Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

India General Service 1908-35, 1 clasp, Waziristan 1919-21 (Udham Singh, Rlys.) good very fine £600-800

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Richard Magor Collection of Medals Relating to India and Africa, and other Fine Awards.

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Ex Roger Perkins Collection, Sotheby, December 1990.

The infamous assassin Udham Singh, hanged for the murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar massacre.

Shortly before 4.30 p.m. on 13 March 1940, Lord Leamington, a former Governor of Bombay, rose to his feet and concluded an unusually well-attended public meeting of the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall, Westminster. Moments later, a dark-skinned man wearing a blue suit thrust his way through the crowd to the platform. He fired six shots from a large calibre revolver. Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar shootings, fell, mortally wounded with two bullets in his back. The third shot smashed the radius bone of octogenarian Sir Louis Dane, whilst a fourth hit Lord Leamington in the hand. Of the last two shots, the first found its target, Lord Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, who only escaped death by the narrowest of margins. The gunman then made a dash for the door but was thwarted in his attempt by the quick thinking of a formidable lady, Miss Bertha Herring. Before being conducted to Canon Row Police Station the assassin, soon to be identified as Udham Singh, remarked, ‘Only one dead, eh! I thought I could get more.’

Udham (Udam) Singh, the second son of a Punjabi peasant farmer, was born on 23 August 1901. Orphaned at an early age, he was apprenticed to the North Western Railway in 1917. On 13 April 1919, he attended the ‘illegal’ gathering in Amritsar, where Gurkha and Indian troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer gunned down more than 1500 men, women and children. By the time Dyer’s men had exhausted their ammunition, Udham Singh found himself trapped under a pile of bodies. Deeply shocked by this experience, the young Sikh vowed revenge and joined the Ghadr (Mutiny) Party. Following service on the railways in the Waziristan campaign, during which he qualified for his I.G.S. medal which, curiously, he was to treasure until his dying day, he went abroad as a full-time revolutionary activist to the United States, where he made contact with fellow Ghadrites. Reappearing in India in 1927, he was arrested on firearms offences and served five years ‘rigorous imprisonment’. Incarceration, however, failed to dampen his ardour for revenge and sometime in 1933, after extensive travelling, he arrived in Britain. Initially, Udham Singh was in touch with an I.R.A. cell, and even stayed as a guest of one of their leaders.

Principally though, he spent the next six years living amongst the country’s immigrant communities under a variety of aliases. In 1937 he turned up in London and soon became a familiar figure at the Sikh Temple in Sinclair Road, Shepherd’s Bush. Here, Udham Singh confided to Shiv Singh Johal, a Temple official, that he was in the country to fulfil a special mission. On Tuesday 12 March 1940, he invited a few Indian acquaintances, who regarded him as something of a womaniser and a noisy but otherwise harmless critic of British rule in India, to dine at the Punjab Restaurant near Covent Garden. Towards the end of the meal he turned to his friends and announced that the very next day London would witness a marvel.

Following his trial at the Old Bailey, the jury took only one hour and forty minutes to return a guilty verdict. Donning the ‘Black Cap’, Mr Justice Atkinson sentenced Udham Singh to death. On 31 July, with his ‘mission’ accomplished, Udham Singh was hanged at Pentonville Prison. Over the next three decades his memory became eulogized among Sikhs, and in 1974, at the request of Mrs Indira Ghandi and the Indian Government, his body was exhumed and returned to the holy city of Amritsar. Now hailed as a martyr, he has been described by one Indian historian as the ‘great revolutionary Shahid Udham Singh who shot O’Dwyer the butcher of the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy’.

The full story of Udham Singh appears in The Amritsar Legacy, by Roger Perkins, Picton Publishing 1989.