Reginald Dyer
Reginald Dyer | |
---|---|
Born | Murree, Punjab, British India (now Pakistan) | 9 October 1864
Died | 23 July 1927 Long Ashton, Somerset, England | (aged 62)
Allegiance | British Empire |
Service/ |
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Spouse(s) | Frances Anne Trevor Ommaney (m. 1888) |
Children |
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As a temporary
Dyer was removed from duty and widely condemned both in Britain and India, but he became a celebrated hero among some with connections to the British Raj.[5] Some historians argue the episode was a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.[6]
Life and career
Dyer was born in Murree, in the Punjab province of British India, which is now in Pakistan on 9 October 1864. He was the son of Edward Dyer, a brewer who managed the Murree Brewery, and Mary Passmore.[7][8] He spent his childhood in Murree and Shimla and received his early education at the Lawrence College Ghora Gali, Murree and Bishop Cotton School in Shimla.[9] From eleven he attended Midleton College in County Cork, Ireland,[10][11] before briefly studying medicine, at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.[12] Dyer then decided to pursue a military career, and enrolled at the Royal Military College of Sandhurst, from where he graduated in 1885. He was also fluent in a number of Indian languages as well as Persian.[13]
Following his graduation, Dyer was commissioned into the
In August 1903, Dyer was promoted to
In 1888 Dyer married Frances Anne Trevor Ommaney, the daughter of Edmund Piper Ommaney, on 4 April 1888, in St Martin's Church, Jhansi, India.[27] The first of their three children, Gladys, was born in Shimla, India, in 1889. They also two sons, Ivon Reginald, born 1895 and Geoffrey Edward MacLeod, born 1896.[28]
Amritsar massacre
Background
In 1919, the European population in
In protest at this action, demonstrators headed for the residence of Miles Irving, the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar. The deputy commissioner had given orders that protestors were not to be allowed to pass into the
Though authorities initially claimed that the massacre was triggered by the assault on Sherwood, regimental diaries reveal that this was merely a pretext. Instead, Dyer and O'Dwyer feared an imminent mutiny in Punjab similar to the Indian Rebellion of 1857.[31]
Events of 13 April
The event known historically as the Amritsar massacre occurred on 13 April 1919 in
Dyer was determined to suppress disobedience in Amritsar. The proposed meeting was to take place in the Jallianwala Bagh, in defiance of the proclamation; Dyer saw this as an opportunity to, in his view, suppress rebels, and, as he claimed, do so in isolation from the general populace.[34] The meeting assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, a walled space of 6 to 7 acres (2 to 3 ha) with five entrances, four of which were narrow, admitting only a few people at a time. The fifth entrance was that used by Dyer and his troops. The organiser of the meeting was Dr Mohammed Bashir, who was later found guilty of inciting the attack on the National Bank.[35] Seven people had addressed the meeting before Dyer arrived, including Brij Gopi Nath who read a poem inciting people to war.[36]
Dyer had at his command 50 troops, including 25
Dyer is reported to have, from time to time, "checked his fire and directed it upon places where the crowd was thickest",[39] not because the crowd was slow to disperse, but because he "had made up his mind to punish them for having assembled there."[39] Some of the soldiers initially shot into the air, at which Dyer shouted: "Fire low. What have you been brought here for?"[40] Later, Dyer's own testimony revealed that the crowd was not given any warning to disperse and he was not remorseful for having ordered his troops to shoot.[41]
The worst part of the whole thing was that the firing was directed towards the exit gates through which the people were running out. There were 3 or 4 small outlets in all and bullets were actually rained over the people at all these gates ... and many got trampled under the feet of the rushing crowds and thus lost their lives ... even those who lay flat on the ground were fired upon.[42]
The Hunter Commission report on the incident, published the following year by the Government of India, criticised both Dyer, and the Government of the Punjab for failing to compile a casualty count, so quoted a figure offered by the Sewa Samati (A Social Services Society) of 379 identified dead, comprising 337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby,[4] with approximately 1,100 wounded, of which 192 were seriously injured.[43] However other estimates,[44] from government civil servants in the city (commissioned by the Punjab Sub-committee of Indian National Congress),[45] as well as counts from the Home Political,[44] cite numbers of well over a thousand dead. According to a Home Political Deposit report, the number was more than 1,000, with more than 1,200 wounded.[44] Dr Smith, a British civil surgeon at Amritsar, estimated that there were over 1,800 casualties.[46] The deliberate infliction of these casualties earned Dyer the epithet of the "Butcher of Amritsar".[2]
Subsequent events
The day after the massacre Dyer continued along confrontational lines, even though the city was quiet. He met with a delegation of Amritsar citizens to whom he directed the following speech, without having received their petitions or heard from them. Made to the delegation in Urdu, the English translation of a segment of Dyer's statement is shown below, as given in Collett's The Butcher of Amritsar:[47]
You people know well that I am a soldier and a military man. Do you want war or peace? If you wish for a war, the Government is prepared for it, and if you want peace, then obey my orders and open all your shops; else I will shoot. For me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same.
