'Let The Killing Begin', Meerut, India, 1857

​Colonel John Finnis, 11th Regiment, Bengal Army

St. Leonard's, Hythe, Kent

The Finnis family were not originally natives of Hythe. The patriarch of the family, Robert, was an upholsterer who moved into the town from nearby Dover in the late 18th Century, but he was no idle drifter. He managed to be elected Mayor eight times between 1794 and 1826, and his family's memorial tablets are prominent in the town's St. Leonard's Church. Robert and his wife, Elizabeth, both died and were buried in the town, as was son George. Another son, Thomas Quested, became a successful London businessman and Lord Mayor of London and died in Essex, but was buried in Hythe. However, three sons never came home: Robert died fighting the United States Navy in 1813; Stephen died in Dinapur in India in 1819; and John became the first victim of the Indian Mutiny (or War of Independence, depending on your viewpoint) when it erupted in Meerut on May 10th, 1857.

Popular history often tries to make things look simple - X happened because of Z, and if Y had been done then all would have turned out differently - but of course few things are that straightforward. Over the years the Indian Mutiny has usually been attributed to cartridges greased with beef or pork fat, and that was a factor, but not the only one. You have also got to throw in princely families and their followers upset at East India Company interference in their affairs, especially in deciding who inherits titles. Then consider higher-caste Hindus  chafing at losing income and influence as the Company increased its own. Throw in resentment at the increasingly evangelistic Christian churches as they sought new converts and insulted and denigrated native religions. Mix in long-standing simmering hostility to an occupying power, stirred by covert agitators, and add a growing awareness that the number of British, as opposed to native, troops was considerably lower than it had been, with the British Army struggling with making up its losses after the Crimean War whilst also engaging in a growing number of campaigns around the world as the Empire grew. It would not take much to start trouble, and in Meerut the trouble started..

​In late March 1857 a Brahmin, higher caste, sepoy in Barrackpore, in West Bengal, incited his fellow soldiers to attack British officers in protest at the use of the greased cartridges. They did not support him, and he was arrested, tried and executed, but his story spread. A month later, in Meerut, north-west of Delhi, eighty-five sepoys of the 3rd Bengal Cavalry, all higher-caste and including several respected veterans, refused to use the new cartridges. 

How should the British commanding officer, Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth, have responded? It is an interesting question, as the sepoys had refused to obey a direct order. Having said that, there was obviously a belief amongst the sepoys that the new cartridges were greased with fat that would defile their religion, and even now it is difficult to establish whether that was true or not. Could Carmichael-Smyth have been more emollient? Probably; he could certainly have avoided what he did. The eighty-five were paraded in front of all the Indian regiments, who were forced to watch proceedings, bearing unloaded muskets whilst surrounded by armed British soldiers and artillery. The eight-five were formally, and literally, stripped of their uniforms and shackled before being led off to start ten years' imprisonment. The ceremony was clearly designed to humiliate the offenders and cow the remainder. Unfortunately, it had completely the opposite effect, and John Fiddis was to feel it first.

Fiddis was born in Hythe in 1804. He joined the 11th Regiment of the Bengal Army at the age of sixteen and by 1854 had risen up to the height of Colonel of the regiment. Along the way he had married Sarah Roche in 1838, and had fathered seven children, born in various cantonments around northern India. The eldest, Robert Francis, was nearly eighteen in 1857 and serving with the Royal Navy, and second son, John, was elsewhere in the Indian Army. George, the third son, was in England, living with his merchant uncle, Thomas Quested Finnis. The remaining four were, I presume, with their mother: Thomas Quested; Louisa Jane; Sophia Margaretta; and the youngest, Lucy Ann, born in 1855. 

The evening of the punishment parade a crowd of sepoys burst into the jail and released the prisoners before marching toward the cantonment. John Fiddis, having apparently calmed his own regiment (or so we are told), went out to persuade the rioters to put down their arms and return to their barracks. Inflamed with anger and, probably, drink, they refused, and then the riot turned to mutiny. Colonel Fiddis was shot off his horse, and fell dead to the ground. He was the first European officer to be killed in the Mutiny, although the fate of any lower-rank soldiers caught in the unrest in the bazaar and the jail is unknown. What is known is that a number of European officers, wives and children were escorted to safety in nearby Rampur, so presumably that is how Sarah Finnis and her four young children escaped. They eventually all arrived back in England and, apart from the two eldest, made their lives there. One of Lucy Ann's children, Captain John Vallentin, won the Victoria Cross for leading an attack on Zillebecke, in Belgium, in November, 1914. Lucy survived him for over twenty years, being the last of her siblings to pass away when she died, in Battersea, in 1935. Meerut must have seemed a long way away.

Colonel Carmichael-Smyth survived his obduracy and lack of empathy, dying in his late eighties in his house in Holland Park. He comes out of the story with a bad press, but if we were in the same position . . . ? Who knows?

Sources

ancestry.co.uk
www.hythehistoryblog.wordpress.com - a wonderfully detailed history of prominent Hythe families
'The 200-year-old Meerut cemetery where nine British soldiers lie' - article by Ishita Mishtra in the History & Culture section of thehindu.com dated 26th May 2018
​'When the dead speak. Hidden stories of 1857 from Ground Zero in Meerut' - article on www.news18.com by Uday Singh Rana
'Meerut Church Falls Silent Again' - article by Jose Kavi on mattersindia.com dated May 10th 2020
www.vconline.org.uk - site dedicated to those awarded the Victoria Cross
'Meerut Cantonment and the War of Independence 1857' - article by Dr. Amit Pathak in the Journal of the United Service Institute of India, 2010
gw.geneanet.org - page covering the Finnis family tree