THE THIRD AFGHAN WAR, NORTH-WEST FRONTIER, 1919
2ND LIEUTENANT ERNEST DUDLEY FFRENCH, 1st GUIDES
ST. BARNABAS CHURCH,
BARNETBY-LE-WOLD,
LINCOLNSHIRE
CAPTAIN REGINALD WALLACE COPLAND, 5th NORTH STAFFORDSHIRES
CASTLE CHURCH
STAFFORD
Introduction
The opening of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’ makes the imperative of narrative succinctly clear – “Everything starts somewhere . . . there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, ravelling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began . . .”
If only it were that simple. As he says in another of his novels “it all depends on how much you know”, and that can make things very complicated.
I could start with the Zaka Khels rebelling in 1907, or the creation of ‘illegal’ Pathan arms factories; or the Indian Army being weakened and undermanned by the Western Front in Europe, or mullahs preaching jihad. But should I then go back and talk about Elphinstone’s disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842, or the Turkish diplomats lobbying for Afghan involvement in the war in 1916, or the complications of the Frontier tribal areas still causing turmoil and strife now?
The Background
No, it is all a book in itself, but I have still got to “start somewhere”, so I will choose February 20th, 1919, which is when Habibullah Khan, Emir of Afghanistan, was assassinated whilst on a hunting trip, leaving his succession in dispute. His brother, Nasrullah Khan, declared himself Emir, but so did one of Habibullah’s sons, Amanullah. After a brief political struggle, Amanullah prevailed, and by April Nasrullah was in prison and Amanullah was undisputed Emir – but undisputed does not mean secure. Nasrullah’s supporters, essentially older and conservative, were still influential, and Amanullah felt he had to do something to win their support. British India seemed a reasonable target.
There was resentment in Afghanistan that Habibullah’s neutrality during the First World War, when despite Turkish pressure he had refused to attack the British on their North-West Frontier at a time when much of the Indian Army was engaged in Europe, had failed to secure any meaningful concessions from the British, in particular over Afghanistan’s right to an independent foreign policy, which Britain, in an echo of the previous century’s Great Game with Russia, still claimed influence over. Amanullah therefore decided the time was right to strike against the British. He knew the British regiments in India were disaffected, waiting impatiently for demobilisation; he knew that the Indian Army was undermanned and weakened following the war; and he knew that nationalist unrest was developing in India. Moreover, he was well aware that the Pathan tribes of the frontier would welcome the opportunity to strike at the British (to be fair, they would probably welcome any opportunity to strike at anyone). He sent agents to foment unrest in the tribal areas and Peshawar, seat of Britain’s Frontier Administration, and armies to break through various passes on the border.
The Campaign
The first incursion was on the 3rd May, when forces under General Saleh Mohammad crossed the border at the Western end of the Khyber Pass, and seized an upland area known as The Bagh. In itself this was just upland pasture, but it was also the source of the water supply for the British garrison base at nearby Landi Kotal, which was garrisoned by five hundred sepoys, against whom Saleh could array five battalions and some artillery. And from the Khyber hills at least twenty thousand Afridi, Mohmand and Orakzau tribesmen were watching, waiting to see what would happen.
On the 6th May, worried that procrastination would encourage unrest among the tribes, Britain declared war on Afghanistan, and sent forth a brigade under General Crocker to reinforce Landi Kotal. Meanwhile unrest was becoming more vocal in Peshawar, with mobs gathering and having to be dispersed, and an increasing number of tribal sepoys (native troops) of the Khyber Rifles deserting – that was worrying when the troops in Landi Kotal were also Khyber Rifles.
