Born c.1831.
Enlisted at Westminster on the 7th of February 1853.
Age: 22.
Height: 5' 9".
Trade: Butcher.
Embarked for the Crimea aboard the H.T. "Mary Anne" on the 19th of April 1854.
From Private to Corporal: 19th of June 1855.
Corporal to Sergeant: 21st of October 1853.
Appointed to Troop Sergeant Major on the 27th of December 1954.
He was the senior N.C.O. in Lord Raglan's Escort during January-March 1854. He had also served with the Escort Troop (as a Sergeant) during October-December of 1854.
Served with the detachment of the regiment under Lt. Colonel De Salis in theExpedition to Kertch on the 22nd of May 1855.
Embarked for India aboard the S.S. "Great Britain" on the 8th of October 1857.
Killed in action at Kotah ke Serai on the 15th of August 1858. One muster roll however, shows, "Died of wounds at Kotahrea on the 15th of August 1858"
Next of kin: Wife, Jane Holland, living at No. 4 Wood Lane, Hammersmith, London.
His "credits" of £4/16/9d. were paid over to his widow.
Entitled to the Crimean medal with clasps for Inkerman and Sebastopol.
Mutiny medal with clasp for Central India.
The Returned medal book states... Mutiny medal returned to the Mint. No trace of issue.
The India Office records show him as having been buried "in one of the various camps in Rajaputana" by the Revd. C.T.F. Wilson, Asst. Chaplain, after being "killed-in-action", aged 27 years. He was buried on the same day as his death.
(His name is recorded on a tablet placed on a wall of St. John's Garrison Church at Meerut. (See record of 979 Thomas Hanrahan, 8th Hussars.)
No 1265 James Rawlins recorded in his diary:
"July 15th [sic] We had a halt day, our Troop Sergeant Major Holland, died from his wounds — he was burried that Evening."
[PB: This diary has since been edited and privately published by Ken Horton as One Hussar: Diary of T.S.M. James Rawlins, 8th Hussars, 1853-1863., c.1985. Paperback, A5, 78pp.]
On the 1st of August 1856 he had married Jane Burke in the parish church of St, Nicholas at Dundalk, Co. Louth. The couple were both described as being of "full age," he a bachelor and she a spinster.
His father was named as Henry Holland, a Coach Maker, and hers as William Burke, a Trader.
James Champion. later a V.C., was one of the witnesses. The marriage was by licence, the officiating priest being the Revd. Francis Rainsford.
In the early 1980s a Mr. G. Allen, of Bedford, contributed an article to a Midland Family History Group Journal on "The Tale of Two Henry's."
His maternal ancestors were named Holland, and after researching along a certain line had, with a degree of family knowledge, decided that he was correct in what he had been able to find out. At this point (he wrote):
"I would have been satisfied had I found my correct line, but the fact that a second cousin had, quite independently, been researching his grand-father, my great-grandfather, Henry Holland, a law-writer.
Working from a 1876 marriage certificate he had been similarly been unable to find a St. Catherine's House entry of birth for this Henry Holland (later found at St. Pancras, via the parish registers).
He had the advantage however, of information about his grand-father's education, since it was said within the family that Henry Holland had attended Christ's Hospital School.
The Hospital School records, held by the Guildhall Library, contain the admission and discharge details and also on checking the 1871 Census for the School in Negate Street, we find a second Henry Holland to the contemporaneous one of Oxenden Street, (Mr. Allen's own researched connection.)
Whereas the first Henry was aged 16, and born in St. Pancras, the scholar Henry was aged 13 and born in Dundalk, Ireland.
This latter Henry Holland had joined the Christ's Hospital School on the 17th of March 1864. He was admitted from Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancs., and recommended by Rodolphe De Salis, then a Governor of the School. It was then shown that he was the son of Henry Holland and Jane his wife, being born on the 10th of May 1857 at Dundalk, Ireland and baptised on the 17th of June. He is later shown as leaving the School on the 12th of April 1873, being "discharged to Mrs. Victoria Jones, his Aunt, of No. 55 Gloucester Road, Pimlico, London, on behalf of his mother, Mrs. Jane Holland Park, who resides at No. 36, Netley Road, Walton Road, Liverpool. The boy intends preparing for the Civil Service examination..."