Dyer devised what even one of his generally supportive superiors, O'Dwyer, described as an "irregular and improper" retaliation for the attack on Marcella Sherwood, designed, it seemed, to fall indiscriminately and humiliatingly on the local population. On the street where the assault occurred, Kucha Kurrichhan, Dyer ordered daytime pickets placed at either end. Anyone wishing to proceed into the street between 6 am and 8 pm was made to crawl the 200 yards (180 m) on all fours, lying flat on their bellies.[48] When questioned at the Hunter inquiry about this, Dyer explained his motivation:[49]
Some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu god and therefore, they have to crawl in front of her too.
There was a curfew in effect from 8 pm, so the order effectively closed the street for the full 24 hours. The houses and shops had no back doors, so the inhabitants could not go out without climbing down from their roofs. No deliveries or services were available to those effectively locked in, so no food or other supplies could be replenished, any sick or injured had no medical attendance, and normal rubbish and latrine sanitary services were absent. The trapped inhabitants included some of the individuals responsible for rescuing and attending to Sherwood, the assault victim. This order was in effect from 19 April until 25, or possibly, 26 April 1919. In addition, Dyer had flogging triangles erected in the street; on these, youths arrested for the assault, some of whom were not subsequently convicted, were publicly flogged in view of the residents.[50][51]
Reaction in Britain and British India
A
Dyer was met by the Adjutant-General of India, Lieutenant-General Havelock Hudson, who told him that he was relieved of his command. He was told later by the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Charles Monro, to resign his post and that he would not be reemployed.[63] He was heavily criticised both in Britain and India. Several senior and influential British government officials and Indians spoke against him, including:
- Pandit Motilal Nehru, father of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who called the massacre the "saddest and most revealing of all".[64]
- Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel Laureate and distinguished Indian educator, who renounced his knighthood in protest against the massacre and said, "a great crime has been done in the name of law in the Punjab".[65]
- Shankaran Nair, who resigned his membership of the Viceroy's Executive Council in the Legislative Council of Punjab in protest at the massacre.[66]
- Punjab Legislative Council members Nawab Din Murad and Kartar Singh, who described the massacre as "neither just nor humane."[66]
- Anglican priest and friend of Gandhi, who termed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre as a "cold-blooded massacre and inhumane."[67]
- Brigadier-General Herbert Conyers Surtees, who stated in the Dyer debate that "we hold India by force – undoubtedly by force".[68]
- Edwin Samuel Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who called it "a grave error in judgement". In a debate in the House of Commons, he asked, "Are you going to keep your hold on India by terrorism, racial humiliation, subordination and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill and the growing goodwill of the people of your Indian Empire?"[67][69]
- Winston Churchill, at the time Britain's Secretary of State for War, who called the massacre "an episode without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire ... an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation ... the crowd was neither armed nor attacking" during a debate in the House of Commons. In a letter to the leader of the Liberals and former Secretary of State for India, the Marquess of Crewe, he wrote, "My own opinion is that the offence amounted to murder, or alternatively manslaughter."[70][71]
- Leader of the Liberal Party and former Prime Minister Anglo-Indian history, nor, I believe, in the history of our empire since its very inception down to present day. It is one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history."[72]
- B. G. Horniman, who observed: "No event within living memory, probably, has made so deep and painful impression on the mind of the public in this country [Britain] as what came to be known as the Amritsar massacre."[73]
During the Dyer debates in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, there was both praise and condemnation of Dyer.[74] In 1920, the British Labour Party Conference at Scarborough unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Amritsar massacre as a "cruel and barbarous action" of British officers in Punjab, and called for their trial, the recall of Michael O'Dwyer and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, and the repealing of repressive legislation.[75]
Dyer's response and motivation
Dyer wrote an article in the Globe of 21 January 1921, entitled, "The Peril to the Empire". It commenced with "India does not want self-government. She does not understand it." He wrote later that:[76]
- It is only to an enlightened people that free speech and a free press can be extended. The Indian people want no such enlightenment.
