John Nicholson (East India Company Officer) - Indian Mutiny

Indian Mutiny

Nicholson was best known for his role in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, planning and leading the Storming of Delhi. Famously dismissive of the incompetence of his superiors, he said, upon hearing of Colonel (later General Sir) Archdale Wilson's hesitancy while on his deathbed, "Thank God I have yet the strength to shoot him, if necessary". One famous story recounted by Charles Allen in Soldier Sahibs is of a night during the Mutiny when Nicholson strode into the British mess tent at Jullunder, coughed to attract the attention of the officers, then said, "I am sorry, gentlemen, to have kept you waiting for your dinner, but I have been hanging your cooks." He had been told that the regimental chefs had poisoned the soup with aconite. When they refused to taste it for him, he force fed it to a monkey - and when it expired on the spot, he proceeded to hang the cooks from a nearby tree without a trial.

Nicholson never married, the most significant people in his life being his brother Punjab administrators Sir Henry Lawrence and Herbert Edwardes. At Bannu, Nicholson used to ride one hundred and twenty miles every weekend to spend a few hours with Edwardes, and lived in his beloved friend's house for some time when Edwardes' wife Emma was in England. At his deathbed he dictated a message to Edwardes saying, "Tell him that, if at this moment a good fairy were to grant me a wish, my wish would be to have him here next to my mother." The love between him and Edwardes made them, as Edwardes' wife latter described it "more than brothers in the tenderness of their whole lives".

He died on 23 September 1857, in a small bungalow in the cantonments of Delhi, as a result of wounds received in the taking of the city nine days previously. He was 34, not as the tombstone gives it, 35.