Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
children a chance to get away in the ship’s boats. Captain Wright of the 91st, one of the few officers to survive, wrote of how:
The order and regularity that prevailed on board, from the time the ship struck until she totally disappeared, far exceeded anything I thought could be exceeded by the best discipline; and it is to be the more wondered at, seeing that most of the soldiers were but a short time in the Service. Everyone did as he was directed, and there was not a murmur or a cry among them until the ship made her final plunge. I could not name any individual officer who did more than another. All received their orders and carried them out as if the men were embarking instead of going to the bottom; there was only this difference; that I never saw any embarkation conducted with so little noise or confusion.3
Of the 693 passengers and crew aboard Birkenhead, 454, the majority of the soldiers aboard, were lost.4
By the 1870s most officers and men went to India in what Second Lieutenant Callwell remembered as ‘leviathans, the five Indian troopers, for these were over 7,000 tons, which meant a big ship in those times, and, designed on particularly graceful lines and painted a white that was almost dazzling at the start, barque-rigged moreover with huge yards, they were remarkably fine-looking vessels’. They may have looked fine enough, but Private John Fraser of the 5th Fusiliers thought that his voyage aboard HM troopship Crocodile in 1880 was ‘as bad, probably, as anything you may have read about in the most lurid of your excursions into popular fiction’.5
Soldiers generally embarked on the Thames, the Medway or from the south coast of England. For most of the period all HM’s regiments in India maintained small depots in barracks at Chatham: the Company’s depot was there too until 1843, when it moved to the small Essex town of Warley. In 1852 Garnet Wolseley reported at Chatham Barracks, and found it ‘overcrowded with boy recruits, chiefly obtained from Ireland, and ensigns of all ages waiting for conveyance to India’. ‘Like all other ensigns,’ wrote Wolseley,
I was allotted one very small room as my quarters. It had the usual barrack table and two chairs; the rest of the furniture, as is usual in all barracks, I had to find myself. The officers’ quarters were very old and abominably bad. An old great-uncle of mine told me that he had towards the end of the previous century occupied a room in the house where I was now lodged. It was, he said, even then generally understood that these quarters were so bad that they had been condemned as unfit for use.
It was believed that the barrack master and his sergeants made a tidy living out of charging young officers for ‘barrack damages’ committed long before. ‘A cracked pane of glass,’ said Wolseley, ‘was a small silver-mine to these men. Fifty ensigns may have occupied the quarter with this cracked pane in it, and all had to pay for a new one.’ Shortly before embarking, he was billed for a latch-key. He had it in his pocket, and offered it to the sergeant, who continued to demand the money. Wolseley, with an early demonstration of the panache that was to take him to the very top of the army, furiously threw it into the river.6 Private Richard Perkes lived in an even less opulent barrack block, but expected less from life, as he told his brother in July 1841:
I do not no whether you know of my enlistment in the Honourable East India Company. I hope that you are as happy as I for I never was so happy in my life as what I ham now for I have plenty of everything that is needful and there is a school to go to and plenty of books to read and a good Bible and prayer Book … It is expected that I should go out of England either 31 of this month or the middle of the next to bengale in the east indies … It takes them a bout five months sailing on the sea there is 4 hundred a going of every month … 7
Soldiers and their families bound for, or returning from, India sailed either as part of the planned move of an entire regiment, which might require two or more ships, as drafts to reinforce units already in India, or as parties of invalids or men due for discharge back in Britain. Regiments bound for India marched or travelled by train to a major port of embarkation like Portsmouth, while smaller drafts generally set off from Chatham. Private soldiers sailed in formed drafts, usually commanded by officers and sergeants of their own regiments. Officers might either sail as draft-conducting officers, or travel privately, with an allowance given them by government or Company. Lieutenant Charles Scott, sailing in January 1861, was delighted to hear that: ‘my application for a passage had been granted or rather that the regulated allowance would be paid me to find my way out to India. I accordingly made my way up to town and took a passage on the Ellora for the 12th to Bombay.’ He was at Suez (‘a most awful hole’) on the 27th, Aden on 2 February, and arrived at Bombay on 10 February after as uneventful a journey as any traveller could hope for.8
Just over ten years before, Second Lieutenant Kendall Coghill of 2nd Bengal European Fusiliers, had travelled round the Cape in ‘a fine tea clipper of 600 tons … [and] wasted 103 days in love, war and idleness’ before seeing land.9 Even before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, it was possible to sail across the Mediterranean and travel through Egypt to resume the journey in the Red Sea, and this became increasingly popular after 1837. On 20 February 1852, Second Lieutenant Fred Roberts of the Bengal Artillery took the Ripon, a P&O steamer, from Southampton to Alexandria, and then boarded a Nile canal boat for Cairo. Here he stayed, like many young officers before and since, at Shepheard’s Hotel. Charles Scott observed that the canal journey to Cairo was ‘130 miles and they take 7 hours to do it. The country is very uninteresting and flat as a pancake.’ After booking in at Shepheard’s, ‘Hockley and I thought of riding to the Pyramids but found it would be too much of an undertaking as they are 10 miles off and the road bad & the Nile has to be crossed on a ferry’.10 Many of those who took the trouble to see the Sphinx seemed to find the creature disappointing:
It is certain that age, or that neglect which imparts, in time, a vinegar aspect to the countenance of the most comely belle, has bereft the Sphinx of all her benignity. To my perception the colossal head (all that now remains) very closely resembles, when seen in profile, a cynical doctor of laws, with wig awry, suffering strangulation per tight cravat.11
From Cairo Second Lieutenant Roberts found himself transported the 90 miles across the desert to Suez in ‘a conveyance closely resembling a bathing-machine, which accommodated six people, and was drawn by four mules’. He then took the paddle-steamer Oriental via Madras to Calcutta, arriving there on 1 April.12 Sergeant Robert Taylor of HM’s 64th made the same trip in 1858, with the difference that his comrades were provided with donkeys for the overland leg.
This was the most laughable journey I ever had, every minute some man was going over his donkey’s head. The heat was very great, but no men fell out during this ride. The donkeys were most wonderful little animals, they performed the journey never halting and without water.13
The cross-desert trip was well organised. Horses were changed every ten or twelve miles, and at the way-stations there was a meal of eggs, mutton chops, stewed chicken, roast pigeon, eggs, with bottled beer and tea or coffee. There was a hotel at the halfway point, with a chance of some sleep of sorts. At Suez, passengers destined for Ceylon, Madras and Calcutta boarded large P&O steamers. These were altogether more popular that the East India Company’s steamers, whose notoriously crusty officers were apparently ‘dead against the passengers and dead against’ the steamships which did the Bombay run. After the East India Company’s demise, the Oriental and Peninsular Steam Navigation Company (now with the ‘Oriental’ and ‘Peninsular’ reversed to produce the more familiar P&O) took over, and the short rations of the Company steamers were replaced with magnificent menus and ‘a fusillade of soda water . . ,’.14