British India and the Raj - a Victorian army officer's ink m...

Hammer

£320

British India and the Raj - a Victorian army officer's ink manuscript diary, of Major Henry Lonsdale Hallewell (1852-1908) while aged 20 and on active service with the 2nd Battalion Royals, intermittently kept from 1st January - 8th June, 1872, only, his narrative commences in a chilly railway carriage from Bombay station - and he was glad of his great coat - eventually arriving at Fatehpur?, further accounts of men's sport racing, horse-buying, dinners (getting very tight on whisky), mess life with his brother officers, dances, official's financial irregularities, rumours, Russian and American news (the veiled possibility of war), cholera outbreaks, marching, boat races, comments on irregular language and snippets of domestic native and colonial life, further notes in places, some loosely-inserted, Lett's Diary for 1872, grey cloth gilt and blind, marbled endpapers, 8vo, [1]

Henry Lonsdale Hallewell was born on 3 October 1852, the son of Colonel Edmund Gilling Hallewell, 28th Regiment. As a Sandhurst Cadet he was the recipient of a Royal Humane Society Medal in bronze, awarded for a rescue made on 28 May 1871 at Knaresborough, Yorkshire (R.H.S. Case No. 18724). He served in the Bengal Famine Relief of 1874 and was mentioned in the Order of the Army of India. As a Deputy Assistant Commissary General in the Commissariat and Transport Corps, he served in the Egypt and Sudan Campaign of 1884-85, being present at the battle of El-Teb. He later served in the operations in Zululand 1888. During the Second Boer War he served as a Major in the Queenstown Rifle Volunteers and was awarded the C.M.G. in 1900 and mentioned in despatches (London Gazette 16 April 1901). Latterly living at The Holt, Alverstoke, Hampshire, he died on 23 June 1908.
Major Hallewell's medals were sold by Dix Noonan Webb, Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria, 25th-26th June 2014, Lot 1118.