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

The Indian Mutiny medal to Sergeant Edward Berrills, Barrow’s Volunteer Cavalry, a member of the 1st Relief Force at Lucknow

Indian Mutiny 1857-59, 2 clasps, Defence of Lucknow, Lucknow (Edwd. Berrills, Barrow’s Voltr. Cavy.) good very fine £1200-1500

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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Edward Berrills, a civilian living at Allahabad, was barely nineteen years of age in early June 1857 when the 6th Native Infantry mutinied and, joined by hundreds of rebellious inhabitants of the town, broke open the gaol, plundered the shops, tore down the telegraph wires, destroyed the railway lines, and massacred every native Christian who had not taken refuge in the fort. The fort itself was defended by about a hundred European volunteers, such as Berrills, a few invalid artillerymen, and a detachment of Sikhs under Captain Brasyer. Having disarmed and ejected the company of the 6th N.I. doing duty in the fort, Brasyer’s Sikhs discovered huge stores of liquor in the cellars and immediately drank as much as they could before selling the rest to ‘the European volunteers who were soon so drunk that they could not stand up let alone fire their muskets.’

Fortunately, the fiery Colonel James Neill and a wing of his regiment, the hard-marching 1st Madras European Fusiliers, reached Allahabad from Calcutta on the 11th, and order was swiftly restored. A few days later Brigadier-General Henry Havelock arrived, and, on 7 July, he ambitiously started for Lucknow via Cawnpore in command of the Allahabad Moveable Column - a ‘pitifully small force’ comprising about a thousand British infantry from four regiments, less than 150 Sikhs, six guns, a detachment of irregular cavalry, and a band of no more than twenty volunteer cavalry under Captain Lousada Barrow, ‘composed of officers whose regiments had mutinied, shopkeepers whose premises had been burned, and indigo-planters whose workmen had run away, “in short of all who were willing to join”’. It was as a member of this latter force, Barrow’s Volunteer Cavalry, that Berrills, ‘a very little fellow’ in stature, set out to discover the fate of his two brothers, who, belonging to the Railway Service, had been caught up in the Defence of Cawnpore.

Five days after leaving Allahabad, Havelock, aware that the Cawnpore garrison had fallen but still concerned as to the fate of the survivors, received word from his spies that a body of rebels were at Fatehpur. By several exhausting marches he hurried on and defeated them before the town on the 12th in a fight that was to be the first of fifteen actions in which Berrills participated. Havelock’s irregular cavalry (the 13th Bengal Irregulars and 3rd Oudh Irregular Cavalry) proved next to useless in the engagement, and a few days later they were ‘quietly disarmed’, and their horses appropriated ‘for public purposes’. The Volunteer Cavalry meanwhile gave good service particularly in reconnaissance duties, and after a successful action at Aong and Panda Nandi on 15 July, it participated with distinction in the defeat of Nana Sahib at the first Battle of Cawnpore on the 16th, after which Havelock’s troops came upon the Bibighar, the human slaughter house where the women and children of the Cawnpore garrison had been imprisoned and butchered.

Having discovered the fate of the womenfolk and having received confirmation of his brothers’ deaths, Berrills is reported to have ‘resolved to kill their murderers in revenge’. L. E. R. Rees, the Calcutta merchant turned volunteer at Lucknow, also recorded that Berrills quickly proved himself ‘plucky like a veteran soldier’, and, ‘Everyone of his comrades bore witness to the gallant manner in which he would run on and attack the rebels.’ The Volunteer Horse, having ‘lost a third of its number’ in one charge was expanded to eighty-five men in August, and following the Allahabad Moveable Column’s junction with Outram’s Oudh Field Force, fought its way into the besieged Lucknow garrison on 25 September. Accordingly Berrills served through the latter stage of the Defence of Lucknow until relieved in November by troops under Sir Colin Campbell. Thereafter he served with Barrow in operations in the Lucknow area.

Refs: The Great Mutiny (Hibbert); A Personal Narrative of the Siege of Lucknow (Rees); Cawnpore Massacre 1857 (Shepherd). History of the British Cavalry, Vol 2, 1851-1871 (Anglesey).