- There should be an eleventh commandment in India, "Thou shalt not agitate".
- The time will come to India when a strong hand will be exerted against malice and 'perversion' of good order.
- Gandhi will not lead India to capable self-government. The British Raj must continue, firm and unshaken in its administration of justice to all men.
In his official response to the Hunter commission that inquired into the shooting, Dyer was unremorseful and stated: "I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself."[77]
However, in his account of the massacre Nick Lloyd comments that although Dyer later claimed to have undertaken the massacre to "save" British India, he had had no such idea in his mind that fateful afternoon. As well as being "dazed and shaken up" – hardly the response of a soldier who had had murder in his mind – all the witnesses recall how Dyer "was unnerved and deeply upset about what had happened".[78]
Nigel Collett – author of the biography The Butcher of Amritsar – is convinced that the Amritsar massacre preyed on Dyer's mind from the very day he opened fire. "He spent the rest of his life trying to justify himself. He persuaded himself it had been his duty to act as he did, but he could not persuade his soul that he had done right. It rotted his mind and, I am guessing here, added to his sickness."[79][80]
Collett quotes Dyer on the motivations that drove him to act as he did:[81] "It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity. The mutineers had thrown out the challenge and the punishment, if administered at all, must be complete, unhesitating and immediate."[82]
Historian Gordon Johnson comments that "... Dyer's actions ran counter to Army regulations. These required that force should be constrained by what was reasonable to achieve an immediate objective; minimum, not maximum, force should be deployed. Moreover, proper warning had to be given. On 13 April 1919, as demonstrated by Collett, Dyer ignored this. While he may have believed the Raj was threatened, and may have thought the mob was out to attack him and his soldiers, this does not justify his cavalier abuse of procedure and his indifference to Indian suffering. In so behaving, he brought not only death to the innocent but also destroyed himself and undermined the empire in which he took so much pride."[80]
Later life
Churchill, the then Secretary of State for War, wanted Dyer to be disciplined, but the Army Council superseded by him decided to allow Dyer to resign with no plan for further punishment. Following Churchill's speech defending the council's decision and a debate in Parliament, on 8 July 1920 MPs voted for the government by a majority of 247 to 37; a motion calling for approval of Dyer's actions was defeated by a majority of 230 to 129.[83][84]
Having been born in India and educated in Ireland, Dyer then settled in Britain. He was presented with a gift of £26,000 sterling, a huge sum in those days, equivalent to £1,111,060 in 2021, which emerged from the fund raised on his behalf by the Morning Post, a conservative, pro-imperialist newspaper which later merged with the
The Morning Post had supported Dyer's action on the grounds that the massacre was necessary to "Protect the honour of European Women".[86]
Many Indians, including
Dyer acquired a farm at Ashton Fields, Ashton Keynes, Wiltshire, which was still given as his address when he died,[88] although in 1925 he had bought a small cottage at Long Ashton on the outskirts of Bristol and spent his last two years there, while one of his sons lived at the farm.[89]
Dyer suffered a series of strokes during the last years of his life and he became increasingly isolated due to the paralysis and speechlessness inflicted by his strokes. He died of
In popular culture
Dyer was portrayed by actor Edward Fox in the 1982 film Gandhi.[94]
References
- ^ a b "No. 29509". The London Gazette (Supplement). 14 March 1916. p. 2902.
- ^ a b c Collett 2006.
- ^ Ferdinand Mount, "They would have laughed", in London Review of Books dated 4 April 2019, Vol. 41, No.7, pp. 9–12
- ^ a b Collett 2006, p. 263.
- ^ Derek Sayer, "British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920," Past & Present, May 1991, Issue 131, pp. 130–164
- ^ Bond, Brian (October 1963). "Amritsar 1919". History Today. Vol. 13, no. 10. pp. 666–676.
- ^ Collett 2006, p. 3.
