Early Career
William Hodson was born on 9 March 1821 at Maisemore Court, near Gloucester, third son of the Rev. George Hodson. He was educated at Rugby School under Dr Arnold and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He accepted a cadetship in the Indian Army at the age of twenty-three; joining the 2nd Bengal Grenadiers, he went through the First Anglo-Sikh War.
Unusually among officers of the time, William Hodson was a Cambridge graduate and keen linguist. A contemporary described him as tall man with yellow hair, a pale, smooth face, heavy moustache, and large, restless, rather unforgiving eyes… a perfect swordsman, nerves like iron, and a quick, intelligent eye. Hodson delighted in fighting and his favourite weapon was the hog spear. He was a brilliant horseman with the capacity to sleep in the saddle. He was described as 'the finest swordsman in the army'.
The initial assistance he gave in organising the newly-formed Corps of Guides in December 1846 had been one of Sir Henry Lawrence's projects in which Hodson excelled. The Guides Corps had Lt Harry Burnett Lumsden as its commandant and Lt Hodson as adjutant. Significantly, among the duties assigned to Hodson was responsibility for equipping the new regiment which necessitated his choosing the regiment's uniform. Accordingly in May 1848 he liaised with his brother Rev. George Hodson, in England, to send all the cloth, rifles and Prussian-style helmets required. With Lumsden's approval, Hodson decided upon a lightweight uniform of Khaki colour - or 'drab' as it was then referred to. This would be comfortable to wear and 'make them invisible in a land of dust'. As a result Hodson and Lumsden had the joint distinction of being the first officers to equip a regiment dressed in Khaki which many view as the precursor of modern camouflage uniform.
For a while, later, he was transferred to the Civil Department as Assistant Commissioner in 1849 and stationed at Amritsar; and from there he travelled in Kashmir and Tibet. In 1852 he was appointed Commandant of the Corps of Guides.
As well as being unusual among British soldiers in India for being a Cambridge university graduate, he also enjoyed classical literature for relaxation, and was a keen linguist - this included his interest in learning the main language(s) of his host country at that time. On his arrival in India he started first learning ‘Hindustani ‘and later Persian, with the help and encouragement from his mentor Sir Henry Lawrence. This apparently was of intellectual and cultural interest to him. Particularly as his army quarters offered him little in the way of culture or reading-matter, save for the ‘usual copy of the Bible and works of Shakespeare’. This led him to eventually order from his brother “a formidable collection of classics, though he probably saw nothing incongruous in spending three hours a day studying Persian, and turning later for relaxation to untranslated Xenophon…”.
Read more about this topic: William Stephen Raikes Hodson
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