PROCEEDINGS OF THE HONOURABLE THE LIEUT.GOVERNOR, PUNJAB, IN THE HOME DEPARTMENT, DATED MARCH 27, 1877. Resolution. The Honourable the Lieutenant-Governor would desire, before the departure of Major-General' Reynell Taylor, C.B., C.S.I., from the Punjab, to express, on the part of the Government under which this distinguished officer has been so long employed, his high sense of the value of his services, which have extended over the whole period since annexation, and which are associated with some of the most striking events in the history of the British occupation of the province. General Taylor entered the service in 1840, and joined in the Gwalior campaign of 1843. In 1845 he was present at the battle of Moodkee, in which he was severely wounded, and after the campaign was appointed Assistant to the Resident at Lahore and was stationed at Peshawur, from which place he took a Sikh Brigade to Bunnoo through the Kohat pass to join Lieutenant Edwardes, and for some months of 1848 held the newly reduced Bunnoo Valley with a Sikh force of 5,000 men. During September and October of that year General Taylor was present with the Army before Mooltan. The following month, the Bunnoo force having mutinied and marched to Jhelum, he again went across the Indus, capturing the fort of Lukkee and checking the progress of Sirdar Mahomed Azim Khan, son of the Ameer of Cabul, and, on the advance of General Gilbert to Peshawur, occupied Kohat with irregular troops. On the annexation of the Punjab General Taylor was appointed a Deputy Commissioner on the Trans-Indus frontier, and has ever since, with the exception of ten months, when he officiated as 1 Reynell Taylor retired from active employment as Major-General, but he became Lieutenant-General on October 1, 1877, and General, December 15, 1880. Commandant of the Guide Corps, been in civil employ under the Punjab Government. But this employment has not prevented General Taylor performing frequent, and always distinguished, service in the field, both as a military and a political officer. When Commissioner of the Derajat he was in political charge with the force under Sir Neville Chamberlain, which successfully undertook the expedition against the Muhsood Wazirs, and as Commissioner of Peshawur he was in political charge during the Umbeylah campaign, and was present at the destruction of Mulkah by the Guide Corps. Subsequently General Taylor was Commissioner of the Umballa Division and Agent of the Lieutenant-Governor for the Cis-Sutlej States, and since 1870 has held the office of Commissioner of the Umritsur Division. The Lieutenant-Governor believes that there is no officer in the Punjab Commission, which has included many honoured and distinguished names, whose services have been more eminent than those of Major-General Taylor. His acquaintance with frontier and Afghan politics is very intimate, and his influence with the chiefs and people has always been great and has always been exercised for good. The Government which General Taylor has served so long and so faithfully, his brother-officers of the Punjab Commission, and the people of the province, whose best interests he has always had at heart, join in regret at his departure and in esteem for a character in which there is nothing which is not worthy of honour. The Lieutenant-Governor trusts that General Taylor may have before him many years of usefulness, and that his sound judgment and unsurpassed knowledge of border politics may still be found of service to the State. Thus was Taylor's active career brought to a close, and on April 3, 1877, he left India never to return. CHAPTER XIII. CLOSING YEARS-REST. 1877-1886. To few people are the remarks of the biographer of Lord Lawrence, when speaking of the close of an Indian administrator's life, more entirely applicable than to Reynell Taylor. On returning to England,' says Mr. Bosworth Smith in referring to Robert Mertins Bird,' after thirty-three years' service, amidst the warm appreciation of all who knew what he had done, and how he had done it, he lived quite unnoticed, and passed to his grave without a single mark of distinction. Such is the lot-the lot borne uncomplainingly and even gratefully-of many of our best Indian administrators. One here, and one there, rise to fame and honour, but the rest live a life of unceasing toil, wield a power which within its sphere is such as few European sovereigns wield, and, with an absolute devotion to the good of their subjects, such as few European sovereigns show. They have to be separated from their children during the most impressible period of their life, and the wife is often obliged to prefer the claims of the children to those of her husband. India can thus be no longer, in any true sense of the word, a home to them, and when at length they return to England, they do so too often broken in health, find themselves unnoticed and unknown, strangers even to their own children, and settle down from a position of semi-regal influence into, say, a semi-detached villa, visited by few save some halfdozen old civilians like themselves, who have borne with them the burden and heat of the Indian sun, and now drop in from time to time to talk over old days and interests which are all in all to them, but of which the outside world knows nothing at all. Verily they have their reward, but it is a reward such as few outsiders can understand or appreciate.' 1 It would be idle to attempt to add more to words so able and so true; they seem to portray the last years of Reynell Taylor's life in a few strokes of the pen. On reaching England, which he did on May 15, having been detained at Malta by the illness of his son Morris, then quartered there with the 101st Regiment, Taylor lost no time in joining his children, and soon after went with his whole family to Devonshire.2 'I never really knew my father,' writes his eldest surviving daughter, 'till I was sixteen, when he and my mother returned finally from India in 1877. We all went to Teignmouth till the spring of the following year, when we moved to Newton Abbot, where we have been ever since. 'My father was devoted to the country all round Newton, and used to enjoy nothing more than walking about the lanes near Ogwell and Denbury. He used to tell us the great desire of his life had always been to end his days 1 Life of Lord Lawrence, vi. 95. 2 From Malta Mrs. Taylor, in company with her youngest son, Henry (born at Dalhousie, June 1, 1875), had preceded her husband to England, and on May 30 her last child, Antoinette, was born at Torcross. living near his old home. Soon after we went to Newton he was made a magistrate, and he attended the bench regularly twice a week. Once a week, too, he attended the Board of Guardians, for he took great interest in the Union, and particularly noticed the children. I think one day was very like another: in the morning he generally wrote a great deal, and in the afternoons took a long walk. He very often went up to Haccombe to see his old nurse, who was living with the Carews as housekeeper. In autumn he used to enjoy going out for a day's shooting, but he did not often go away from home. I think he often stayed at home when he might have gone away, to avoid spending anything on himself. He 'My father was most particular about Sunday. used always to go to the old parish church in the morning and to East Ogwell in the afternoon. His idea was that nothing secular should be done on Sunday, and even made a rule of never reading any fiction on that day. I do not mean to say he ever told us we were to do the same, as he never laid down any rules for us, but only told us his own views. His religion was built on the very simplest lines; he used to say that the object to struggle for was to be entirely as little children in the matter. I never knew anyone live up to his own standard of right so consistently, but to us he was always affectionate and lenient. 'He never spoke to us of himself in any way, and we really do not know the incidents of his life well.' Here, again, is another picture to which I find it difficult to add, for men can be estimated by those who knew them not, only as they are represented by those who knew them.' |