Taking the Shilling - The Robinsons

Three families find India through the army

In the spring of 1823, a young man named Jonathan Chadwick walked into a recruiting office in Huddersfield and joined the army, as the saying goes, he chose to ‘take the shilling‘. The recruitment papers say he was nineteen years old, five feet seven inches tall, with dark hair, brown eyes, and a fresh complexion. Behind him lay the mills and looms of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Ahead of him lay India, and a life he could not have imagined. His attestation, the formal record made when he enlisted, recorded his trade: fitter and turner, a skilled man who worked with iron and the lathe.

Why he left the trade for the army the record does not say. In the early 1820s, Huddersfield’s machine shops were short of skilled men and a fitter could earn several times what a private soldier did. So Jonathan was not pushed into the army for want of work in a place like Huddersfield. So why did he join? Perhaps a recruiting party closed a bargain over drink, playing on a young man’s wish for a wider life and a clean break from Huddersfield. Whatever the reason, he signed up and, in May 1823, he had boarded a ship called the Marquis of Wellington and was sailing toward the East.

He was one of thousands. The East India Company’s armies were enormous, and they were always hungry for men. The Crown sent out whole regiments, the regular British Army carrying its red coat and its discipline to every corner of the Raj. The East India Company kept its own European regiments as well, and it raised sepoy regiments as well, where Indian soldiers were managed by European officers. And behind the officers in the British Army stood the ordinary soldier recruited in Britain, living out their service in India, and either died there or went home old and worn.

Three families in this story came to India by that road, and their paths tell different stories about what it meant to take the shilling and cast your lot with the empire.

The King’s Soldier: William Barren of Northamptonshire

William Barren was born in 1787 at Paston, in the Soke of Peterborough, a farming village on the edge of the Fens. In 1805, at the height of the war with Napoleon, he came out as a soldier of the 69th Regiment of Foot, the South Lincolnshire Regiment. He was one of four or five thousand men put aboard ships that year and sent east to reinforce the Company’s forces.

The 69th sailed from Spithead on 8 March 1805, escorted by His Majesty’s ship Hindostan, and reached Madras on 13 July. Within days, the battalion was tested. On 10 July 1806, the sepoys of two of the Madras native battalions rose at the fort of Vellore in a sudden and bloody uprising. Four companies of the 69th held the fort as its only European garrison. The men were caught asleep and half-armed. They held the barrack gate and fought for hours without their officers, most of whom were struck down in the first rush. Philip Bottom, a private, climbed the flagstaff under fire to tear down the Mysore standard the mutineers had raised. By the time Colonel Gillespie’s dragoons rode in from Arcot and broke the rising, close to a hundred of the regiment’s men were dead or wounded.

It was the first of many campaigns. The 69th fought at Travancore, sailed for the Indian Ocean to take the French islands of Réunion and Mauritius, stormed the Dutch island of Java, and then came back to the Indian stations for the long interior soldiering that filled the rest of its years. Through all of it, William Barren served as a private, and then as a sergeant. The first mention of him by name in 1815 lists him in Captain George Lane’s company, “present and on duty,” while the captain was away on leave.

When the battalion’s time in India ended in 1825, William Barren did not go with it. He had married in India—we know almost nothing about the woman except her Christian name, Elizabeth—and he had a daughter, Sarah, baptised at Cannanore in 1821. A married soldier with a family did not lightly take ship for England. So Barren did what a number of King’s soldiers did at the end of their service: he transferred to the Company. His younger children were baptised as children of a sergeant of the 2nd Madras European Regiment, one of the Company’s own European corps. He had settled in India, and he stayed there until he died at Madras in 1830.

His daughter Sarah married into another military family, taking up with Jonathan Chadwick, the Huddersfield fitter who had come out with the artillery. Their marriage, at Madras in 1835, joined the Yorkshire engineer to the daughter of the Northamptonshire farmer, and in that union the family’s Indian story took root.

