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

The important campaign pair to Lieutenant-General Sir Sydney Cotton, G.C.B., 22nd Regiment, later Colonel of the 10th Foot and Governor of Chelsea Hospital, who commanded two punitive expeditions on the North West Frontier and ruthlessly suppressed the mutinous uprising in the Punjab in 1857

(a) Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (M. Genl. Sir S. Cotton, K.C.B. Commg. Peshawor Divn.)

(b) India General Service 1854-94, 1 clasp, North West Frontier (Mr. Gl. Sir S. J. Cotton, Comg. Sitana. Expy. Force) light contact marks, otherwise very fine (2) £2000-2500

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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Sydney John Cotton was one of twelve children of Henry Calveley Cotton of Woodcote, Oxfordshire, and a first cousin of Sir Willoughby Cotton, the First Afghan War general who, as a youth, led the notorious Rugby School mutiny of 1797.

Sydney Cotton was born on 2 December 1792 and entered the Army on 19 April 1810. Appointed Cornet without purchase in the 22nd Light Dragoons, he joined the regiment in India, and served with it in command of a squadron in the ceded districts during the Third Mahratta War. Having been promoted Lieutenant on 13 February 1812, he found himself placed on Half-Pay on the disbandment of the 22nd, but using his family connections to effect gained employment as Aide-de-Camp to Major-General Hare at Bangalore.

Having been advanced to the rank of Captain on 1 January 1820, he married Marianne Hackett, the daughter of a Captain in his former regiment. In 1822 he purchased a company - ‘the sole purchase step of his career’ - in the 3rd Regiment of Foot (The Buffs) then in New South Wales. On the Buffs removal to India, he secured the appointment of A.D.C. and Military Secretary to his influential kinsman, the celebrated Peninsula general Sir Stapleton Cotton, 1st Baron Combermere, who was afterwards advanced to a viscountcy for the capture of Bhurtpoor in 1826.

In January 1828, Cotton became Major in the 41st Regiment in Burma, but later exchanged into the 28th Regiment in New South Wales. On 23 November 1841, he was advanced to Lieutenant-Colonel by Brevet and given the job of taking five hundred male and female convicts to Moreton Bay on the east coast. He performed the task with such vigour that the district was opened to settlement soon after and was subsequently developed to become the State of Queensland. In 1842 Cotton returned to India with the 28th Foot and travelled up country to take part in the fighting in Afghanistan, but a virulent attack of cholera knocked out the regiment before it could come to grips with the foe. Ever anxious to prove himself in the field, Cotton next went to Scinde hoping for a renewal of hostilities after the Battle of Hyderabad but the Baluchis decided they had had enough.

Cotton was promoted regimental Lieutenant-Colonel on 8 June 1843, and, in 1848, when the regiment was ordered home he effected an exchange with Colonel John Pennefeather whose own corps, the 22nd Foot, were staying in India. In early 1853 with the local rank of Brigadier he served under General Fane at a camp of exercise at Ambala, which included H.M’s 9th Lancers, H.M’s 32nd, H.M’s 52nd, the 60th Rifles, 3rd Bengal Cavalry, and several Native Infantry regiments. Private Waterfield (qv) of the 32nd recorded: ‘We were sometimes commanded when in the field by General Fane, and sometimes by Brigadier Cotton. General Fane seems to be a very easy man, and well able to manoeuvre troops, but Brigadier Cotton has most decidedly the advantage in the word of command. He can give it loud enough to be heard by the whole of the line; he is called by the men ‘the Nosy Brigadier’, but still he is a very able officer.’

In 1853, Cotton, a disciplinarian whose ‘moderate stature and lean active form’ belied his forty odd years of military service, was at last given a chance. The murder of Colonel Mackeson, the much loved British Commissioner at Peshawar by a fanatic, as he sat on the verandah of his house listening to petitions, was followed by a period of great tension in the frontier city. British officers, who at the best of times were used to living amongst a volatile population whose petty squabbles might be settled with the lunge of a knife than by other means, took to sleeping in their boots and with their swords at their sides. Incursions and raids into the fertile Peshawar valley by Afghan tribesmen from the hills followed. Accordingly reinforcements were despatched and Cotton arrived at the head of a combined force of cavalry, infantry and guns, which he took to the Kohat Pass and brought several refractory tribes to submission.

