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

The Crimea and Indian Mutiny campaign pair to Lieutenant Frederick Saunders, 84th Regiment, massacred at Cawnpore in the most horrible of circumstances - ‘Mr. Saunders was nailed down, hands, feet, and knees; and that these barbarians the first day cut off his feet and ears and nose, and so left him until the next day when some other pieces were cut off him, and he died. He had killed six men, and would have shot Nena Sahib also, that terrible ruffian, but his revolver did not go off’

(a) Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (Lieut. F. J. G. Saunders, 84th Regt.)

(b)Turkish Crimea 1855, British issue, unnamed as issued, fitted with usual small ring for suspension, together with a contemporary news cutting reporting the full circumstances of his terrible death and accompanying engraved portrait of him in the uniform of the Turkish Contingent, the first sometime polished, otherwise good very fine and excessively rare (2) £5000-6000

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

Frederick John Gothleipe Saunders, the fifth son of Colonel Richard Saunders, 60th Rifles, was born at Glanmire, Co. Cork, on 5 April 1826 and commissioned Ensign by purchase in H.M’s 56th Regiment on 29 December 1846. He exchanged into H.M’s 84th on 2 March 1847, and married Sarah Herbert at St John’s, Paddington, in April 1847. He joined his regiment in India on 19 August of the same year, and was promoted Lieutenant without purchase on 13 July 1850. He left India on 8 May 1854 to serve with the Turkish Contingent under Sir H. Vivian during the Crimean War and returned to Madras on 28 December 1856. He offered to serve in the Persian expedition in any capacity but was not employed and so rejoined his regiment at Rangoon.

At the outbreak of the Mutiny at Meerut on 10 May 1857, the 84th were at Dum Dum, just north of Calcutta, and here the regiment waited the arrival of further European troops with a view to forming part of a powerful moveable column. But as a result of the many urgent requests from the civil authorities in the North West Provinces, it was decided to push members of ‘E’ and ‘G’ Companies, namely Lieutenants Saunders and O’Brien (see Lot 56) and Ensign Magrath, together with five sergeants, five corporals, 2 drummers and eighty-eight privates, immediately up country. While it is known that they left daily in parties of between fifteen and twenty men over five days commencing on 19 May, it is impossible to say which group Saunders accompanied or on which day he started. Curiously it appears that his wife and nine year old son, Frederick Herbert, went with him. By 3 June the detachment from ‘E’ and ‘G’ Companies, such as it was, had arrived at Cawnpore.

The Cawnpore Division, commanded by Major-General Sir Hugh Massy Wheeler, consisted of some 3,000 native troops, outnumbering the European officers and men of the station by about ten to one. Despite the fears of many European civilians, Eurasians and Christian natives, Wheeler initially believed that a local uprising was unlikely, but in order to reassure them he announced that shelter would be provided in the military barracks which stood in an exposed position on a plain to the east of the city about a mile from the Ganges. By 4 June, however, Wheeler’s optimism had been dispelled, and all waited apprehensively for the storm to break.

Soon after the siege began on 6 June, Saunders was wounded in the left breast by grapeshot. Nevertheless, he continued to take an active part in the defence of the entrenchnment and quickly emerged as one of Wheeler’s most unyielding and determined officers. In a little over three weeks some two hundred and fifty members of the garrison, originally consisting of 1,000 souls, had been killed, chiefly by the blazing sun and heavy artillery fire. A spy, having entered the entrenchment in the guise of a water carrier, carried a report to rebel leaders that the British, short of food and much reduced in numbers, might be willing to surrender. A short letter was drawn up an and on 25th it was delivered to General Wheeler by the wife of a Eurasian merchant held prisoner by Nana Sahib. The letter was addressed to ‘The subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’, and read: ‘All those who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive safe passage to Allahabad.’

General Wheeler was irritated by its tone, and together with a number of younger officers was in favour of rejecting it outright. Saunders, for his part, ‘raised his voice against putting any trust in the word of the rebels, and was for continuing the struggle to the last’. But Captain John Moore (qv), ‘a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Irish officer’ of H.M’s 32nd Regiment, who had taken over the direction of the defence after Wheeler and other senior officers had become incapacitated, prudently pointed out that the wet weather, now overdue, would soon wash away the mud walls of the entrenchment, fill up the rifle pits and dampen the remaining powder, making the continuation of the defence impossible. Persuaded by Moore’s arguments, Wheeler decided to surrender and at length a deputation of officers went down to Satichura Ghat on the Ganges to see what arrangements the rebel leaders had made for the evacuation of the garrison by boat to Allahabad. After some negotiation it was agreed that the garrison would give up the entrenchment and march down to the Ghat under arms on the 27th. The appointed hour duly arrived and the exodus began, but soon after the refugees reached the Ghat, the rebels treacherously opened fire.

Saunders succeeded in clambering into a boat, but quickly jumped overboard in mid-stream in order to get away from the inferno of fire. On reaching the shore he was seized by the rebels, and stripped of his sword, but managed to retain his concealed revolver. Perhaps owing to his commanding manner, he escaped the fate of the majority of other adult male survivors who were at once rounded up and shot. The women and children (including Sarah Saunders and young Frederick), who survived the initial slaughter were, of course, taken off to the Nana’s headquarters at the Savada House before being moved to that house of horrors, the Bibighar.

Saunders demanded an audience with Nana Sahib, and followed by a few soldiers of the 84th, who had ‘determined to share the fate of their commander’, he was duly brought before the rebel leader. He then performed an astonishing act of defiance. ‘Upon getting near the Nana’, a contemporary newspaper reported, ‘he dashed forward through the guards by whom he was surrounded, shooting down five of them with his revolver, and firing the sixth round at the Nana, but unfortunately without effect. A few moments later he was stretched and crucified; his nose, ears hands and feet were cut off.’ He was then ‘left mutilated, bleeding and roasting in the sun until the next day when further and more horrible cruelties were perpetrated, until death relieved him from his unutterable agony. A body of cavalry ... charged over him, each man of which cut at him as he passed, until he was literally hewed into pieces.’ According to the report, ‘Lieutenant Saunders left a wife and two sons [sic] to weep his loss, and a wide circle of friends to hold in honoured remembrance his terribly glorious end.’ Evidently the report was written before the fate of his family became known in England. Sarah Saunders and her son were butchered in the Bibighar on 15 July.

The first hard news of Saunders’ fate appears to have been reported by an N.C.O. of the 84th who arrived at Cawnpore with Havelock’s Allahabad Moveable Column. In a letter home, published in the London Times on 19 September 1857, he wrote: ‘At Cawnpore, a cookboy, who was with G Company by some means escaped; being a Bengalee of course he could mix with the remainder of his class without detection. He is but a lad; he told us that Mr. Saunders was nailed down, hands, feet, and knees; and that these barbarians the first day cut off his feet and ears and nose, and so left him until the next day when some other pieces were cut off him, and he died. He had killed six men, and would have shot Nena [sic] Sahib also, that terrible ruffian, but his revolver did not go off.’

Refs: WO 76/228; WO 25/3240; Roll of Officers (84th) York & Lancaster Regiment (Raikes & Key); The York & Lancaster Regiment, 1758-199 (Wylly); The History of the Indian Mutiny (Ball); Cassell’s Illustrated History of India; Cawnpore Massacre 1857 (Shepherd); Our Bones Are Scattered (Ward); The Times, 29 September 1857.