1859.
For some time after the execution of Tantia the Seventeenth was kept marching about from day to day; and it was not until the 13th May that it finally went into quarters at Morar (Gwalior), detaching one squadron under Captain Taylor to Jhansi. In both places the regiment suffered severely from sickness, and lost many officers and men—the result of the climate, bad accommodation, and the reaction after the campaign. 1860.On the 10th January 1860 it was ordered to Secunderabad, and proceeded thither by rapid marches under command of Major White. On the way it lost thirty-eight more men of cholera and other diseases, among them Veigh, the butcher of the Balaclava charge, whose end was decidedly tragic. The deaths on the march, of course, entailed the digging of graves for the dead, in which work Veigh, who was a strong man and a thirsty soul, always glad to earn a few extra rupees, was particularly zealous. One day when his task of grave-digging was complete he was suddenly struck down by cholera, and in a few hours was buried in the grave which he had made for another. It was his final distinction to have dug his own grave.
1860–64.
The regiment now remained at Secunderabad for five years. There is little to be chronicled of this period except one or two small matters of dress. In April 1860 the peaks on the forage caps were discontinued, and in 1861 the regiment, for the first time in its life, was equipped with white helmets. These were made of leather, covered with white cloth, without plume or spike, 1864. and were the work of a saddler sergeant who had come to the regiment from the 12th Lancers.
On the 14th December 1864 the Seventeenth left Secunderabad, and after sixteen days’ march on foot arrived at Sholapore, whence it travelled by rail to Poona, and, after halting there till the 20th January 1865, reached Bombay, 1865. and embarked for England on the Agamemnon on the 21st. During the eight years of its service in India it was recruited at various times to a total number of 48 officers and 404 men. Its losses from climatic causes and disease, through death and invaliding, amounted to 38 officers and 373 men, while 122 more men were left behind as volunteers to serve with other regiments in India.
In April the regiment landed at Tilbury, and on the 6th May marched to Colchester, where it was inspected in October by the Commander-in-Chief, its sometime Colonel. Colonel White, the Commanding Officer, was now the only officer remaining who had ridden through the action at Balaclava, Sir William Gordon having retired in 1864. 1866. In the following year Colonel White retired, and was succeeded by Colonel Drury Lowe, a name that will live long in the regiment. It was in this same year 1866, the year of the Austro-Prussian war, that the Seventeenth were first quartered at Aldershot.
1867.
The year 1867 brings another name well known in the regiment on to the list of officers, this time not at the head of all, but at the foot of the cornets, that, namely, of John Brown, who held the adjutantcy from this time until 1878. Lieutenant-Colonel Brown (to give him his present rank) joined the Seventeenth as a band-boy in 1848. He rode the Balaclava charge as a trumpeter, and was brought to the ground close to the Russian battery, his horse’s off hind leg being carried away by a cannon shot, and his own thigh pierced by a rifle bullet. After several weeks in hospital he rejoined the regiment in the Crimea, and when the Seventeenth went out to Central India dropped the trumpet for the lance. He was one of Major White’s squadron at Barode, and from that time rose rapidly until he received his commission in 1867. For the present we need say no more than that he was Adjutant during Colonel Drury Lowe’s command of the regiment.
In August 1867 the regiment was quartered at Shorncliffe and Brighton, 1868. where it remained until May 1868, when, after two months’ stay at Woolwich, it was moved in August to Hounslow and Hampton Court. 1869. In the following year an experiment was tried which proved most successful, and has now been finally adopted, viz. the “squadron organisation.” The squadron became the unit, and the word Troop was abolished—abolished, that is to say, in hope rather than in deed; for words which have the sanction of two centuries of use are not so easily expunged. When troops of cavalry first came into existence in England they were at least sixty men strong; when they were first organised by Statute they were one hundred men strong. Squadrons, again, were not compounds, but fractions of troops. Be that as it may, however, the old word Troop was for the time abolished, though not for long, and that of Squadron took its place. The establishment of cornets was, therefore, reduced by four; four troop sergeant-majors became squadron quartermaster-sergeants; four farriers were reduced and four shoeing-smiths added; and an additional sergeant (fencing instructor) was also added to the establishment. Simultaneously eight corporals and twenty-three privates were reduced, bringing down the total strength from 588 to 553, while the number of horses (a more serious matter) sank from 363 to 344.
In 1869 also the white plume, which had been adopted in 1857, was done away with, and a black plume issued in its stead. The original plume of the regiment, as we have seen, was scarlet and white, but was arbitrarily altered, for all Lancer regiments alike, by King William IV., to black. The old mourning lace, adopted by John Hale, having been long since abandoned, the black plume might seem to be a means of prolonging its memory; but the prejudice of the regiment ran in favour of white (scarlet and white being apparently out of date), and after a year or two the white plume was restored.