Lieutenant Walter Richard Pocock Hamilton VC (1856-1879)
Bronze painted statue of Lieutenant Hamilton. NAM 1986-08-14
‘If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white,
Remember it’s ruin to run from a fight:
So take open order, lie down, and sit tight,
And wait for supports like a soldier.
Wait, wait, wait like a soldier . . .’ - Rudyard Kipling, The Young British Soldier
The British Army’s involvement in Afghanistan goes back a long way. Lieutenant Walter Hamilton of the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides won his Victoria Cross (VC) in 1879 during the Second Afghan War (1878-1880). At the Battle of Futtehabad on 2 April 1879, he led on his regiment after the death of his commanding officer against superior numbers and rescued Sowar Dowlut Ram, an Indian cavalryman, from the clutches of the enemy.
News of his award had probably not reached him when, six months later, the British Embassy in the Afghan capital Kabul was attacked. Hamilton was in charge of the ambassador’s seventy-man escort. Virtually everyone was massacred, but Hamilton sold his life dearly, the official report relating ‘that at his final charge to silence a gun which he did silence, Lieut. Hamilton fell where he said he would fall, killing on his way to inevitable death three men with his pistol and two with his sword’. He also achieved more recent fame as the central character in M M Kaye’s novel The Far Pavilions (1978).