The School's charter was intended to provide for the education of poor children and not for those of the wealthy. Henry was admitted upon a declaration by his widowed mother concerning the level of her income...) Henry Holland had been a Troop Sergeant Major in the 8th Hussars, being killed in India in 1858. The Regimental records have yielded a birth/baptismal certificate for his son, Henry, born in Dundalk in 1857. Soon after volunteering for the regiment it would appear from the P.R.O. records that T.S.M. Holland was sent to the Crimea in 1854, and was rapidly promoted. His medals indicate that although he took part in the battles of Inkerman and Sebastopol he did not take part in the notorious Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in October of that year.
He survived the Crimean campaign to return to the home base at Dundalk, where he married Jane Burke in 1856, having his son, Henry, nine months later. Within another year he was off to India in the now famous S.S. "Great Britain" when his regiment was sent out to quell the remnants of the Indian Mutiny which had broken out in 1857. It was a ferocious campaign, and he was fatally wounded in August of 1858. Often, details of a death in action are very sparse, but I was able to find out from letters in the National Army Museum in which senior officers spoke of the loss of this N.C.O., his personal qualities and his home circumstances.
The Christ's Hospital records indicated a family connection with Hammersmith and so I browsed through the 1851 Census for the area. I was pleased to find an entry for the Holland family in Shepherd's Bush showing Henry, prior to enlistment, as a journeyman-butcher, aged 19, born in St. George's parish, Bloomsbury, and living with his mother, an annuitant, and widowed.
In the 1841 Census I found the family, complete with the father, yet another Henry Holland, a coach smith, as indicated on T.S.M. Holland's marriage certificate of 1856. Land records for Shepherd's Bush showed that the coach smith Henry also had business premises in Coal Yard (now Stukeley Street/Smart's Place) off Drury Lane, London, where Nell Gwynn was born two centuries before.
Henry Holland is listed in several London Trade Directories of the early nineteenth century, but whether he had any connection with the eminent firm of Holland and Holland of Oxford Street remains unclear. Before moving to Hammersmith coach smith Henry lived with his family in Bloomsbury, but prior to that appeared to have come from St. Pancras...
Thus I have two separate and independent Henry Hollands who could have been my great-grandfather, born three years apart and several hundred miles in distance, one in St. Pancras and the other in Dundalk; both fit the facts well enough.
On the face of this evidence most people would in all probability accept the first-found as a reasonable solution and eliminate the second, except that it must be remembered that we only turned to the Christ's Hospital records as a direct result of family folk-lore, and for no other reason."
A study of what Mr. Allen found out about both sides of the question leaves the impression that his own first researches were the correct ones and that he has no family connection with the Henry Holland of the 8th Hussars.
Extract from the letter referred to in the magazine article, and written by Major George Gooch of the 8th Hussars:
"We suffered a great loss with the one man killed though. It was my Sergeant-Major, just made Regimental Sergeant Major [sic] and he was shot by a rebel skulking behind a rock on the other side of the river.
I saw him shot; he was standing pointing to where the rebels had gone up into the rocks and one of them got a rest for his gun over a rock and shot the Sergeant-Major in the stomach — he lived until the next morning.
There was some hope for him in the evening, but inflammation came on and he sunk very low soon after.
He was such a nice man, the best I ever knew in the regiment — you remember how anxious I was to have him as Sergeant-Major of my Troop just before we left England, when I was gazetted, and getting a letter from Charles about it when we were at Brighton.
He married just before we left Dundalk, and had a child.
I promised him I would do all I could to help them. I am writing to his friends about him and to ask what I can do. I dare say you would give them help in any way possible, if I can find out what she means to do. Perhaps she may go to live with his family — who are well off."
See the baptismal certificate of his son, also Henry, in the "Certificates" file.