On 29 November he commanded the 22nd Foot on a punitive expedition under Colonel S. B. Boileau against the Utman Khels who occupied the hills to the north of the city. The expedition, which included Gurkhas, the Guides under Lieutenant Hodson, and Mountain Artillery, followed an alternative route to the one taken by Sir Colin Campbell a year earlier, and struggled up the Sargasha Pass which was so steep and narrow that it was only possible to move through it in single file.

By noon the 22nd Foot and the Gurkhas, aided by artillery, had entered the Pathan villages and set them alight, whilst under a constant fire from tribesmen in the surrounding hills. Finding himself increasingly hard pressed, Boileau commenced a fighting retreat towards Taruni, where the troops were alarmed to see hundreds of Afridis sitting up in the hills watching the fight. It was feared that at any moment they would succumb to temptation and descend to cut up the harassed force, but fortunately they remained true to their pledge of loyalty and sent deputations to the Utman Khels warning them not to come any closer, before bringing out water to the exhausted troops. At length Boileau’s force regained the plain, and marched into camp having been under arms for eighteen hours at a cost of 8 killed and 29 wounded.

On 31 August 1854, Cotton, now a full Colonel, went out again to destroy border villages in command of a force comprising the 22nd and 42nd Regiments, native infantry, cavalry and guns, this time visiting the homes of hostile Mohmands at Dabb, Sadin and Shah Masnsur Khel with fire and death. The first village he reached was Shah Mansur Khel, which was defended by matchlock men both in the houses and in the surrounding hills, but they were soon driven off by the mountain guns and infantry. The houses were flattened by elephants and grain stocks either carried away or burnt. Dabb and Sadin suffered similar fates for a cost of one killed and sixteen wounded. When the 22nd Foot returned to England, Cotton transferred nominally to the 10th Foot in Bengal, and in 1855 served in command of a brigade in the Sarhind Division at Ambala. He returned to Peshawar in command of a brigade the next year and carried out a series of ‘instructive field manoeuvres’ which so appealed to the professional mind of the newly arrived D.A A.G., the young Captain Henry Norman (see Lot 85), that he obtained special permission from his chief General Reed (qv) to take part in various exercises.

The outbreak of the Mutiny was not a complete surprise and Cotton, like a number of officers elsewhere in India, had received a warning from one of his servants that there was to be ‘a general rising in the country, in which the [Bengal] sepoy army was to take the lead’. As the officer commanding the forces at Peshawar, he attended the emergency Council of War at Reed’s quarters on 13 May 1857, where Sir John Lawrence’s trusted lieutenants Neville Chamberlain (qv), Herbert Edwardes and John Nicholson resolved to form a Moveable Column to stamp out, at the first, any sign of insurrection in the Punjab. Lawrence at Rawalpindi, however, considered the Council’s measures provocative and an over reaction, and next day Reed and Cotton received despatches to that effect from his secretary. Reed now found himself in a quandary and threw the ball to Edwardes, while Cotton dealt with Lawrence’s response with characteristic decision and told Edwardes in a letter written the same day: ‘Our arrangements of yesterday supersede, of course, those of the Chief Commissioner; being at this moment in operation, nothing more need be done.’ Lawrence, who awoke to the crisis a few days later was afterwards to confess that his zealous subordinate, Cotton, was ‘an old trump’ and most certainly ‘the right man for the place’.

As a further precautionary measure Cotton decided to disarm four regiments at Peshawar. Their officers protested and declared their implicit trust in the men, but Cotton was unmoved and ordered the disarming to take place at the first opportunity. As the Sepoys piled their muskets a number of their officers threw down their swords and spurs in sympathy, but other than that the parade, which took place on 22 May, passed off without incident. That night however about two hundred men belonging to the 51st N.I. deserted only to be caught by police and local people of the district and marched back to Peshawar. Colonel Cooper of the 51st was summoned to draw up the charge for the trial of the deserters, and sympathetically charged them with merely being absent without leave. Cotton was furious and had it changed at once to desertion, before hanging the Subadar-Major in front of the whole garrison.

