Beschreibung:

The Brian Ritchie Collection of H.E.I.C. and British India Medals The Indian Mutiny medal to Allan Octavian Hume, C.B., Indian Civil Service, Magistrate and Collector, who had an outstanding record of ‘military’ service in Agra during the mutiny, and who was a founding member and longtime General Secretary of the Indian National Congress Indian Mutiny 1857-59, no clasp (A. O. Hume, Civil Service) nearly extremely fine £1200-1500 Footnote Allan Octavian Hume, a son of the surgeon and enlightened politician Joseph Hume, M.P., was born in 1829, and was educated at Haileybury, where he excelled, and at London University. He was admitted to the Bengal Civil Service in 1849 and by his ‘activity and acuteness’ obtained prior to the Mutiny ‘the first great prize of the service - the charge of a district - in an unusually short space of time’, having ‘been selected for what was deemed a post of special difficulty, as magistrate and collector of Etawa’, situated some seventy-five miles south east of Agra and about a hundred miles north west of Cawnpore. On learning of events at Meerut and Delhi, Hume organised police patrols to watch the roads and prevent mutineers from infecting his district. On 16 May one of his patrols brought in seven Sowars of the 3rd Light Cavalry from Meerut, but omitted to relieve them of their arms. At Etawah the Sowars levelled their carbines at the quarter-guard of the 9th N.I., and drawing their swords attacked the European officers. In the mêlée that ensued five of the troopers were killed and of the other two who escaped one was captured shortly afterwards. ‘This was the first retributive blow that fell upon the mutineers of the Third Cavalry. They were all Mohamedans (Pathans) of Futtehpore.’ Events deteriorated rapidly until the troops at the Station were in open revolt. Hume was briefly able to restore order in his district, though he suspended the collection revenue, shrewdly considering that having lost five lakhs by the plunder of his treasuries, it was wiser to leave owed monies ‘in the hands of a thousand landholders than in a treasury guarded by sepoys too likely to mutiny’. Miscreants, however, were brought promptly to justice and at his hands received as impartial a trial as the circumstances allowed. He hanged only seven convicted murderers, and these ‘by methods which caused the least suffering’. By contrast, it was the proud boast of a colleague in another district that he hanged a hundred mutineers in three days - Hume was determined to uphold the law and steadfastly refused to be intimidated by those who venomously attacked him for his ‘excess of leniency’. Ultimately, however, he was forced to abandon Etawah in June following the mutiny of the Gwalior Contingent, and take refuge with other Europeans from stations in the North West Provinces at Agra. In early July 1857 he served as a volunteer gunner ‘with the right half-battery’ when the officers and able bodied men of that garrison sallied forth to Sucheta to do battle with mutineers from Neemuch, but were roundly beaten and driven back to Agra under a harassing fire. Hume returned to Etawah in December 1857 and re-organised the police, but was unable to re-establish the authority of the Government nor the collection of revenue until the end of 1858 when he succeeded in raising the large sum of twelve lakhs. For the greater part of 1858 his service was ‘little but a record of fighting; and certainly no officer of his cloth saw more purely military service.’ In March 1858 he was joined by a column under Colonel Riddell of unspecified strength. The successful operations of Sir Hugh Rose’s Central India Field Force, in May and June 1858, then had an adverse effect on Hume’s efforts to clear his district, as large bodies of retreating rebels began to pass through Etawah in an attempt to escape into still disturbed Oudh. On 2 July Hume was forced through broken health to hand over his district temporarily to Mr G. E. Lance who, after a series