On the 8th May the unrest in Peshawar was stifled, as the authorities closed the city gates and threatened to turn off the water supplies, and on the same day Crocker arrived at Landi Kotal. It took three days for Crocker’s forces (British, Dogra, Gurkha and Sikh) to capture The Bagh and push the Afghans back over the border, with the RAF bombing the enemy on their way. On the 13th May Crocker was allowed to take his forces over the border as well, intent on taking the town of Dakka, and thus control of the Western Khyber. After a decisive battle at a ridge nicknamed, from its appearance, Stonehenge Ridge, the Sikhs captured the ridge and the Afghan artillery mounted on it, prompting Saleh Mohammad to withdraw his forces. Crocker could feel that his campaign in the north had been successful, even though his men were still being sniped at by opportunistic Mohmand marksmen in the hills, and even though in the Eastern Khyber the desertions were continuing, prompting the authorities to disband the militia altogether and replace them with regulars.
Although the Khyber was now relatively sorted, the situation elsewhere was less so, and so Crocker’s plans to march on to Jalalabad had to be abandoned. In the south the British advanced from Quetta and seized the Afghan fortress of Spin Baldak, which settled the southern front, but in the central zone of Waziristan things were hotting up.
The Afghan general there, Nadir Khan, had fourteen battalions available against General Eustace’s five. Facing such odds Eustace decided to abandon the posts in the Kurram and Upper Tochi Valleys. Presumably he thought he might be able to concentrate his forces more effectively, but instead the troops manning those posts, mainly North Waziristan militia, decided to follow the example of their Khyber counterparts and desert, adding their numbers to the gathering tribal lashkars. When he heard of the abandonment of the posts, Roos-Keppel, the Frontier's Governor, was apparently furious, fearing with justification that it would be taken as encouragement by the local tribesmen, supporting the fear he had expressed when the war broke out – “Amanullah has lit a fire that will take us a great deal of trouble to put out”. To prove him right, the Southern Waziristan militia in Wana revolted, and attacked the British officers and the loyal (Gurkha, Hindi and Sikh) sepoys. Major Russell, the officer in charge, had to lead a sixty-mile fighting evacuation which was heralded as the heroic feat of the war, but which was still a retreat.
Nadir Shah, his forces now augmented by an estimated twelve thousand Pathan tribesmen, turned his forces towards Eustace and his force of eight hundred at Thal, and placed it under siege. The siege was to last for four days, until General Dyer (of Amritsar infamy) arrived with a force of three thousand regular troops, and put the Afghans to flight, aided by the fact that in the meantime Amanullah had decided to seek an armistice, and ordered Nadir Khan to cease his offensive. On the 3rd June Dyer took the Afghan camp at Yusuf Khel, and the Third Afghan war came to an end, although the actual peace was not signed until the 8th August.
The Men
“And where are our British memorial inscriptions?”, do I hear you ask? Why is it that, if the war had ceased, and the Afghans were defeated, Captain Reginald Wallace Copland and Lieutenant Ernest Dudley ffrench were to be both killed on the 16th July, and end up buried at Delhi’s India Gate Cemetery?
Reg Copland was an experienced officer. Still only twenty-five, but as a Lieutenant in the 5th North Staffordshires he had seen action in France from 1915 before being attached to the 1st/3rd Gurkhas. Born on the Isle of Sheppey, in 1894, he came from a family accustomed to travelling to get on. His grandfather, James, had moved from Scotland to Devon, setting up as a draper, and then earned his living from commissions. His father, William Wallace, became a civil engineer, and in the 1890s moved to Gibraltar to work as engineer for the Sanitary Authorities there, with responsibility for ensuring that polluted wells, that Gibraltar had been struggling to use for its water supply, ceased to be a problem. Reg was working as an articled clerk for a Stafford solicitor when he was mobilised in August 1914 and began his army career.
Ernest ffrench was an offshoot of the peerage, although his own beginnings were less grand than that implies. The ffrenches were landowners and MPs in Galway, but Ernest’s grandfather, George, was a clergyman, the vicar of Shinrone in County Offaly (home of Barack Obama’s earliest known ancestor), and then of Newton Solney in Derbyshire. His father, William, became a doctor, and when Ernest was a child practiced as a GP in Barnetby-le-Wold in North Lincolnshire. Born in February, 1900, Ernest was not experienced. The London Gazette of 2nd April, 1919, announces the King’s Approval for 2nd-Lieutenant ffrench to be admitted to the Indian Army, and he was posted to The Guides, and then attached to the 1st/3rd Gurkhas. The timeline is not precise, but his entire Indian experience cannot have exceeded three months.