In his mission to uphold British supremacy, Cotton was prepared to employ most draconian measures, and given a free hand he would have hanged every man jack of the 51st. On 25 May the 55th Native Infantry mutinied at Hoti Mardan and in their flight from John Nicholson and Luther Vaughan (see Lot 86) a hundred and twenty Sepoys were taken prisoner and brought to Peshawar. Cotton immediately ordered a mass execution at which every man was to be blown from a gun but, to his frustration and annoyance, Lawrence intervened. In April 1858 Cotton, still smarting from the Chief Comissioner’s interference, aired his views on the matter in a public letter: ‘With regard to the injunction placed on me by the Chief Commissioner not to carry out into effect the execution of the hundred and twenty criminals, but to take one fourth or one third of them, which latter I determined on ... I am of the opinion, and I was at the time of the great execution of forty criminals blown away from guns, that mutiny was raging to such an extent throughout the country that no one ought to escape punishment (capital); and I now believe that if the hundred and forty men had been executed, as I intended, we should not have had the 51st affair [of August 1857, see below] at all. No doubt Sir John Lawrence’s views were humane, but it was not mercy in the end.’

In his book Nine Years on the North-West Frontier, published in 1868, Cotton further defended the executions by stating that, ‘the mode adopted in carrying them into effect spread far and wide, and, even in the city of Cabul itself, were the subject of discussion and astonishment’, and that the Afghans ‘were alone deterred ... by the imposing attitude which had been assumed at Peshawar .... it came to the author’s knowledge afterwards that thirty thousand Afghans had shod their horses at one time, ready to invade our territory’.

Whilst confounding the rebellion within the Punjab, Cotton prudently kept a weather eye towards the Afghan border, expecting that the ever restless and unsettled tribesmen would sweep down from the hills at the first sign of weakness. The 51st affair of August 1857, alluded to above, began when a well known agitator and ‘red-hot fanatic’ named Syud Ameer arrived in the Khyber to rally the tribesmen to the green standard of Jihad. But fortunately the tribesmen had just been humbled by the Peshawar authorities and fined 3,000 Rupees for the murder of Lieutenant Hand, and though much frightened by Syud Ameer’s rantings, refused to join him. Syud Ameer however would not give up and he sent emmissaries into the lines of the disarmed regiments at Peshawar urging them to rise. The Sepoys thus stirred began to organise, and smuggled arms into their lines. But ‘General Cotton,’ recorded Edwardes, ‘as usual, took the initiative. On the morning of August 28, he caused the lines of every native regiment to be simultaneously searched, the Sepoys being moved out into tents for that purpose. Swords, hatchets, muskets, pistols, bayonets, powder, ball, and caps were found stowed away in roofs, and floors, and bedding, and even drains; and exasperated by the discovery of their plans and by the taunts of the newly raised Afreedee regiments, who were carrying out the search, the 51st Native Infantry rushed upon the piled arms of the 18th Punjab Regiment, and sent messengers to all the other Hindostanee regiments to tell them of the rise. For a few minutes a desperate struggle ensued. The 51st Native Infantry had been one of the finest Sepoy corps in the service, and they took the new Irregulars altogether by surprise. They got possession of several stands of arms and used them well. Captain Bartlett and other officers were overpowered by numbers and driven into a tank. But soon the Afreedee soldiers seized their arms, and then began that memorable fusilade which commenced on the Parade-ground at Peshawur and ended at Jumrood.

General Cotton’s military arrangements in the Cantonments were perfect, for meeting such emergencies. Troops, Horse and Foot, were rapidly under arms, and in pursuit of the mutineers. Every civil officer turned out with his posse comitatus of levies or police, and in a quarter of an hour the whole country was covered with the chase. General Cotton, in a stirring divisional order, thanked the troops warmly for the promptitude with which they put down this rising, and made a similar acknowledgement by letter of the services of the Civil officers. The exertions of all, on this occasion, were indeed very great. The mutineers rose at noon, and the heat was dreadful. Colonel Cooper, who commanded the 51st, and joined in the pursuit of his own men, died before evening from the effects of the sun.’

