Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/372

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Stewart
358
Stewart

On his return to India in 1875 he was present at the camp of exercise at Delhi in honour of the visit of King Edward VII, then prince of Wales, and in April 1876 was appointed to the command of the Lahore division. In the Afghan war of 1878–80 he was selected to command the Quetta army in October 1878, marched through the Bolan and Khojak passes, dispersed the enemy in a cavalry action at Saif-ud-din, entered Kandahar, and also occupied Kalat-i-Ghilzai and Girishk in January 1879. During the fifteen months he remained at Kandahar the surrounding districts became fairly settled and quiet. For his services he received the thanks of parliament and was made a K.C.B. On 30 March 1880 he set out on his celebrated march to Kabul through a country deserted and without resources, defeated the Afghans at Ahmed Khel on 19 April and at Urzu on 23 April, and reached Kabul on 2 May, taking over the command from Sir Frederick (now Earl) Roberts. His combined force was now styled the Northern Afghanistan field force. Having seen the new amir, Abdur Rahman, formally recognised, Stewart was preparing to leave the country when intelligence reached him at the end of July of the disaster at Maiwand, and he sent Sir Frederick Roberts with a picked force of ten thousand men to march to Kandahar to retrieve the position of affairs. He himself returned to India in August with the rest of the troops by the Khaibar route. For his services he received the medal with clasp, the thanks of parliament, the grand cross of the Bath, and was created a baronet. He was appointed military member of the viceroy's council on 18 Oct. 1880, but, on 7 April in the following year, succeeded Sir Frederick Haines as commander-in-chief in India, and occupied the post until the end of 1885, when he returned home. He accepted a seat on the council of India on 16 Dec. 1885, which he held until his death. He was made a companion of the Indian Empire on 24 May 1881, decorated with the grand cross of the star of India on 7 Dec. 1885, and appointed governor of Chelsea Hospital on 9 March 1895. In 1889 he received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, and of LL.D. from Aberdeen University. He was a member of the royal commission on Indian civil and military expenditure. He died at Algiers on 26 March 1900. To simplicity of manner and extreme modesty he added the power of plain speaking without giving offence. He was a keen genealogist and an enthusiastic fisherman, and visited Canada frequently for salmon-fishing in the waters of his old schoolfellow, Lord Mount Stephen.

He married, in 1847, Marina, daughter of Commander Thomas Dymock Dabine, R.N., and niece of General Carpenter, who survived him with two sons and three daughters of the marriage. The eldest son, Norman Robert, the present baronet, born on 27 Sept. 1851, colonel in the Indian staff corps, served with distinction under his father; the second, Donald William, became British resident at Kumasi and was made C.M.G. in 1896.

[India Office Records; Despatches; Army Lists; Burke's Peerage &c.; Times, 27 March 1900; Lord Roberts's Forty-one Years in India; Kaye's Sepoy War; Malleson's Indian Mutiny; Holland and Hozier's Expedition to Abyssinia; Anglo-Afghan War, 1879-80, official account; Forbes's Afghan Wars; Ashe's Kandahar Campaign; Le Mesurier's Kandahar in 1879; Shadbolt's Afghan Campaigns of 1878–80; Men and Women of the Time.]


STEWART, PATRICK (1832–1865), major royal (late Bengal) engineers and temporary lieutenant-colonel, second son of James Stewart (d. 19 Sept. 1877) of Cairnsmore, Kirkcudbrightshire, and of his wife Elizabeth (d. 18 April 1872), only daughter of Dr. Gilbert Macleod, East India Company's service, was born at Cairnsmore on 28 Jan. 1832. He was educated at Sunderland by Dr. Cowan and at Perry Hill, Sydenham, and entered the military college of the East India Company at Addiscombe in August 1848. He obtained a commission as second lieutenant in the Bengal engineers on 14 June 1850, having passed out of Addiscombe at the head of his term and carried off the Pollock medal. His further commissions were dated: lieutenant 1 Aug. 1854, second captain 27 Aug. 1858, brevet major 28 Aug. 1858.

After the usual course of professional instruction at Chatham Stewart arrived at Calcutta on 13 Oct. 1852. In May 1853 he was appointed acting superintendent of electric telegraphs during the absence of Dr. (afterwards Sir William Brooke) O'Shaughnessy [q. v.] in Europe. The establishment of electric telegraphs in India had just commenced, and Stewart's work was the construction of lines from Calcutta to Lahore and from Agra to Indore, some seventeen hundred miles in length. The energy and rapidity with which he carried it on won great praise. In November 1853 he took up the duty of aide-de-camp to the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Provinces. An ardent sportsman, he had ample opportunities of hunting, and experienced many accidents. Lady Canning ob-