The Action
A lashkar is a term for any large organised force of Frontier tribesmen, and on 14th July a large Waziri lashkar was reported to have entered the Zhob valley in Northern Baluchistan. At that time what is now the town of Zhob was known as Fort Sandeman, and was the British military base for the region. Having been encouraged by the British withdrawal from their garrisons in Waziristan, the Waziri tribes were now campaigning for independence of their own, believing they could gain it as part of the final peace agreement between Afghanistan and the British.
On the 15th a convoy attempting to travel between Lakaband Kili in the Upper Zhob Valley and Fort Sandeman was attacked by a force of about seven hundred tribesmen from the Waziri lashkar. Outnumbered and outfought, the convoy retreated to Lakaband, and called for assistance. The next day a force set out to relieve the convoy, and escort it back to Fort Sandeman. The tribesmen, obviously feeling confident, attacked the relief force en route. Although it did manage to reach Lakaband, its commanding officer was killed – was that officer Captain Copland? We do know that in combat the tribesmen always prioritised the killing of the British officers.
Having met the convoy the combined forces set off back, and reached Kapip, about ten miles from Fort Sandeman, without incident. Then, however, the Waziris attacked again, and in a lot more force. An estimated four thousand attacked the convoy from all sides. One hundred Indian soldiers were killed or wounded. Of the surviving six British officers, four were killed, including Ernest ffrench, and the other two wounded. The survivors undertook an organised evacuation, taking their casualties with them, and abandoning the convoy’s vehicles (most of the drivers had fled during the attack) and their contents, and disabling their two artillery pieces before retiring. Amanullah had indeed started something when he decided to send his army over the border, and Roos-Keppel’s fears were to be realised. The peace agreement did not grant Waziristan independence (although the Afghans did get control of their own foreign policy), and the Waziri tribes’ guerrilla actions were to continue for another twenty years.
Afterwards
One footnote about 2nd-Lieutenant ffrench. His parents retired to Dorset, and died there. His sister married into the van Straubenzee family, and died in Cheltenham in the 1980s. His brother worked in Argentina before dying in Spain. St. Mary's Church in Barnetby was made redundant in 1972, although the graveyard is still used for burials. It's a bit sad, but I suspect there will be no-one in Barnetby-le-Wold with any link to, or memory of, Ernest ffrench, despite the memorial.
The opening of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’ makes the imperative of narrative succinctly clear – “Everything starts somewhere . . . there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, ravelling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began . . .”
If only it were that simple. As he says in another of his novels “it all depends on how much you know”, and that can make things very complicated.
I could start with the Zaka Khels rebelling in 1907, or the creation of ‘illegal’ Pathan arms factories; or the Indian Army being weakened and undermanned by the Western Front in Europe, or mullahs preaching jihad. But should I then go back and talk about Elphinstone’s disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842, or the Turkish diplomats lobbying for Afghan involvement in the war in 1916, or the complications of the Frontier tribal areas still causing turmoil and strife now?
The Background
No, it is all a book in itself, but I have still got to “start somewhere”, so I will choose February 20th, 1919, which is when Habibullah Khan, Emir of Afghanistan, was assassinated whilst on a hunting trip, leaving his succession in dispute. His brother, Nasrullah Khan, declared himself Emir, but so did one of Habibullah’s sons, Amanullah. After a brief political struggle, Amanullah prevailed, and by April Nasrullah was in prison and Amanullah was undisputed Emir – but undisputed does not mean secure. Nasrullah’s supporters, essentially older and conservative, were still influential, and Amanullah felt he had to do something to win their support. British India seemed a reasonable target.
