Lucknow Changed The 'Luck' Of The British In 1857

By K.D.L.Khan The British are very finicky about the hoisting and hauling down of their national flag -the Union Jack.

In the hey days of the British empire, raising the flag on sunrise and taking it down at sunset was a very sacred task.

But only one exception was made in this rule.Lucknow.

At the shattered remains of the former British residency at Lucknow, the flag was flying constantly for 24 hours a day for 90 years- from July 1857 to August 15th 1947, in memory of the heroic defence of the building against Indian sepoys, by the British.

The last flag was ceremoniously taken down at midnight on 15th August 1947 and was given to King George VI, the last British Emperor of India, for his collections of historic British flags.

If Delhi was the symbolic centre of the Indian Mutiny, and Cawnpore provided its most horrific episode, it was Lucknow that caught the imagination of the British public and became, perhaps, the most well known action of all Britain's 19th century wars.

It had all the dramatic elements of a siege and even better, a happy ending, as the British soldiers said "I am in luck, now." The British resident at the Lucknow was Henry Lawrence who, with his brother John, had worked in the Punjab governed it.

Lawrence knew the dangers of the British position in Lucknow and when mutiny swept through Oudh not long after the events at Meerut, he was reasonably well prepared.

He decided to make his stand inside the Residency compound and unlike Wheeler at Cawnpore he fortified it strongly.ÿ Into this 33 acre refuge Lawrence gathered the entire European community of Lucknow and a garrison of about 1,700 men.

Half the defending force were sepoys who had remained loyal to the British.

On the night of 30th May almost all native troops in Lucknow rebelled but were successfully defeated and dispersed by Lawrence on 31st May.

The Siege of the Lucknow thus commenced from 2nd of July 1857.

The British strength of Combatants/Non Combatants in the Residency was as following a.

Fighting Men (1) Europeans - 1008.

(2) Indian sepoysÿÿÿÿÿÿ - 712 (230 deserted during the siege).

Non Combatants 1280 (including 600 European women and children).

A British historian places the sepoys besieging the residency at 6,000, though still being reinforced; against British strength of about seventeen hundred.

The Sepoy regiments retained their military formation and in addition were reinforced by soldiers from Oudh State's army.

What hampered the sepoys and which proved to be the ultimate salvation of the British was the lack of experienced leadership.

Instead of concentrating artillery fire on vulnerable points of the Residency defences, which could easily be breached they kept on firing haphazardly and also did not bother to coordinate their fire with the assaults.

They did try to storm the walls but were always beaten back.

Twice they breached the perimeter and British sallies to regain lost ground or eliminate strong points near the walls became necessary and commonplace.

Trying to undermine the walls, the charges the sepoys detonated sometimes exploded well inside the residency compound.

Many of the British soldiers, were Cornishmen - former tin miners, who were used to working underground and it helped them to find out the places where the sepoys were mining.

Interestingly there were VIP Indian prisoners within the garrison.These were the ex King Wajid Ali Shah's elder brother Mustafa Ali Khan, two Mughal Princes Mirza Mohammad Shikoh and Mohammad Humayun Khan, Nawab Rukn-ud-Daula and the Raja of Tulsipur.

The Sepoys did not spare any nook or corner of the Residency area with their artillery and musket fire, save the rooms north of the Hospital area where these prisoners were lodged By September 1857, the garrison had been reduced to 350 British soldiers and 300 loyal sepoys, with over 550 women, children, sick and wounded to look after.

On 25th September 1857 .the besieged had luck as a force under Sir Henry Havelock and Sir James Outram managed to break through the armed ring of sepoys and entered the fort.

Unfortunately, there were only a thousand of them and no sooner had the Residency gates closed behind them than the siege continued.

But Lucknow was too hot to hold and as soon as possible all the Britishers and their Indian allies marched out of the city to Cawnpore.

Throughout it all, the Union Jack, which flew from the Residency roof, was never taken down, as custom dictated it should be each evening.ÿ Day and night it hung limply from the flagpole -ÿa symbol of British defiance.

The British remembered to take down the Residency flag before they left and it was only in 1858 they were able to reenter Lucknow..

The ruins of the Residency ( the remains of a church, mosque, post office, jail, school, banquet hall and houses) remind us of the great uprising of 1857 in Lucknow.They are preserved in the same condition in which they came under central protection in the year 1920.

An archaelogical museum has been established in view of its importance, during the First War of Indian Independence.

And it is housed in a portion which was annex of the main Residenct building The museum, transports viewers back to the year 1857, giving them an insight into the events and the mood of the times.

This has been achieved by means of a meticulous chronological arrangement of exhibits in the galleries of the ground floor and the basement.

The exhibits comprise an extensive range of material - from old photographs, lithographs, paintings and documents to artifacts and memorabilia, which invoke the high points of a revolt that has remained embedded in the collective memory of the people."