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

The campaign pair to Colonel N. C. Macleod, Bengal Engineers, one of the ‘explosion party’ at the blowing of the Cabul Gate at the fortress of Ghuznee in July 1839

(a) Ghuznee 1839, unnamed

(b) Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (Lieut. Col. N. C. McLeod, Bengal Engrs.) nearly extremely fine £4000-5000

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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Norman Chester Macleod, a scion of the Macleods of Drynoch, was the son of Norman Macleod, B.C.S., the officiating Judge of the Provincial Court at Murshidabad, and was born in Calcutta on 15 June 1813. He was nominated for a Cadetship in the Bengal Engineers in 1830 by N. B. Edmonstone, Esq., on the recommendation of his widowed mother, Eleanora, then residing at Bath. Having attended the Military Seminary at Addiscombe, near Croydon, he was appointed 2nd Lieutenant on 8 December 1831 and passed the following year at Chatham before proceeding to India in August 1833. In October of the latter year he was directed to Delhi to do duty with the Bengal Sappers and Miners and was appointed Acting Assistant Engineer to the Delhi Division in March 1834 till January 1836. Between May 1834 and January 1835, he oversaw the construction of a bridge over the Hindaun River, and in early 1837, he was appointed 2nd Assistant to the Superintendent of Canals West of the Jumna. It was probably during this period that he contracted the ‘fearful jungle fever’ which dogged him for the rest of his days, and which he kept at bay with a vegetable diet and by the use of ‘hydropathic appliances’.

On Lord Auckland’s disastrous decision to send an army into Afghanistan to support Shah Soojah, Macleod was attached to the Engineer cadre of the Bengal Column with the Army of the Indus on 21 October 1838, and was appointed to the command of a company of Sappers and Miners. The Bengal Column assembled at Ferozepore under Sir Willoughby Cotton and marched out on 10 December, much hampered by fifty to sixty thousand camp followers. A junction was made with the Bombay Column under Sir John Keane in the Indus delta, and the difficult crossing of the two channels of the river at Rohri effected solely due to the efforts of ‘the relatively junior Engineer officers of the Bengal corps’, Lieutenants Macleod and Robert Pigou (Ritchie 1-53) among them. With great difficulty the Army struggled on in temperatures of over 100° F on the 150-mile journey to Quetta, via the sixty-mile long Bolan Pass, and after a heavy loss in transport animals and baggage to the predatory Baluchi robber bands, the Bengal Column, suffering from the effects of intense heat, inadequate rations and dysentery, arrived at Candahar on 26 April 1839. Keane arrived eight days later with the Bengal Column, and on 27 June the Army staggered on towards Ghuznee, where, according to the Envoy to Afghanistan, Sir William MacNaghten, there would be no resistance.

On 21 July, they came within sight of the fortress of Ghuznee, which contrary to all reports had been fortified by Hyder Khan, and was held by a garrison of some four thousand men who immediately opened a heavy fire. The walls were over sixty feet high ruling out the possibility of an assault by escalade and mining operations were impracticable due to the wet ditch which surrounded the place. Furthermore, Keane had left all of his 18-pounder guns at Candahar due to the shortage of draught-animals, the rugged terrain and the false intelligence. He was now in a critical situation, he only had two days’ rations in hand and no more than one day’s supply of ammunition for his light artillery. Either side of him lay the two armies of Ghilzai tribesmen who had shadowed him since leaving Candahar, and beyond Ghuznee lay the main Afghan army under Dost Mohamed. In his dilemma, Keane consulted his Chief Engineer, Captain George Thomson, Bengal Engineers, who pronounced there were two alternatives. Either Keane could mask Ghuznee and advance to fight Dost Mohamed or carry the fortress by a surprise assault after the Engineers had blown in the Cabul Gate. Keane could not spare the troops to mask Ghuznee, and so placed the fate of the army in the hands of the junior Engineer officers.

The Engineers and Sappers volunteered to a man for the Explosion Party which was to blow down the gate. The honour, however, went to Captain A. C. Peat of the Bombay Engineers, Lieutenant Henry Marion Durand of the Bengal corps, and Lieutenant MacLeod, together with three British non-commissioned officers, Subadar Davey Singh and fifteen men of the Bengal Sappers and Miners, and Jemadar Bhowaney Singh and five men of the Bombay Sappers and Miners. To Captain Thomson is due the credit for planning the demolition and the assault. The affair was one of simple daring.

At the first streak of dawn on 23 July 1839, the party moved off towards the gate. Durand in the lead with MacLeod in close attendance, followed by six men of H.M’s 13th Regiment; the Bengal Sappers, carrying powder bags or bags of earth with which to tamp the charge; Sergeants Robertson and Vivian with the hose; and finally Peat with the other Sergeant and the Bombay Sappers to assist with the bags of earth or to replace casualties as required. When about 150 yards from the gate, the party was challenged and fired upon. Blue lights flared on the battlements and a general fusillade began, but owing to the smart practice of the covering party there were no casualties.

Durand and Macleod pushed on across the bridge, through the fausse-bray and up the winding road to the Cabul Gate while Peat placed the covering party in a position to repel any attack by Afghan swordsmen. Subadar Debi Singh laid the first bag containing the end of the powder-hose. The other carriers with the rest of the three hundred pounds of powder and those carrying the earth followed, and, having deposited their bags, were directed by MacLeod along the foot of the massive walls, where they were screened from the Afghan’s fire. Meanwhile, Durand and Robertson were uncoiling the hose towards a sally-port to the right of the gateway. Durand’s first attempt to ignite the port-fire failed, and so he tried blowing on the quick-match and port-fire held together. When it lit, Durand put it on the ground only to see it go out. All the while the Afghans redoubled their efforts to dislodge the Explosion Party with musketry and a cascade of stones, bricks and clods of earth from above. Frantic to fire the charge, Durand told Robertson to clear out as he was going to flash the train with his pistol and most probably perish in the explosion. Robertson refused to leave him and implored Durand to try the port-fire once more. He did, and fortunately this time it caught and burned steadily.

