1857 Uprising artefacts fetch £5,520 in Britain

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BRITISH NOSTALGIA for the Raj has led to a boost in sale of 1857 Uprising artefacts and two medals issued to British officers during India’s First War of Independence in 1857 were auctioned on Thursday for £2,520.
In June, bravery medals of the last English soldier to leave the besieged Lucknow Residency in 1857 were auctioned by the British military and medal auction house called Bosleys at Marlow in Buckinghamshire.
Bonhams sold an Indian mutiny medal issued to Lt. Octavius Ludlow Smith of the 48th Bengal Regiment of Native Infantry. He later rose to the rank of Lt. General. The medal had two bars — Defence Lucknow and Lucknow. The sale included another mutiny medal with off centre and staggered naming to Lieut O. Smith.
Also included for sale in the lot was a rupee given by Maharajah Duleep Singh as payment to his troops, a pouch bearing arms of Scinde Horse and a damaged enamel inlaid Indian talwar (sword).
However, Smith’s inscribed copies of some of his contemporaries first-hand published accounts of the 1857 Uprising, all first editions dating from 1858, did not sell at the auction and were withdrawn from the sale. Smith’s original diary, which covered the period “from the outbreak of the mutiny at Lucknow on May 30, 1857, to the recapture of Lucknow in 1858,” is housed in the British Library.
Smith’s father-in-law Lt. Colonel (later major-general) Sir Vincent Eyre’s photographs and a collection of watercolours were auctioned for £3,000 at Summer Athenaeum sale at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, on Thursday.
Eyre, who witnessed the 1857 Uprising, had been involved in Afghanistan, where in 1842 he was captured, along with his family, by Afghan rebels. He and his family spent nearly nine months in captivity.