- ^ Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series Ireland and the British Empire Kenny, Kevin 2004 Oxford University Press page 90
- ^ Chauhan, Pratibha. "The 'Evil Cottonian' who let the school down". The Tribune. Tribune News service. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
- ^ "Amritsar and the Irish connections". Irish Medical Times. 29 September 2009. Retrieved 13 April 2019.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 9.
- ^ "News from the archives: a recent accession". The National Archives of Ireland. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ISBN 978-1-59698-629-9.
- ^ "No. 25506". The London Gazette. 28 August 1885. p. 4082.
- ^ "No. 25766". The London Gazette. 13 December 1887. p. 6940.
- ^ "No. 25883". The London Gazette. 14 December 1888. p. 7141.
- ^ "No. 26795". The London Gazette. 17 November 1896. p. 6276.
- ^ "No. 27362". The London Gazette. 4 October 1901. p. 6489.
- ^ "No. 28362". The London Gazette. 3 May 1910. p. 3072.
- ^ "No. 30360". The London Gazette (Supplement). 30 October 1917. p. 11270.
- ^ "No. 29924". The London Gazette (Supplement). 30 January 1917. p. 1058.
- ^ "No. 31787". The London Gazette (Supplement). 17 February 1920. p. 2046.
- ^ "No. 30617". The London Gazette (Supplement). 5 April 1918. p. 4273.
- ^ "No. 31823". The London Gazette (Supplement). 12 March 1920. p. 3278.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 231.
- ^ "No. 32047". The London Gazette. 10 September 1920. p. 9148.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 17.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 35.
- ^ ISBN 0-471-35062-1
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 162.
- ^ Athale, Rtd. Colonet Anil. "What will be history's verdict on the Ramlila maidan eviction?". columnist. rediff.com. Retrieved 9 June 2011.
- ^ Colvin 1929, pp. 168–169.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 169.
- ^ Colvin 1929, pp. 170–172.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 175.
- ^ Colvin 1929, pp. 175–176.
- ^ Colvin 1929, p. 178.
- ^ Disorder Inquiry Committee Report, Vol II, p. 191.
- ^ a b c Report of Commissioners, Vol I, II, Bombay, 1920, Reprint New Delhi, 1976, p. 56.
- ^ Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, A Premeditated Plan, Punjab University Chandigarh, 1969, p 89, Raja Ram; A Saga of Freedom Movement and Jallianwala Bagh, Udham Singh, 2002, p 141, Prof (Dr) Sikander Singh.
- ^ See: Report of Commissioners, Vol I, II, Bombay, 1920, Reprint New Delhi, 1976, pp. 55–56.
- ^ Statement of Eyewitness Mr Girdhari Lal, who happened to watch the scene from the window of his house overlooking the Jallianwala Bagh: Ref: Report of Commissioners, Vol I, II, Bombay, 1920, Reprint New Delhi, 1976, p 1011.
- ^ "Amritsar: Minutes of Evidence taken before the Hunter Committee". Parliament.UK. Retrieved 12 April 2019.
- ^ a b c Home Political, 23 Sept 1921, No 23, National Archive of India, New Delhi
- ^ Report of Commissioners, appointed by the Punjab Sub-committee of Indian National Congress, Vol I, New Delhi, p 68
- ^ Report of Commissioners, Vol I, New Delhi, p 105
- ^ Collett 2006, p. 270.
- ISBN 978-1-4039-9333-5.
- ISBN 978-0-8157-8300-8.. The Sunday Guardian.
- Kumar, Mayank (16 April 2022). "The Crawling Order: A sign of imperial British atrocities"
Sources
- Colvin, Ian (1929). The Life Of General Dyer. London: William Blackwood And Sons.
- Collett, Nigel (2006). The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer. A&C Black. ISBN 978-1-85285-575-8.
Further reading
- Draper, Alfred (1981). Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj. London: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd. ISBN 978-0-304-30481-3.
- Moreman, T. R. (2004). "Dyer, Reginald Edward Harry (1864–1927)". required.)
- Hunter Committee; "Disorders Inquiry" Committee (1920). Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab 1919–1920. Vol. I–III. (Cmd. 681) [1920].
External links
- Army Council and General Dyer 8 July 1920, UK House of Commons
- Winston Churchill's Amritsar Speech, 8 July 1920, UK House of Commons
- Michael O'Dwyer (Assassination) 14 March 1940, UK House of Commons