There was resentment in Afghanistan that Habibullah’s neutrality during the First World War, when despite Turkish pressure he had refused to attack the British on their North-West Frontier at a time when much of the Indian Army was engaged in Europe, had failed to secure any meaningful concessions from the British, in particular over Afghanistan’s right to an independent foreign policy, which Britain, in an echo of the previous century’s Great Game with Russia, still claimed influence over. Amanullah therefore decided the time was right to strike against the British. He knew the British regiments in India were disaffected, waiting impatiently for demobilisation; he knew that the Indian Army was undermanned and weakened following the war; and he knew that nationalist unrest was developing in India. Moreover, he was well aware that the Pathan tribes of the frontier would welcome the opportunity to strike at the British (to be fair, they would probably welcome any opportunity to strike at anyone). He sent agents to foment unrest in the tribal areas and Peshawar, seat of Britain’s Frontier Administration, and armies to break through various passes on the border.
The Campaign
The first incursion was on the 3rd May, when forces under General Saleh Mohammad crossed the border at the Western end of the Khyber Pass, and seized an upland area known as The Bagh. In itself this was just upland pasture, but it was also the source of the water supply for the British garrison base at nearby Landi Kotal, which was garrisoned by five hundred sepoys, against whom Saleh could array five battalions and some artillery. And from the Khyber hills at least twenty thousand Afridi, Mohmand and Orakzau tribesmen were watching, waiting to see what would happen.
On the 6th May, worried that procrastination would encourage unrest among the tribes, Britain declared war on Afghanistan, and sent forth a brigade under General Crocker to reinforce Landi Kotal. Meanwhile unrest was becoming more vocal in Peshawar, with mobs gathering and having to be dispersed, and an increasing number of tribal sepoys (native troops) of the Khyber Rifles deserting – that was worrying when the troops in Landi Kotal were also Khyber Rifles.
On the 8th May the unrest in Peshawar was stifled, as the authorities closed the city gates and threatened to turn off the water supplies, and on the same day Crocker arrived at Landi Kotal. It took three days for Crocker’s forces (British, Dogra, Gurkha and Sikh) to capture The Bagh and push the Afghans back over the border, with the RAF bombing the enemy on their way. On the 13th May Crocker was allowed to take his forces over the border as well, intent on taking the town of Dakka, and thus control of the Western Khyber. After a decisive battle at a ridge nicknamed, from its appearance, Stonehenge Ridge, the Sikhs captured the ridge and the Afghan artillery mounted on it, prompting Saleh Mohammad to withdraw his forces. Crocker could feel that his campaign in the north had been successful, even though his men were still being sniped at by opportunistic Mohmand marksmen in the hills, and even though in the Eastern Khyber the desertions were continuing, prompting the authorities to disband the militia altogether and replace them with regulars.
Although the Khyber was now relatively sorted, the situation elsewhere was less so, and so Crocker’s plans to march on to Jalalabad had to be abandoned. In the south the British advanced from Quetta and seized the Afghan fortress of Spin Baldak, which settled the southern front, but in the central zone of Waziristan things were hotting up.
The Afghan general there, Nadir Khan, had fourteen battalions available against General Eustace’s five. Facing such odds Eustace decided to abandon the posts in the Kurram and Upper Tochi Valleys. Presumably he thought he might be able to concentrate his forces more effectively, but instead the troops manning those posts, mainly North Waziristan militia, decided to follow the example of their Khyber counterparts and desert, adding their numbers to the gathering tribal lashkars. When he heard of the abandonment of the posts, Roos-Keppel, the Frontier's Governor, was apparently furious, fearing with justification that it would be taken as encouragement by the local tribesmen, supporting the fear he had expressed when the war broke out – “Amanullah has lit a fire that will take us a great deal of trouble to put out”. To prove him right, the Southern Waziristan militia in Wana revolted, and attacked the British officers and the loyal (Gurkha, Hindi and Sikh) sepoys. Major Russell, the officer in charge, had to lead a sixty-mile fighting evacuation which was heralded as the heroic feat of the war, but which was still a retreat.
