FOR ALL WITH AN INTEREST IN THE HISTORY
OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY AND THE BRITISH RAJ
LIVE LECTURES
The Indian Mutiny
In 2024 The British in India presented two live lectures on the Indian Mutiny on Monday 10 June and Monday 14 October at the University Women's Club, 2 Audley Square, Mayfair, London W1K 1DB. Lectures were presented in the Library and preceded by drinks and book sales in the Dining Room and Garden. For those who wished to stay, an optional two-course meal (main course, dessert and coffee) from 8pm to 9:30pm followed in the Drawing Room.
How to book
YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART / BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
MONDAY 10 JUNE 2024 18.30-20.00
The Rise and Fall of the City of Lucknow
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
Lucknow enjoyed a short but spectacular rise after the Nawabs of Avadh made it their capital in 1775. Celebrated as a city of palaces, shrines and extraordinary European-inspired architecture, the arts of dance, music, drama, poetry, painting and silverware flourished under its immensely wealthy rulers. This cultural splendour ended when the Indian Mutiny broke out. The city was occupied by rebel sepoys and Lucknow became famed throughout the Empire for the defence of the British Residency by its small garrison of soldiers, civilians and schoolboys, its reliefs by Havelock and Outram and its eventual fall to the British in fierce fighting.
Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones MBE is a renowned historian of colonial India who has lectured widely in Britain, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, France and the USA. Her many books include Lucknow 1857, The Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah, The Uprising of 1857, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow and, most recently, Empire Building: The Construction of British India, 1690-1860.
ALAMY / NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM
MONDAY 14 OCTOBER 2024 18.30-20.00
Onward, Christian Soldier: Havelock's March to Cawnpore and Lucknow
Sir Mark Havelock-Allan KC
In mid-Victorian Britain, Major General Henry Havelock was the most celebrated military commander since Nelson and Wellington. His heroic march across northern India to relieve the beleaguered British garrisons at Cawnpore and Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny captured the public's imagination like no other since Waterloo.
With his small force of 1500, Havelock set out from Allahabad in July 1857 to march through searing heat and monsoonal rain the 175 miles to Cawnpore and Lucknow. Opposed by tens of thousands of mutinous sepoys, he fought three battles to reach Cawnpore, arriving too late to save the garrison there, and a further five battles before he fought his way into the British Residency at Lucknow, preventing its fall and the massacre of everyone in it. In this lecture Sir Mark Havelock-Allan recounts the life and deeds of his soldier ancestor, who was as renowned for his evangelical fervour as his military achievements.
Sir Mark Havelock-Allan KC is a retired judge. He is the great-great-grandson of Sir Henry Havelock and is President of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia.
