Kate was born in 1890 in Abbottabad, in the North West Fontier province of what is now Pakistan. Her father Robert had occupied various positions there since the 1880s, ending as magistrate. Robert's antecedents in India go back several generations.
I am indebted for many of these results to my second cousins Christopher Hewson and Barry Knox-Hewson (fellow great-grandsons of Robert Hewson). Christopher has assembled a large set of genealogical data on the Hewsons and their relatives extending back, mostly in Ireland, to around 1500.
My earliest known ancestor to have lived in India is Kate's great-grandfather Robert Simmons or Simmonds (c1790-) who in 1817 is recorded serving at Fort William, Calcutta, in the Bengal European Regiment.
The regiment was formed by Lord Clive of the East India Company in 1756, incorporating smaller formations dating back to 1652. The regiment fought at the siege of Delhi and the relief of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny, on which more below. Following the abolition of the Company the regiment was incorporated in the British Army as the 101st Regiment of Foot (Royal Bengal Fusiliers). (More)
Robert Simmons served later as a Sergeant-Major in the Bengal Native Infantry. Officers and some NCOs were British, while other NCOs and sepoys were Indian. (More)
In 1842 Robert's future son-in-law James Thornton Hewson enlisted in the Company army in London and shipped out to Bengal along with his mother (who died en route) and sister. He married Robert's daughter Elizabeth in 1844. In 1857 James was a Sergeant-Major in the 34th Bengal Native Infantry, stationed at Barrackpore near Calcutta. The preceding months had been marked by wide scale unrest in the BNI regiments, a focus of which was the introduction of new rifle cartridges greased with beef tallow. Tensions had been exacerbated by the complacency and incompetence of many Company officers[2].
On 29 March sepoy Mangal Pande, after haranguing his colleagues, attacked Hewson and the regiment's adjutant, but was eventually overpowered. Hewson gave evidence at Pande's court-martial the next day:
The second witness was Sergeant-Major Hewson who testified while lying on a charpoy still wounded. The bulk of his testimony was about the conduct of sepoys while Mangal Pandey was inciting them. They had done nothing to help him subdue Mangal Pandey and had just stood there 'talking between themselves'. (Letters, Dispatches and Other State Papers, The Military Department of the Government of India 1857-1858. Military Department Press, 1893)
Pande was sentenced and executed shortly afterwards, and the 34th was disbanded. Large scale mutiny broke out in Meerut in early May. James Hewson survived the Mutiny, retired as a Captain, and died in 1905.
The incident was the subject of Mangal Pandey- The Rising (2005) a stirring - and to descendants of James Hewson fascinating - historical drama. In the finest Bollywood tradition it lurches into song and dance routines on the flimsiest of pretexts, but has clearly gone to a good deal of trouble over actors, costumes and settings.
The name "Hewson" has alas been detached from the married sergeant-major who was James Hewson, and attached to a fictitious young and villainous captain who is Mangal's chief persecutor. The film also includes scenes in which Mangal and his colleagues in the Bengal Native Infantry plot a nation-wide rising with representatives of various rajahs; and asserts that Mangal was one of the inspirations of the 20th-century independence movement. Both are questionable.
Kate's father Robert was born in the Punjab and much of his life was spent in the North-West Frontier Province, preceded by a clerkship in the Punjab and Delhi Railway[3]. In the 1870s he was employed as a clerk in Peshawar.
Robbert was married in Peshawar in 1873 and his first two children were born there in 1875 and 1878. In the 1880s and 1890s he was stationed at Abbottabad, an adminstrative centre and military base for the north and east of the Province. His remaining children (including Kate) were born there between 1881 and 1895. He is recorded in the position of Magistrate there in 1900.
Abbottabad is in the fooothills of the Karakorum range, near the southern end of the Karakorum Highway that heads north and then east over the Khunjerab Pass into China. It is the site of the Pakistani Military Academy and a number of educational institutions. The cantonment area is "still very British" (Wikipedia). The town was founded in 1853 by a Major Abbott after the British annexation of the Punjab. On his retirement he was inspired to write a poem that begins "I remember the day when I first came here / And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air." According to an English visitor in 1868:
Abbottabad is a small cantonment on a large plain surrounded by bare mountains, a notice is posted in my room warning travellers not to go unarmed .. Much hotter down here, the sun powerful after 10 o'clock, but Punkahs not necessary .. snow in winter. (J F Foster, Three Months of My Life: a Diary, 1873)
Kate's mother Julia Kennedy was born in Glasgow in 1858. Her parents were also born and lived in Glasgow. Her father's occupation is variously recorded as 'iron moulder' and 'kettle moulder', while her mother was a mill worker at the time of her marriage. Julia's father's parents had moved to Glasgow from Ireland, probably in the 1820s. It is not clear to me how Julia came to move to India, where in 1873, at the age of fifteen, she married Robert Hewson. Julia's father was a witness at the marriage.
Kate trained and worked as a nurse and married Alexander Milne in Mussoorie, India, in 1918.
The links below set out relevant photographs and images; a tree of Kate Hewson's direct ancestors, as I have been able to establish them back in time; family trees of her great-grandfathers John Freeman Hewson and John Kennedy as I have been able to follow them forwards; and a summary of UK census results for the Kennedys from 1841 to 1861.
Kate's Direct Ancestors A Hewson FamilyTree A Kennedy Family Tree
Kennedy census records, 1841-1901
1. The phrase "Indian Mutiny" is controversial, as are other descriptions.
2. Christopher Hibbert, 1978 The Great Mutiny: India 1857 which also describes the Barrackpore incident.
3. Rudyard Kipling's Kim's father had joined that railway on leaving the army, and after his wife died he "fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby ... and died as poor whites die in India."
Text revised November 2007