Siege of Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India, 1826

Lieutenant Joseph Tindal, Bengal Engineers
Holy Trinity, Skipton, Yorkshire 

The Background

Fifty-five kilometres west of Agra, on the edge of Rajahstan, Bharatpur is, for India, a medium-sized city, the centre of an agricultural region, and in its centre stand a collection of government offices and museums called the Lohagarh Fort. Just under two hundred years ago, however, Bhurtpore (as it was spelt) was the capital of the Jat Kingdom, its fortress had a reputation for being impregnable, and among those looking up at its cliffs and walls was a young engineering officer, a Yorkshireman, from the edge of the Dales, called Joseph Tindal.

It was December, 1825, and Tindal was there because in February of that year the Raja, Baldeo Singh, had died. He was succeeded by his six year-old son, Bulwant Singh, supported by a regent  approved by the British - but the new king’s cousin, Durgan Sal, had other ideas. At the end of March Durgan usurped the throne. The British Resident in Delhi, Sir David Ocherlony, warned the local people and chieftains not to support Durgan, but he was ignored.

 Durgan and his followers had two reasons for confidence: the British were already committed to a war in Burma, and the Jats calculated that that meant there would not be sufficient troops left over to fight them; moreover, there was a belief that the fortress in Bhurtpore was impregnable,  famed for an episode twenty years previously when it had withstood a siege and several assaults by a British army under General Lake. The British had suffered very few military setbacks in India, so Bhurtpore assumed a symbolic significance for the independent princes of North India. As James Creighton recounted in his memoir of the coming conflict, all of Northern India was watching Bhurtpore, and if Durgan Sal succeeded in his defiance then “not a chieftain who could muster one hundred followers but would have brought them against us”.  Action had to be taken.

In July 1825 Ochterlony died, and was replaced by Sir Charles Metcalf , who had been General Lake’s political assistant twenty years earlier. Metcalf called on Viscount Combermere, who as General Stapleton Cotton had previously commanded the cavalry in the Peninsular War, and dispatched him to Bhurtpore with twenty-seven thousand men.

The Man 

Joseph Tindal was with those troops, one of several officers from the Bengal Engineers. He was the son and grandson of Skipton attorneys, with two elder brothers who had also gone into the law (one becoming a barrister at The Inns of Court), but Joseph must have been tempted by the potential glamour, excitement and potential for wealth that lay in India. At Bhurtpore Combermere needed the engineers to prepare siege trenches and to create the mine galleries with which he intended to bring down the fort’s walls. Tindal would have work to do.

The Siege

The campaign started well for the British. They arrived on December 10th, and almost immediately secured the Jheel Bund, the earth wall surrounding the city’s lake, which if breached would have flooded the fort’s outer defensive ditches and the surrounding countryside, thus making Combermere’s task even more difficult.  Taking advantage of this success the British went on over the next two weeks to secure a number of local villages, as well as an area of ground known as Baldeo Singh’s Garden, and proceeded to construct redoubts in preparation for a siege. Trenches were dug to connect the strongpoints, and guns and mortars positioned.  It was not all uneventful, as cannons were firing from the fort, and there were a number of skirmishes involving Jat cavalry, who were stationed in the jungle outside the fort.

On Christmas Eve the British guns opened fire (Christmas was not forgotten; the troops received a double ration of liquor on the 25th), and the pattern for the next week was established. The British guns pounded the fort’s east wall and gates. The Jat artillery responded with some accuracy, apparently directed by a renegade artilleryman named Herbert, who had noted the positions of the British guns before deserting. Despite the enemy fire more advanced batteries were established, with sustained fire on the fort’s north-east angle, and also onto its west face. Then on January 1st a mine gallery was begun, directed at that north-east corner, and it was then that the first officer fatality of the campaign was suffered. Combermere wrote to Metcalf, “I regret I have to report the death of First-Lieutenant Tindal, a promising young engineering officer”. Joseph had been working in the trenches when he was hit by a cannon-shot.

For another 17 days the siege continued. The artillery persevered, the Jats attempted various sorties which were repulsed, and mines were laid by both sides. On January 4th breaches in the walls were apparent, and storming parties were organized, but the breaches were deemed impracticable, and so the mining and cannonades continued.

The Attack

On the 18th the attack finally began. At 8.30 a large mine was exploded under the north-east angle, and that was the signal for a concerted assault on two breaches and a gate. It was surprisingly easy. Within an hour the British troops had penetrated the walls, and by four in the afternoon the garrison had surrendered, with Durgan Sal captured as he tried to flee the city. Bulwant Singh was restored to the throne, and the British had secured their influence over the Jats, destroying the myth of Bhurtpore’s impregnability in the process. The deserter Herbert did not get away. He was caught and hanged.

Afterwards

Joseph Tindal was the only engineering officer to die in the battle, although two others were wounded. The ambition that led a boy from Skipton to a death in Rajastan can perhaps be gleaned from the future careers of his fellow officers at Bhurtpore: his commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Astbury, died in 1840 as a Major-General; Captain Edward Garstin became a General, and Superintending Engineer for the North-West Provinces, dying in Bangalore in 1871; Lieutenant Henry Goodwyn became a General before retiring to Bournemouth, where he died in 1886 (he also fancied himself as an architect, and designed the Gwalior Monument which can still be seen in Calicut); Lieutenant Archibald Irvine became a Lieutenant-Colonel, and was Director of Works for the Admiralty when he died in 1849; Lieutenant John Colvin died at Leintwardine House in Herefordshire in 1871, a retired Colonel of the Royal Engineers, having constructed the canal systems that earned him the soubriquet “the father of irrigation” in North India. Fame and fortune for all, as they were the ones lucky enough not to be struck by the cannonball that ended Joseph Tindal’s career.

Sacred to the memory of Lieut. Joseph Tindal of the East India Company’s Bengal Engineers, 3rd son of William and Ann Tindal of this place who after a short, but not undistinguished, career met the death of a soldier at the memorable siege of Bhurtpore on the 1st of January 1826 in the 23rd year of his age.


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 © Jon Dewhirst 2013

Sources
Photos
Holy Trinity Church, Skipton - Immanuel Giel, Wikimedia Commons
The Storming of Bhurtpore, 1826 - unknown artist; the original of this painting is available to view at the museum of The Prince of Wales' Own Regiment of Yorkshire, Tower Street, York

Military
http://wiki.fibis.org/index.php/Jat_Warhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stapleton_Cotton,_1st_Viscount_Combermere
'Narrative of the Siege and Capture of Bhurtpore', James Norman Creighton, Bhurtpore, 1830) - viewable online

Genealogy
www.ancestry.co.uk