fire through the narrow streets. One of the most ruthless of the British commanders, General Neal, another Scotsman, is shot dead from an archway in the Khasbazare. And this exhausted, blood-soaked column finally sees the gateway, the bailey guard of the residency ahead of them. And inside the residency can hear the Highlanders coming, the sound of the bagpipes cutting through the roar of the cannons. I mean, it's such a movie.

51:34Anita:It's cinematic, isn't it? I mean, if you were a director, that's how you would do it. But this is actually what happens because there is a wonderful, wonderful diary entry from a staff officer who is inside the residency who describes the exact moment when they see that vanguard break through the smoke, right? So you can hear them coming and then through this cloud of smoke, you see them for the first time. And this is what he wrote. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm. The Highlanders stopped everyone they met and with repeated hurrahs and squeezes of the hand began to ask, are the bairns still alive?

52:09Anita:It's a Scots term, bairns for children. And again, you can see that question, Willie, means that Karnepore very much on their mind.

52:18William:Are the bairns all alive? Exactly.

52:20Anita:Yeah, it's finding the one child's shoe. We remember, you know, that was such a moment in Karnepore for British troops, just finding a tiny, tiny shoe in the road. So that has driven them all the way. So dusk falls on September the 25th. Havelock and Uhtram covered in dust, covered in blood, clamber through a breach in the residency wall. And what do they see?

52:42William:This is literally, they go through a breach in the wall.

52:45Anita:Yes, a breach. So they squeeze themselves through. What's inside? What meets their eyes?

52:49William:Captain Wilson has left his account of this. He's one of the defenders and he describes the scene. He says, big, rough bearded soldiers were seizing the little children out of our arms, kissing them with tears rolling down their cheeks and thanking god that they'd come in time to save them from the fate of those in khan poor but but but but they make it there they've they've they've broken through the siege but the following morning a terrible realization dawns on them all well

53:20Anita:so getting there is one thing but what shape are you in when you've got there so they've lost in this absolutely daring mission, they have lost over 500 men just to get to this point, to the children and the kissing and the biscuits. They are so depleted. Their baggage train, just remember, has most of their supplies. Most of the cannons and heavy artillery has been left there and that's completely cut off. They're looking around at the wounded and the depleted and the women and the children and they realise, how the hell do we get them out of here? Because we lost 500 people. trying to get into this rebel-held city.

53:56Anita:How the hell are we going to get these people out? And something even worse, they hadn't brought food. They hadn't brought any food. No. So, you know, you've got these starving people looking at them going, did you bring anything? You know, we've been starving to death. Do you have anything? But they haven't. And not only that, but there are now two and a half thousand more mouths to feed here in this enclave. So what do you do in that situation, really? What can you do?

54:24William:So they've got no transport to evacuate the women and children out. They don't have the strength to fight their way out now they've got in. And the 3 ,000 men of the relief force are now trapped alongside the original garrison. So the firing starts again. The flies return. And the first relief of Lucknow is over. And what is known in the Victorian history books as the second siege of Lucknow begins from this point.

54:49Anita:Till the next time we meet, though, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. and goodbye from me, William de Rimpel.