In 1963 the publican of the Lord Clyde pub at Walmer in Kent moved some boxes and discovered an old, battered skull with a note folded up in its eye socket. The note identified the skull as that of Alum Bheg, ‘a principal leader in the mutiny of 1857 & of a most ruffianly disposition'. It accused him of murdering Europeans: as punishment, he had been ‘blown away from a gun'. The skull was thereafter displayed in the pub for the edification of drinkers.
Half a century later, the publican's heirs – who felt queasy about the matter – contacted Kim A. Wagner, an academic of British imperial history at Queen Mary, University of London. Wagner found that Alum Bheg had joined the uprising in the Punjabi city of Sialkot, an obscure event in what was known then by the British as the Indian Mutiny, afterwards by some Indians as the First War of Independence and today by scholars as the Indian Uprising.
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