Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria, to include the Brian Ritchie Collection (Part I)

The Indian Mutiny medal to Lieutenant F. S. M. Wren, 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry, massacred in the water at Satichura Ghat, near Cawnpore, in June 1857

Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (Lieut. F. S. M. Wren, 2nd Ben. L.C.) impressed naming as issued in 1886, good very fine and very rare
£2500-3000

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals.

View
Collection

Francis Stoneham Montagu Wren, the son of Thomas Wren, D.L., J.P., of Lenwood, Northam, Devon, and his wife Delitia Montagu, was baptised on 18 November 1836. He was educated at Bideford Grammar School and at the Rev. Rowsell’s school in Stepney, and was nominated for a Cadetship in the Bengal Cavalry by Major James Oliphant on the recommendation of his father, a former Major in the Madras service. He was examined by the professors at Addiscombe on 7 February 1854 and passed the Military Committee at East India House in London next day. He left for India by the overland route (via Marseilles and Suez) on 4 April, being appointed Cornet the same day, arrived at Calcutta on 15 May 1854, and was directed to do duty with the 1st Bengal Light Cavalry from 6 June. He was posted, on 7 August, to the 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry at Cawnpore, and a year later promoted Lieutenant. On 1 April 1856 he passed the examination in colloquial Hindustani.

On 5 June 1857, following a period of mounting tension, the 2nd Light Cavalry mutinied and the Europeans occupied the hastily and ill-prepared entrenchment. The garrison, under Hugh Massey Wheeler, consisted of 200 European soldiers from H.M’s 32nd and 84th Regiments, 200 officers and male civilians and about 400 women and children. For twenty-one days the garrison held out against the half-hearted attentions of some 7,000 mutineers and rebels, who were content to divide their time enjoying newly acquired plunder and punishing their former masters with ferocious hails of musketry, grape and roundshot. Inside the entrenchment, the poorly provisioned men, women and children were daily decapitated and disembowelled by cannon fire, killed by musketry, or the effects of the sun, or horribly mutilated by gunshot wounds.

In the third week of June the rebel leaders decided to bring operations to a close and sent in an emissary with a letter offering safe passage down the Ganges to Allahabad. After some discussion, it was conceded that the only hope of survival lay in surrender. On 27 June, the survivors marched out from the entrenchment, the women and children, and wounded in bullock carts or riding on elephants supplied by the rebels, towards awaiting boats at Satichura Ghat. The able bodied men were still under arms, their pockets bulging with ammunition. As the refugees started to board the boats large numbers of concealed rebels opened a murderous and indiscriminate fire.

On 24 November 1857 a letter written by Lieutenant Delafosse, one of only four men to survive the massacre, appeared in the London Gazette recording the fates of those of whom he was certain. Halfway down the Cavalry list he confirmed the slaughter on 27 June 1857 of twenty-one year-old Lieutenant Wren in the water at Satichura Ghat. The application for Francis Wren’s medal was made by his eldest brother, Adderly Barton Wren, J.P., of Lenwood, in 1886. It was sanctioned in Military Despatch to India No. 181 of 15 July 1886, which stated:

‘The late Francis Stoneham Montagu Wren, 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry, is stated on page 260 of the Bengal Army List for January 1858 to have been killed by insurgents at Cawnpore on 27th June 1857. A Mutiny medal roll of his name should therefore have been furnished by your Government, but none appears to have been received in this Office. The fact of the deceased officer’s being entitled to the Mutiny medal has just been brought to the notice of the next of kin, his eldest brother Mr Adderley B. Wren, who has accordingly preferred an application for it. As the claim is a just one, I have sanctioned the issue of a medal, and I request that your Excellency will cause a formal medal roll to be transmitted to this Office for filing with the other records.’

A medal roll was duly returned with the Military Despatch from India of 25 October 1886, and Adderly Wren finally received his brother’s medal on 13 December of that year. We are fortunate that the persistance of his next of kin resulted in the issue of a medal to comemmorate the services of the gallant Francis Wren for, in the great majority of cases, medals were not forthcoming for the next of kin of the many officers and men massacred at Cawnpore. There is a memorial to Francis Wren in St Margaret’s Church at Northam, Devon.

Refs: IOL L/MIL/9/231; IOL L/MIL/10/59, 63 & 65; IOL L/MIL/3/2288; IOL L/MIL/5/93; Bengal Army List 1857; Walford’s County Families, 1893.