The Flagstaff Tower is interesting from the fact that it was here the residents from the cantonment of Delhi assembled to make a stand, on hearing that the rebels from Meerut were murdering the British officers on duty within the city, that the three Native regiments and battery of Field Artillery had joined the mutineers, and that at any moment they themselves might expect to be attacked.  The tower was 150 feet high, with a low parapet running round the top, approached by a narrow winding staircase.  Here the men of the party proposed to await the attack.  The ladies, who behaved with the utmost coolness and presence of mind, were, with the wives and children of the few European non-commissioned officers, placed for their greater safety on the stairs, where they were all but suffocated by the stifling heat in such a confined space.  The little party on the roof consisted of some twenty British officers, the same number of half-caste buglers and drummers, and half a dozen European soldiers.  Not a drop of water, not a particle of food, was to be had.  No help appeared to be coming from Meerut, in the direction of which place many a longing and expectant glance had been cast during the anxious hours of that miserable 11th May.  Constant and heavy firing was heard from the city and suburbs, and the Cavalry were reported to be advancing on the cantonment.

Before evening the weary watchers realized that their position was untenable, and that their only possible chance of escaping the fate which had befallen the officers within the city (whose dead bodies had been inhumanly sent in a cart to the Tower) lay in flight.  Shortly before dark the move was made, the women and children were crowded into the few vehicles available, and accompanied by the men, some on foot and some on horseback, they got away by the road leading towards Umballa.  They were only just in time, for before the last of the party were out of sight of the cantonment, crowds of Natives poured into it, burning, plundering, and destroying everything they could find.

Amongst the fugitives from Delhi was Captain Tytler, of the 38th Native Infantry, who, after a variety of vicissitudes, reached Umballa safely with his wife and children.  When Anson’s force was being formed for the advance on Delhi, Tytler was placed in charge of the military treasure chest, and through some unaccountable negligence Mrs. Tytler was allowed to accompany him.  I believe that, when Mrs. Tytler’s presence became known to the authorities, she would have been sent out of camp to some safe place, but at that time she was not in a fit state to travel, and on the 21st June, a few days after the force took up its position under a heavy cannonade, she gave birth to a son in the waggon in which she was accommodated.  The infant, who was christened Stanley Delhi Force, seems to have been looked upon by the soldiery with quite a superstitious feeling, for the father tells us that soon after its birth he overheard a soldier say; ’Now we shall get our reinforcements; this camp was formed to avenge the blood of innocents, and the first reinforcement sent to us is a new-born infant.’  Reinforcements did actually arrive the next day.