Born in Birmingham c.1826
Enlisted at Birmingham on the 19th of May 1846.
Age: 20.
Height: 5' 6".
Trade: Plater.
Wounded and taken prisoner of war at Balaclava.
Died, "of his wounds", date unknown, during captivity.
1177 James Wightman of the 17th Lancers writes movingly of Fletcher in his Memoirs. Wightman and Fletcher, having reached the guns and been wounded, and their horses killed, they joined up with a small party of the 17th Lancers and the two were later taken prisoner.
"Presently there joined me two other men, Mustard, of my own corps, and Fletcher, of the 4th Light Dragoons. We were now through and on the furthest side of a considerable body of the Russian cavalry, and so near the bottom of the valley that we could well discern the Tchernaya river. But we were all three wearied and weakened by loss of blood; our horses wounded in many places; there were enemies all about us, and we thought it was about time to be getting back...
My horse was shot dead, riddled with bullets. One bullet struck me on the forehead, another passed through the top of my shoulder; while struggling out from under my dead horse a Cossack standing over me stabbed me with his lance once in the neck near the jugular, again above the collar bone, several times in the back, and once under the short rib; and when, having regained my feet, I was trying to draw my sword, he sent his lance through the palm of my hand. I believe he would have succeeded in killing me, clumsy as he was, if I had not blinded him for the moment with a handful of sand.
Fletcher at the same time lost his horse, and, it seems, was wounded.
We were very roughly used. The Cossacks at first hauled us along by the tails of our coatees and our haversacks. When we got on foot they drove their lance-butts into our backs to stir us on. With my shattered knees and the other bullet wound on the shin of the same leg, I could barely limp, and good old Fletcher said get on my back, chum! I did so, and then found that he had been shot through the back of the head. When I told him of this, he's only answer was, "Oh, never mind that, it's not much, I don't think.' But it was that much that he died of the wound a few days later; and here he was, a doomed man himself, making light of a mortal wound, and carrying a chance comrade of another regiment on his back. I can write this, but I could not tell of it in speech, because I know I should play the woman."
[Source: "Balaclava and the Russian Captivity", The Nineteenth Century, May 1892, pp. 856-857.]
Entitled to the Crimean medal with clasps for Alma, Balaclava and Sebastopol.
A medal with clasps for Alma and Balaclava only was sold by Spink's in 1886, at Glendining's on the 25th of September 1917 and again on the 28th of March 1927 from the "Hamilton-Smith" collection. This medal has impressed naming.
In 1998 it was learnt that this medal (with the same clasps as previously known of) was in the possession of the Officers' Mess of the Royal Irish Hussars and has presumably been so since last sold.
Wounded and taken prisoner of war at Balaclava.
Died, "of his wounds", date unknown, during captivity.
See a further reference to Thomas Fletcher in the record of 1460 James Henry Herbert, 4th Light Dragoons.
See also the record of 597 Thomas Perry, 8th Hussars.