Nadir Shah, his forces now augmented by an estimated twelve thousand Pathan tribesmen, turned his forces towards Eustace and his force of eight hundred at Thal, and placed it under siege. The siege was to last for four days, until General Dyer (of Amritsar infamy) arrived with a force of three thousand regular troops, and put the Afghans to flight, aided by the fact that in the meantime Amanullah had decided to seek an armistice, and ordered Nadir Khan to cease his offensive. On the 3rd June Dyer took the Afghan camp at Yusuf Khel, and the Third Afghan war came to an end, although the actual peace was not signed until the 8th August.
The Men
“And where are our British memorial inscriptions?”, do I hear you ask? Why is it that, if the war had ceased, and the Afghans were defeated, Captain Reginald Wallace Copland and Lieutenant Ernest Dudley ffrench were to be both killed on the 16th July, and end up buried at Delhi’s India Gate Cemetery?
Reg Copland was an experienced officer. Still only twenty-five, but as a Lieutenant in the 5th North Staffordshires he had seen action in France from 1915 before being attached to the 1st/3rd Gurkhas. Born on the Isle of Sheppey, in 1894, he came from a family accustomed to travelling to get on. His grandfather, James, had moved from Scotland to Devon, setting up as a draper, and then earned his living from commissions. His father, William Wallace, became a civil engineer, and in the 1890s moved to Gibraltar to work as engineer for the Sanitary Authorities there, with responsibility for ensuring that polluted wells, that Gibraltar had been struggling to use for its water supply, ceased to be a problem. Reg was working as an articled clerk for a Stafford solicitor when he was mobilised in August 1914 and began his army career.
Ernest ffrench was an offshoot of the peerage, although his own beginnings were less grand than that implies. The ffrenches were landowners and MPs in Galway, but Ernest’s grandfather, George, was a clergyman, the vicar of Shinrone in County Offaly (home of Barack Obama’s earliest known ancestor), and then of Newton Solney in Derbyshire. His father, William, became a doctor, and when Ernest was a child practiced as a GP in Barnetby-le-Wold in North Lincolnshire. Born in February, 1900, Ernest was not experienced. The London Gazette of 2nd April, 1919, announces the King’s Approval for 2nd-Lieutenant ffrench to be admitted to the Indian Army, and he was posted to The Guides, and then attached to the 1st/3rd Gurkhas. The timeline is not precise, but his entire Indian experience cannot have exceeded three months.
The Action
A lashkar is a term for any large organised force of Frontier tribesmen, and on 14th July a large Waziri lashkar was reported to have entered the Zhob valley in Northern Baluchistan. At that time what is now the town of Zhob was known as Fort Sandeman, and was the British military base for the region. Having been encouraged by the British withdrawal from their garrisons in Waziristan, the Waziri tribes were now campaigning for independence of their own, believing they could gain it as part of the final peace agreement between Afghanistan and the British.
On the 15th a convoy attempting to travel between Lakaband Kili in the Upper Zhob Valley and Fort Sandeman was attacked by a force of about seven hundred tribesmen from the Waziri lashkar. Outnumbered and outfought, the convoy retreated to Lakaband, and called for assistance. The next day a force set out to relieve the convoy, and escort it back to Fort Sandeman. The tribesmen, obviously feeling confident, attacked the relief force en route. Although it did manage to reach Lakaband, its commanding officer was killed – was that officer Captain Copland? We do know that in combat the tribesmen always prioritised the killing of the British officers.
Having met the convoy the combined forces set off back, and reached Kapip, about ten miles from Fort Sandeman, without incident. Then, however, the Waziris attacked again, and in a lot more force. An estimated four thousand attacked the convoy from all sides. One hundred Indian soldiers were killed or wounded. Of the surviving six British officers, four were killed, including Ernest ffrench, and the other two wounded. The survivors undertook an organised evacuation, taking their casualties with them, and abandoning the convoy’s vehicles (most of the drivers had fled during the attack) and their contents, and disabling their two artillery pieces before retiring. Amanullah had indeed started something when he decided to send his army over the border, and Roos-Keppel’s fears were to be realised. The peace agreement did not grant Waziristan independence (although the Afghans did get control of their own foreign policy), and the Waziri tribes’ guerrilla actions were to continue for another twenty years.
