Lieut.-Colonel Hunter Blair, became senior Lieut.-Colonel of the regiment, of which he assumed the command on the 1st of June, on the reduction of the staff in Ava.
On the 1st of September, Lieutenant Edmund Cox, with twenty-eight flankers, proceeded to Ava, as escort to the envoy, they being the first British soldiers who had visited that capital.
An order was received at Rangoon, on the 16th of October, directing that in consequence of the intended return of the Eighty-seventh to England, the men should be permitted to volunteer for the Forty-fifth regiment, also in garrison: one hundred and twenty-three men availed themselves of this offer.
On the 22nd of October, the head-quarters embarked for Calcutta, which they reached on the 16th of November, and were joined by the rest of the regiment on the 24th of that month.
Besides those already named, the regiment had to regret the death (in Ava) of two old and much valued officers, Captain Peter Benson Husband and Surgeon Alexander Leslie; and of Lieutenant Nicholas Milley Doyle, and Ensign Richard Loveday, two most promising young men, who were drowned in the Irrawaddy, and of above one hundred and eighty non-commissioned officers and soldiers, chiefly from dysentery.
After the return of the regiment from Ava, it had the honor of being reviewed at Calcutta by General Lord Combermere, G.C.B., Commander-in-chief in India, and inspected by Major-General Robert Alexander Dalzell, afterwards the Earl of Carnwath.
On the 13th of November, the volunteering re-commenced, and continued, with intervals, to the 27th of December, during which two hundred and fifty-nine men turned out, for the Sixteenth lancers, Thirteenth, Thirty-first, Thirty-eighth, and Forty-fourth regiments and East India Company’s service, reducing the regiment in India to two hundred and eighty men.
1827.
On the 1st of February the head-quarters, with nine companies, sailed from Calcutta in the free trader “Lord Lynedoch,” leaving the remainder of the regiment to follow in the “Cornwall.”
It may be remarked, as a singular circumstance, that the regiment should return to England in a ship bearing the name of the hero under whom it gained the decoration of the eagle at Barrosa, and still more remarkable, that its actual commanding officer, Lieut.-Colonel Hunter Blair, had proceeded to India in the “Barrosa.”