Page 102 - KRH Regimental Journal 2022

100 The Regimental Journal of The King’s Royal Hussars
Cartoon from The Lloyds Cartoon from The Hawk, April 1976 Corporal Byrne Weekly News May 1911
Rose Murray married Sergeant Thomas Summerell of the 14th Light Dragoons at Meerut, on 19 November 1851, aged just 16. She remembered ‘as we came out of church we were carried to quarters in palanquins. We had a palanquin each, for there was not room for us both in the same one’.
One of her most entertaining recollections is from the Lloyds Weekly News, who interviewed Rose in May 1911. She spoke of a ‘fierce’ confrontation between the regimental wives and the Commanding Officer, and although reported to have taken place on the eve of the Indian Mutiny it is more likely to have been a few years earlier. At the time, the Commanding Officer was Lt Col Henry Edward Doherty CB, who had commanded the 14th since 1850. At the Battle of Ramnuggur, after Colonel Havelock was mortally wounded, Doherty led the three squadrons of 14th Dragoons out of the Sikh entrenchments to safety. From the interview, Lloyds reported:
‘ “Our Regiment” – and it was interesting to note the personal touch whenever she referred to her husband’s regiment – “came down to Meerut when we left Lahore.... We were really on our way back to England, and the women and the children were actually on the ‘bum-boats’ ready to be taken on board the
Yeoman Gaoler Stephen Sweeney.
Credit: David Coleman, Archivist of the Yeoman Warders
troopship. Then we heard that our men had been sent back to Meerut, and we all refused to go to England. Colonel Doherty, who was the commanding officer, had all the married men of the regiment paraded, and he told them it was their duty to make their wives obey orders and that they must go back to England. The men, of course, listened in silence and then went to canton- ment and told their wives... One or two [of the wives] were appointed to speak for the rest, and they interviewed Colonel Doherty. They told him that they knew trouble was brewing that if they went home to England they would not see their husbands for six or seven years, and they set him at defiance.
In despair the poor distracted colonel telegraphed to the Commander-in-Chief, who was in Calcutta at that time, and asked for instructions. In reply he got a telegram authorising the women to remain, so we won the day.” ‘
Colonel Doherty may have displayed great bravery at Ramnuggur but was no match for the power of the ‘Wives Club’. The scene was pictured in the Lloyds weekly News article and re-imagined in The Hawk Journal of 1976.
Thomas Summerell was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major in 1867, leaving the Army three years later. The family then lived in Stafford where he joined the Queen’s Own Yeomanry. Sadly, he died in 1878, aged just 48. The Staffordshire Advertiser reported:
‘[Thomas Summerell served] Three years in the Stafford Troop and six years in the Newcastle-under-Lyme squadron and won for himself the esteem of all his volunteer commissioned and non-commissioned officers and privates, many of whom, with a few civilian friends, followed him to his grave at the Cemetery in their civilian clothes, it being his wish during his illness not
Ramnuggur Ball photograph, Rose Summerell and John Stratford in the centre