Afterwards
One footnote about 2nd-Lieutenant ffrench. His parents retired to Dorset, and died there. His sister married into the van Straubenzee family, and died in Cheltenham in the 1980s. His brother worked in Argentina before dying in Spain. St. Mary's Church in Barnetby was made redundant in 1972, although the graveyard is still used for burials. It's a bit sad, but I suspect there will be no-one in Barnetby-le-Wold with any link to, or memory of, Ernest ffrench, despite the memorial.
TO THE DEAR AND HONOURED MEMORY OF ERNEST DUDLEY FFRENCH 2ND LIEUT. 1ST GUIDES. I.A. ATTD 3/1ST GURKHA RIFLES WHO FELL IN ACTION NEAR FORT SANDEMAN ON THE AFGHAN FRONTIER, JULY 16TH 1919. AGED 19 YEARS. ELDER SON OF WILLIAM J. L. AND HELEN FFRENCH OF BARNETBY-LE-WOLD MALO MORI QUAM FOEDARI
CAPTAIN REGINALD WALLACE COPLAND, 3/1st GURKHA RIFLES, KILLED IN ACTION NEAR FORT SANDEMAN, NORTH-WEST PROVINCE OF INDIA, 16 JULY 1919
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CAPTAIN REGINALD WALLACE COPLAND, 3/1st GURKHA RIFLES, KILLED IN ACTION NEAR FORT SANDEMAN, NORTH-WEST PROVINCE OF INDIA, 16 JULY 1919
COMMENT ON THIS STORY ON FACEBOOK
Sources
Photo
5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, North-West Frontier - Wikimedia Commons
St. Mary's, Barnetby-le-Wold - by David Wright, geograph.org.uk, on Wikimedia Commons
Military
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhob
http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/Handlist_H.htm - my sincere thanks to the staff of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge for allowing me access to newspaper cuttings covering the attack on the convoy, from the papers of E.J.B. Hudson of the Indian Telegraph Service
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk
Record of Service of Solicitors and Articled Clerks with His Majesty's Forces, 1914-19 (Spottiswood, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd., London, 1920) - available online at www.archive.org
Geneology
Ancestry.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Church,_Barnetby
http://thepeerage.com
Paper-based
Khyber: British India's North West Frontier - The Story of an Imperial Migraine', Charles Miller, (Macdonald and Jane's, London, 1977)
Every Rock, Every Hill: A Plain tale of the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan', Victoria Schofield (Buchan and Enright, 1984)
Two Hundred Years of British Hydrogeology' ed. J.D. Mather (Geological Society 2004)
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2013
Photo
5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, North-West Frontier - Wikimedia Commons
St. Mary's, Barnetby-le-Wold - by David Wright, geograph.org.uk, on Wikimedia Commons
Military
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhob
http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/Handlist_H.htm - my sincere thanks to the staff of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge for allowing me access to newspaper cuttings covering the attack on the convoy, from the papers of E.J.B. Hudson of the Indian Telegraph Service
http://www.london-gazette.co.uk
Record of Service of Solicitors and Articled Clerks with His Majesty's Forces, 1914-19 (Spottiswood, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd., London, 1920) - available online at www.archive.org
Geneology
Ancestry.co.ukhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary%27s_Church,_Barnetby
http://thepeerage.com
Paper-based
Khyber: British India's North West Frontier - The Story of an Imperial Migraine', Charles Miller, (Macdonald and Jane's, London, 1977)
Every Rock, Every Hill: A Plain tale of the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan', Victoria Schofield (Buchan and Enright, 1984)
Two Hundred Years of British Hydrogeology' ed. J.D. Mather (Geological Society 2004)
© Jonathan Dewhirst 2013