On 11 June 1857, Lawrence shocked Edwardes by proposing ‘that we should abandon Peshawar and the Trans-Indus’ and hand it over to Dost Mohammed of Afghanistan, in exchange for his neutrality, in order to concentrate on preserving other possessions. The decision to stay was a momentous one, and one which Cotton was afterwards proud to have been associated with. In a mood of self-congratulation he commented, ‘If there was a subject submitted for the consideration of local authorities which called forth, or rather involved, a question of responsibility, it was that. The alternatives being these, ‘Hold on at all hazards’ (and, indeed, great and many were the hazards), or ‘Retreat to save our bacon.’ The hazard, of all others, was the contemplated sickness of the European troops in the autumn of each year. Every one who knows anything of the soldiers in Peshawar knows that there is not a single man fit for a day’s work in the autumn of each year. What, then, might we expect to be our fate in holding on, should the people of the country and beyond the passes, (who are as well aware of our annual weakness) choose to take advantage of us? And with this direful prospect, we decided on holding on to Peshawar - which saved India.’

The return of the Guides after the fall of Delhi in late 1857 gave Cotton an opportunity to turn the whole garrison out on a full dress parade to welcome them home. The Guides were received with a royal salute, the garrison presented arms, and Cotton, revelling in the occasion, rode forward surrounded by his staff. He then addressed them, reciting their record of distinguished service. Edwardes at his side translated. A feu de joie was fired three times by the assembled troops, and amidst tremendous cheers, ‘the troops passed round in review, the Guides being placed at their head ... And so ended that day’s work, at which all the citizens of Peshawur must have been looking on. It was a brilliant day after rain, with no dust and the whole passed off admirably.’

In April and May 1858, with the worst of the crisis over, Cotton, accompanied by his son, Lynch (see Lot 42), as A.D.C., and Edwardes as Political Officer, set out for Sitana where he promptly dealt with the Pantjar Chief, Mohurrun Khan, who had under his command a large body of Hindustani fanatics and Bengal Sepoys. ‘He burnt the villages of their allies, blew up the forts, drove them from Sitana, and razed their dwellings to the ground’. While thus employed word reached camp that Cotton was made a Knight Commander of the Bath ‘for his services at Peshawar’. However, ‘there was but one opinion throughout the garrison’, and that was that, Edwardes ought to have got it also. ‘Indeed, the omission seemed to throw a cloud over Sir Sydney Cotton’s enjoyment of his honour’.

On 26 October 1858, Cotton was made Major-General and continued to hold the Peshawar command, where, in 1861, J. H. Sylvester, the regimental surgeon of Probyn’s Horse came within his orbit, ‘... there was no active service for a while, but to belong to a force under Sir Sydney Cotton was to be constantly on parade. He was a martinet of the old school, lived in his uniform, and kept all under his command very constantly in theirs. To be seen in public dressed in plain clothes involved instant arrest’. Cotton, to the relief of not a few, returned to Europe in 1863, where he was appointed Colonel of the 10th Foot, and was given command of the North Western District with his headquarters at Manchester. He was made Lieutenant-General on 20 April 1866, and in 1869 was made Honorary Colonel of the 1st Cheshire Rifle Volunteers. In 1872 he was appointed Governor of Chelsea Hospital, and the following year was made a G.C.B.

General Cotton, who was the author of various books and pamphlets in which he expressed his forthright views on military and Indian subjects, expired after an illness of three days duration on 19 February 1874, but characteristically not without comment. ‘He appeared to have thought he was entering the gates of glory with a victorious army’, his niece recorded, ‘and expressed it somewhat in these words: “I hear it; yes, I hear it! Music! Such music as I never heard before - and songs of victory and triumph! I am going, going now; I am ready. The Captain waits to meet me - the great Captain ... I have finished my course; I have fought the good fight!”

Refs: Dictionary of National Biography; WO 76/85 & 120; WO 25/793; WO 25/87; Hart’s Army List; The Memoirs of Private Waterfield; Memorials of the Life and Letters of Sir Herbert Edwardes (Mrs Edwardes); Cavalry Surgeon (Sylvester); Life of Field Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain (Forrest); General Sir Arthur Cotton, His Life and Work (Lady Hope).