Durand and Robertson retreated and lay down to watch the flame of the ignited train run up to the gateway. Meanwhile, Peat curious as to the long delay had ventured forward from a sally-port in the fausse-bray, and as he neared the gate the charge exploded, throwing him violently to the ground. The roar of the explosion above the general din of battle told the attackers that the way was open but no bugles sounded nor troops advanced. Peat looked up and saw that the gate had been demolished, but beyond he saw a large pile of debris blocking an inner archway. Believing that the way was not clear, he stumbled back to report to Thomson who was with the infantry. What Peat had not realised, however, was that the route into the fortress turned sharp right after the main gateway, and that the inner archway had been blocked up by the Afghans because it was unsafe. Before reaching Thomson, Peat collapsed whereupon MacLeod came up and dragged him under the cover of a tomb by the roadside. Durand ran back to the infantry covering party and started to harangue the subaltern, telling him to order his Bugler to sound the Charge. The witless subaltern refused to act without further orders from his Major, and so Durand made for the head of the four companies led by Colonel Dennie, but as he dashed back he tripped over a tomb and fell heavily.

Against the tremendous din, Macleod asked the dazed Peat what had happened and was told that the gate was blown alright but the way was still blocked. Standing close by, Brigadier ‘Fighting Bob’ Sale overheard this exchange and his Bugler, whether by orders or not, sounded the Retreat. As Durand lay almost helpless on the ground, he was mortified to hear the call being repeated by others. He struggled to his feet and limped back to the head of the assaulting column, determined to rectify the situation. On the way he met Lieutenant George Broadfoot, Bengal Engineers, who shouted “Has it failed?” “No, no” replied Durand, and Broadfoot ran back to inform Sale whose Buglers immediately pealed out the advance whilst Dennie’s companies surged through the Cabul Gate to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. Once the assaulting troops had carried all before them, the Afghans threw themselves from the ramparts rather than face the British bayonets. Thus fell to the Army of the Indus the strongest fortress south of Cabul.

Macleod returned to India in the autumn of 1839 and received the thanks of the Government for his services in Afghanistan, and was mentioned in Sir John Keane’s despatch announcing the storm and capture of Ghuznee (London Gazette 30 October 1839). Lord Keane of Ghuznee, as he became, attributed the success of the Explosion Party solely to Thomson, although Captain Peat was rewarded with a Brevet-Majority and a C.B. But as Colonel Sandes states in his history The Indian Sappers and Miners, ‘there was no suitable decoration in those days for Durand and Macleod.’

The first occasion on which the Order of Merit was awarded to the Indian Army was for gallantry at the capture of Ghuznee, when Subadar Davey Singh and Jemadar Bhowaney Singh, together with seventeen Sepoys, received the 3rd Class of this newly instituted award. These were the men who carried the bags of powder and earth which were carefully arranged at the bottom of the Gate under the cool direction of Lieutenant Macleod.

In 1840 Macleod was appointed Executive Engineer in the Ramgarh Division’s Department of Public Works and returned to canal work. The following year he served as Acting Assistant Secretary to the Military Board, and, in 1844, he went on a four year furlough. He returned to duty as the Executive Engineer of the Midnapore Division in March 1850, but changed station the next month to serve in the same capacity at Agra till 1857. In the tumultuous May of that year, Macleod, who had been promoted Brevet-Major in 1856, was appointed temporary Military Secretary to the normally capable and resolute Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Provinces, John Russell Colvin, then on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As such Macleod was one of the officers who succeeded in bringing some order to the day to day existence of the 6,000 souls bottled up in the fort at Agra while a large a body of rebels and mutineers from the Gwalior Contingent lurked about the vicinity. When Colvin finally cracked, Macleod was obliged to make over the government to a provisional council. His fellow members of the council were Brigadier Polwhele, the senior military officer, and E. A. Reade of the Bengal Civil Service. For these services Mcleod was thanked in Colonel H. Cotton’s despatch on the operations at Agra (Calcutta Gazette 24 December 1857).

Following the arrival at Agra of the Delhi Field Force on 10 November, MacLeod was sent down to take charge of the entrenched camp at Cawnpore and make various improvements. J. W. Sherer in his book Havelock’s March on Cawnpore mentions him here as a man of ‘a very modest disposition’ and one who could not ‘escape the charge of eccentricity’. At the shabby affair of the Second Battle of Cawnpore where the British were defeated by numerically superior forces of Tantia Tope later that month, Macleod served on the staff of Major-General C. A. Windham and was duly thanked in the latter’s despatch of 30 November1857, with others, for ‘the great services they have voluntarily rendered’ (Calcutta Gazette 24 December 1857). MacLeod’s next and final appointment was as Superintending Engineer at Allahabad in August 1858. He became Lieutenant-Colonel on New Year’s Day 1859, and retired on 1 July 1860 with the rank of Honorary Colonel. Norman Macleod, one of the four ‘heroes of the Cabul Gate’, married Maria Isabella, the youngest daughter of J. Uniacke, Esq., of Chester and Bath, and died at Brighton on 23 January 1875.

Refs: Hodson Index (NAM); IOL L/MIL/10/30; IOL L/MIL/10/64 (folio 327); The Military Engineer in India (EWC Sandes); The Indian Sappers and Miners (EWC Sandes).