CHITRAL
Surgeon – Major Robertson was in charge of a group of 543 people beseiged in Chitral Fort, which was only 80 yards square, by Sher Afzal. The problem had arisen over the line of succession to the rule of Chitral. The siege started on the 4th March 1895. A relief force was sent out under Major -General Sir Robert Low. Included in this force was Arthur Brooke serving with the Kings Own Scottish Borders.. They fought a battle on the 7th April at the Malakand Pass where the Kings Own Scottish Borders & the Gordon Highlanders stormed the crest with fixed bayonets
Chitral, a famous incident in the Dardistan region on India’s north-west frontier, fought during March–April 1895. When the British garrison of the fort at Chitral was besieged on 4 March by a mixed force of Chitrali and Pathan tribesmen, a relief effort was organised which succeeded in rescuing it 46 days later. The main component of the relieving force was a division of nearly 15,000 men under Major-General Sir Robert Low, which marched northwards from Nowshera (near the Punjab capital, Peshawar) on 1 April. Meanwhile a smaller, lightly equipped column (comprising 400 men of the 32nd Pioneer Regiment and 100 native levies under Colonel James Kelly) pushed west from the Kashmiri base at Gilgit and approached Chitral from the north-east, aiming to reinforce the garrison until Low arrived. As Kelly’s force neared the fort, the investing tribesmen fled during the night of 18 April and his column entered unopposed two days later.
While the glory of lifting the siege went to Kelly, Low’s troops nonetheless saw some heavy fighting. At Malakand—one of the three passes at an altitude of 3,500 feet (1,067 metres) allowing passage into the Swat River valley—he was opposed by up to 12,000 Pathans, although probably less than half these possessed firearms. The pass was stormed in a five-hour action on 3 April, and a further clash with 2,000 hostile tribesmen ensued the next day around the walled village of Khar, just beyond the pass on the northern side of the range.
The Australian Connection
The Australian association with the Chitral episode, which became a classic of the imperial frontier because of the publicity it received at the time, was in the person of Captain James Macarthur-Onslow of the New South Wales Mounted Rifles. One of four officers of the New South Wales military forces selected to gain experience with Indian Army units from November 1894, he had just finished his period of special training with the 1st Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, when the crisis in Dardistan arose. Instead of embarking for Sydney, Macarthur-Onslow volunteered to accompany (at his own expense) the KRRC battalion when this was attached to Low’s relief expedition. He thus became the only member of the colonial forces to receive the Chitral medal with the Malakand clasp.
H.C. Thomson (1895) The Chitral Campaign, London: William Heinemann; Sir George Robertson (1977) Chitral, Karachi: Oxford University Press; Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.10 (1986), pp.196–7