The Engineer: Jonathan Chadwick and the Artillery

Jonathan Chadwick came out as a private in the Madras Horse Artillery, the mounted gunners of the southern presidency. His was a different world from the infantry, a world of machines and horses and the discipline of the gun. A fitter in his earlier life, he understood metal and precision. The artillery needed men like that.

We know very little of his early service. The records are sparse, and a court-martial record from 1829—a charge of conduct prejudicial and mutinous at the station of Jaulnah, a sentence of seven hundred lashes, of which five hundred were administered—survives in the files. Whether this Jonathan Chadwick was the family’s man cannot be said for certain, though the identification rests on the likelihood: the name was uncommon, and the gunner of the court martial was in the same small corps, the horse artillery of the Madras army, in the same years. A man broken that way is not usually promoted, yet this Jonathan rose to corporal in 1837 and sergeant in 1838. He married Sarah Barren, served on through the 1840s, was invalided in 1840 after seventeen years’ soldiering, continued in the European Veteran Battalion, and was pensioned in 1845. He died at Madras in 1850, after twenty-seven years in India.

Their son Jonathan, born in 1839, trained as an apothecary and rose in time to a senior post in the Madras medical service. In the pattern that emerged across the family, the soldier’s son became a healer. The barracks gave way to the dispensary, but the work remained inside the army’s world, and it remained inside the same presidency.

The Garrison Family: The Summers and Wallaces at Aldershot

The third family came to the army by a different route. Margaret Ann Summers was born in 1871 at North Camp, Aldershot, in Hampshire. Aldershot had been bare heath until the 1850s, when the army bought the ground and laid out upon it the great permanent camp that became the training and garrison town of the Victorian military. North Camp was the army’s own ground, and a child born there almost certainly belonged to a serving soldier’s family, quartered in the lines of huts and barracks that had risen on the Hampshire sand.

Her father was Albert Summers, born about 1836. His own birth has not been found, but his people were already in India. The records suggest he was probably born in the Madras Presidency, the son of a civil officer named Charles Frederick Summers who had married in Madras early in the century. Albert himself took the shilling. In 1861 he was a corporal in the 102nd Foot, the Royal Madras Fusiliers, stationed at Bangalore. The regiment was an old East India Company corps, the 1st Madras (European) Fusiliers, brought onto the British establishment as the 102nd in 1861.

By 1866 he had made sergeant, and on 6 December that year he married at Ootacamund, the hill station in the Nilgiri Hills. His bride was Margaret Mary Wallace, a girl born at Bangalore in 1844, the third generation of her line to be born in India. Her father was William Wallace, a serjeant of Horse Artillery. Her mother, Margaret Henderson, had been born at St Thomas’ Mount, near Madras, in 1814. Behind them stretched a line of garrison people, soldiers and their wives and their country-born children, stretching back through the early years of the Company and ending in a single marked point: an ancestor named Elizabeth Wilkins, whom the marriage register of 1807 called a native woman.

Margaret Mary’s line was a deep Indian line, deeper than William Barren’s or Jonathan Chadwick’s. She married Albert Summers, and they had children born in India: Martha Jane at Lucknow, Margaret Ann at North Camp. In 1870 the regiment sailed for home after long service in India. Margaret remained behind. She remarried and went back to India, and her children grew up in that world.

Margaret Ann Summers, born at North Camp in 1871, grew up in India and married Cecil Chadwick, the rubber planter who was born of the medical line. Through that marriage, the three military families—the Barrens from Northamptonshire, the Chadwicks from Huddersfield, and the Summers-Wallaces from the garrison—became one family. They had come to India by the army, scattered across the presidency towns and the hill stations, and when they married into one another, they created something new: a people bound by the army’s discipline and the army’s world, but no longer quite soldiers, and no longer quite the English people they had left behind.

Updated 12 August 2026
Non-commercial use permitted with attribution

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