APPENDIX A
THE HISTORY OF THE MURDER OF MAJOR NEILL AT AUGUR IN 1887
I will relate an incident of an unusual kind, told to me by a man whom I met in Jhânsi, which has reference to the executions ordered by General Neill at Cawnpore in July and August, 1857. But before I do so I may mention that in Cawnpore, Jhânsi, and Lucknow I found the natives very unwilling to enter into conversation or to give any information about the events of that year. In this statement I don't include the natives of the class who acted as guides, etc., or those who were in the service of Government at the time. They were ready enough to talk; but as a rule I knew as much myself as they could tell me. Those whom I found suspicious of my motives and unwilling to talk, were men who must have been on the side of the rebels against us. I looked out for such, and met many who had evidently served as soldiers, and who admitted that they had been in the army before 1857; but when I tried to get them to speak about the Mutiny, as a rule they pretended to have been so young that they had forgotten all about it,—generally a palpable falsehood, judging from their personal appearance,—or they professed to have been absent in their villages and to know nothing about the events happening in the great centres of the rebellion. The impression left on my mind was that they were either afraid or ashamed to talk about the Mutiny.
In the second chapter of these reminiscences it may be remembered I asked if any reader could let me know whether Major A. H. S. Neill, commanding the Second Regiment Central India Horse, who was shot on parade by Sowar Mazar Ali at Augur, Central India, on the 14th March, 1887, was a son of General Neill of Cawnpore fame. The information has not been forthcoming[53]; and for want of it I cannot corroborate the following statement in a very strange story.
In 1892 I passed two days at Jhânsi, having been obliged to wait because the gentleman whom I had gone to see on business was absent from the station; and I went all over the city to try and pick up information regarding the Mutiny. I eventually came across a man who, by his military salute, I could see had served in the army, and I entered into conversation with him.
At first he pretended that his connection with the army had merely been that of an armourer-mistree[54] of several European regiments; and he told me that he had served in the armourer's shop of the Ninety-Third when they were in Jhânsi twenty-four years ago, in 1868 and 1869. After I had informed him that the Ninety-Third was my regiment, he appeared to be less reticent; and at length he admitted that he had been an armourer in the service of Scindia before the Mutiny, and that he was in Cawnpore when the Mutiny broke out, and also when the city was retaken by Generals Havelock and Neill.
After a long conversation he appeared to be convinced that I had no evil intentions, but was merely anxious to collect reliable evidence regarding events which, even now, are but slightly known. Amongst other matters he told me that the (late) Mâharâja Scindia was not by any means so loyal as the Government believed him to be; that he himself (my informant) had formed one of a deputation that was sent to Cawnpore from Gwalior to the Nânâ Sâhib before the outbreak; and that although keeping in the background, the Mâharâja Scindia incited his army to rebellion and to murder their officers, and himself fled as a pretended fugitive to Agra to devise means to betray the fort of Agra, should the Gwalior army, as he anticipated would be the case, prove victorious over the British. He also told me that the farce played by Scindia about 1874, viz. the giving up a spurious Nânâ Sâhib, was a prearranged affair between Scindia and the fakeer who represented the Nânâ. But, as I expressed my doubts about the truth of all this, my friend came down to more recent times, and asked me if I remembered about the murder of Major Neill at Augur in Central India in 1887, thirty years after the Mutiny? I told him that I very well remembered reading of the case in the newspapers of the time. He then asked me if I knew why Major Neill was murdered? I replied that the published accounts of the murder and trial were so brief that I had formed the conclusion that something was concealed from the public, and that I myself was of opinion that a woman must have been the cause of the murder,—that Major Neill possibly had been found in some intrigue with one of Mazar Ali's womenkind. To which he replied that I was quite wrong. He then told me that Major Neill was a son of General Neill of Cawnpore fame, and that Sowâr Mazar Ali, who shot him, was a son of Suffur Ali, duffadâr of the Second Regiment Light Cavalry, who was unjustly accused of having murdered Sir Hugh Wheeler at the Suttee Chowrah ghât, and was hanged for the murder by order of General Neill, after having been flogged by sweepers and made to lick clean a portion of the blood-stained floor of the slaughter-house.
After the recapture of Cawnpore, Suffur Ali was arrested in the city, and accused of having cut off General Wheeler's head as he alighted from his palkee at the Suttee Chowrah ghât on the 27th of June, 1857. This he stoutly denied, pleading that he was a loyal servant of the Company who had been compelled to join in the Mutiny against his will. General Neill, however, would not believe him, so he was taken to the slaughter-house and flogged by Major Bruce's sweeper-police till he cleaned up his spot of blood from the floor of the house where the women and children were murdered. When about to be hanged Suffur Ali adjured every Mahommedan in the crowd to have a message sent to Rohtuck, to his infant son, by name Mazar Ali, to inform him that his father had been unjustly denied and flogged by sweepers by order of General Neill before being hanged, and that his dying message to him was that he prayed God and the Prophet to spare him and strengthen his arm to avenge the death of his father on General Neill or any of his descendants.