The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals

The Indian Mutiny medal to Boatswain’s Mate John Harrison, Royal Navy, a member of Shannon’s Naval Brigade, awarded the Victoria Cross for conspicuous gallantry at Lucknow

Indian Mutiny 1857-59, 2 clasps, Relief of Lucknow, Lucknow (John Harrison, Boatsn’s Mate. Shannon) nearly extremely fine
£8000-10000

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

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Ex Colonel Walford collection, sold by Sotheby Wilkinson & Hodge, 5 July 1897. Harrison’s Victoria Cross is held by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

John Harrison, the son of John Harrison, Estate Carpenter, was born at Castleborough, Co. Wexford, on 24 January 1832. He entered the Royal Navy as a Boy Second Class on 2 February 1850, and joined his first ship Prometheus in which he was rated Ordinary Seaman. On 1 February 1853 he joined the line-of-battle ship Agamemnon and served in her throughout the Crimean War. He left Agamemnon in July 1856 as Leading Seaman and Coxswain of the Pinnace, and in the October following joined the Shannon, a new screw steam frigate of fifty-one guns, commanded by Captain William Peel, V.C., R.N.

In early 1857 Peel received orders to prepare for service in China, where the exasperating behaviour of the Emperor and his officials in refusing to abide by the terms of the Nanking Treaty had brought the two countries to the brink of war. Peel was to proceed to Singapore, pick up the Ambassador Extraordinary, Lord Elgin, and convey him to the mouth of the Peiho River, where the latter was to make a last appeal to the Chinese before the Government resorted to full scale naval and military operations. The Shannon sailed on 17 March 1857, and reached Singapore on 11 June. On Elgin’s way out to Singapore, his P&O steamer had touched Galle in Ceylon to pick up Lieutenant-General the Hon. T. Ashburnham, who had been appointed to the command of the land forces in China. Ashburnham had sketchy reports of unrest among the Sepoys in India, but it was not until they reached Singapore that the full horror of the insurrection was revealed. Elgin then received an urgent request from the Governor General of India, Viscount Canning, appealing for the troops assigned to the China venture. Unable to contact his superiors in London, Elgin acted on his own authority and diverted the troops. He later won much credit for doing so, but this left only the Shannon to reinforce Sir Michael Seymour’s inadequate naval force on the China Station and press Britain’s claims against the Imperial government.

Arriving at Hong Kong on 2 July, Elgin found that the French Ambassador, with whom he was to make his representations, was still on his way out, and that it would be sometime before he could carry out his mission. He therefore instructed Peel to sail for Calcutta so that he could have talks with Lord Canning. The Shannon entered the Hooghly on 8 August 1857, carrying a detachment of the 90th Light Infantry, picked up at Singapore after their own transport, the Transit, had been wrecked, and was welcomed by the European inhabitants with wild enthusiasm and no small sense of relief. Elgin lost no time in ascertaining the seriousness of the situation and on hearing of the chronic shortage of artillery, immediately offered to place the ship’s company and guns from H.M.S. Shannon at Canning’s disposal. A Naval Brigade was formed and on 13 August, Peel set out for Allahabad taking with him 408 officers and men, six 8-inch 65 cwt. 68-pounders with 400 rounds of shot per gun, a 6-pounder brass gun, a 24-pounder howitzer, eight rocket tubes, and a large quantity of siege train stores. The first part of the journey up the Ganges by river steamer was fraught with difficulties; mosquitoes, heatstroke, cholera and typhoid were omnipresent, and the usual lowerdeck problem of drunkeness was exacerbated by the searing heat of the Bengal summer.

However, on marching out of Allahabad for Cawnpore on 28 October, ‘Peel’s Jacks’ or ‘The Shannons’ as they liked to be called, soon proved themselves ‘superb campaigners, able to march, fight, live off the land, handle guns and horses with equal ease, and soon won a fearsome reputation amongst the Sepoys, who firmly believed that the Jacks were all four feet high by five foot wide from snout to tail, carried 9-pounder guns over their heads, and ate human flesh as much as they could, salting down the rest for future consumption’.






By 15 November 1857, the Naval Brigade had reached the Alumbagh, just outside Lucknow, and came under the command of the recently arrived Commander-in-Chief, Sir Colin Campbell. Next day as Sir Colin strove to effect the relief of the Lucknow Residency, Peel’s Naval Brigade, which now consisted of about 200 sailors and marines, with six 24-pounder guns, two 8-inch rocket tubes mounted on ‘hackeries’ (bullock carts), was in action bombarding the thick loopholed outer walls of the Shah Nujeff mosque. It quickly became apparent that it was going to be a tough nut to crack and Peel ordered his guns up to within a few feet of the outer walls ‘as if he had been laying Shannon alongside an enemy’s frigate’. In such an exposed position, ‘The Shannons’ began to suffer casualties not only from the mutineers’ musket fire from the walls but also from a number of rebels in a tree who were tossing out grenades on to the gun crews below. Peel called for volunteers to climb the tree, dislodge the mutineers and spot enemy positions. Three men came forward, Lieutenant Nowell Salmon, R.N., Leading Seaman John Harrison and Able Seaman Richard Southwell. Southwell was killed outright, but Harrison and Lieutenant Salmon succeeded in climbing the tree and ejecting ‘the ruffians who were throwing grenades’. Both Harrison and Salmon were recommended for the Victoria Cross by Peel, and the awards were subsequently announced in the London Gazette of 24 December 1858. The citation read:

‘John Harrison, Naval Brigade, and Nowell Salmon, Lieut. (now Commander). Date of Act of Bravery: 16 Nov. 1857. For conspicuous gallantry at Lucknow, on 16 Nov. 1857, in climbing up a tree touching the angle of the Shah Nujjiff, to reply to the fire of the enemy, for which most dangerous service the late Capt. William Peel, K.C.B., had called for volunteers.’ As there were no posthumous Victoria Cross awards at the time, Southwell’s gallantry went unacknowledged.

Rated Boatswain’s Mate and Petty Officer on 27 June 1858, Harrison was discharged from the Navy on 13 January 1859, and received his Cross from Queen Victoria at an investiture held in the quadrangle of Windsor Castle on 4 January 1860. Salmon, who later rose to become Admiral of the Fleet and a G.C.B., supplied Harrison with a letter of recommendation by which he obtained a post in the Customs and Excise. As the result of a wound received during the Second Relief of Lucknow, and a bout of malaria contracted during his service in the Far East, Harrison suffered poor health and made several visits to the Naval Hospital. A man of strong religious convictions, and a firm Protestant, he lived latterly at 5, Stafford Place, Westminster. John Harrison, V.C., never married and died aged 33 on 27 September 1865. He is buried at Brompton Cemetery, West London.

Refs: The Victoria Cross at Sea (Winton); The Victoria Cross (Creagh).