Campaigning Experiences in Rajpootana and Central India During the Suppression of the Mutiny 1857-1858

Frances Fanny Duberly was a famous - and in some quarters infamous - Victorian lady. A Wilitshire banker s daughter, she was married to Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 8th KIng s Irish Hussars, one of the component units of the famous Light Brigade in the Crimean War. She followed her husband to the Crimea, disobeying Lord Lucan s order for her to leave, dined with Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade s Commander, on his yacht; and was photographed on horseback by the famous war photographer Roger Fenton. Her gossipy, indiscreet memoir of the war was a bestseller, and she repeated the trick with this volume - her eye-witness account of the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1858 which immediately followed her Crimean experiences. She is once again unafraid to be tempted to touch upon points outside a woman s province and she assails the East India Company for contributing to the mutiny by not educating its Sepoy soldiers, and by behaving towards them in an un-Christian manner. She recommended that each Indian Army officer should be given a sabbatical year in England once every seven years so they do not lose touch with the mother country. Her account of the 1858 mopping-up operations against the flying foe as she calls the remnant mutineers is valuable as a record in itself - but primarily because it is the work of a very fearless woman. She claims she herself rode 1,800 miles by horse in the course of the campaign.