‘Indian Mutiny rebel’s skull should go home’
THE skull of an Indian Mutiny rebel that found its way to a Kent pub should be taken back to the subcontinent for burial because it belongs to a man wrongly accused of murdering European missionaries, says an academic.
The skull was owned by a couple who inherited it after relatives took over The Lord Clyde pub in Walmer and discovered it in a back room in 1963.
The couple passed it on to Dr Kim Wagner, a senior lecturer in imperial history at Queen Mary University, London, who began to investigate its provenance.
He was helped by the fact that the skull came complete with a handwritten scrap of paper, rolled up and inserted into an eye socket, claiming to tell its history.
It said Captain A R Costello, a British Army officer from the 7th Dragoon Guards, brought the skull to England and it belonged to Havildar Alum Bheg, 32, a leader of mutineers who murdered a group of missionaries and a doctor in 1857. As punishment, it said he had been “blown away from a gun”, a common method of executing rebels, which involved tying the person to the mouth of a cannon that was then fired.
“My research shows he was actually innocent,” Dr Wagner told The Daily Telegraph. “Those murders did happen, and he was there, but he didn’t kill them. We know it was somebody else.”
He says the skull should receive a respectful burial in his home country, particularly because the method of his death was a deliberate effort to stop a proper burial taking place.
He said the British High Commission in India and the Royal Asiatic Society was involved in preliminary discussions about a possible repatriation.
“There’s no real precedent for this kind of thing,” he added.