Enlisted at London on the 21st of December 1839.
No other enlistment details are shown.
From Private to Corporal: 18th of August 1840.
Corporal to Sergeant: 18th of October 1844.
Appointed Troop Sergeant Major on the 27th of July 1847.
Promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major on the 20th of October 1854.
He was slightly wounded in action at Balaclava.
Gazetted as Cornet (dating from the 5th of November 1854) and to be Adjutant, on the 8th of December 1854.
To Lieutenant: 26th of March 1855.
To Captain: 31st of July 1865.
At the Cavalry Depot, Canterbury, from the 8th of May 1867.
Permitted to retire, "by the sale of his commission", on the 24th of November 1869. He was the senior Captain in the Regiment at this time.
Entitled to the Crimean medal with clasps for Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman and Sebastopol.
He is said (following enquiry by a professional researcher) to have died at Canterbury, Kent, on the 16th of December 1891, aged 66 years, and to have been buried in the churchyard of St. Gregory the Great, at Canterbury in Plot No. 1679 on the 20th of December, being brought from 63 New Nuttington Lane, parish of St. Mary's.
No occupation of the deceased is shown and neither is it possible to say if a gravestone was ever erected, the whole area having been cleared and made into a children's playground in the 1960s. There is a series of letters and numbers by the side of each entry in the register of burials, those by his being C433c, but nothing to indicate exactly what these signify.
A local stonemason, however, at an unrecorded date, claimed that "all monuments in the military burial ground were removed some 15 years ago and that because of the nature of his trade he knew where most of them were and that he would try to find Jenning's grave", but nothing came of this.
A letter from a local genealogist written in August 1978 said that he had found a headstone with only "Henry Je------", on it in the same part of the cemetery as indicated by the stone mason. A check of the five newspapers circulating in the Canterbury area at the time show no mention of his death and burial, something, which had he been 1102 Henry Jennings of the Light Brigade and an officer to boot, would have surely have been recorded by one of them.
(Some doubt arises however, as to whether this was 1102 Henry Jennings, as St. Catherine's House registers show a man of this name as dying at Canterbury, aged 66 years during the October-December quarter of 1891. His death certificate shows him to have been a "Butcher's journeyman" who died at Northgate, Canterbury from "Laryngitis" on the 16th of December 1891, aged 66 years. A check of the 1891 Census (April) for No 63 New Ruttington Lane shows that the house was inhabited by William Keating, a labourer, his wife, a fish hawker and a lodger, Henry Keating, widower, aged 66, butcher and born in Canterbury. So was this the same man buried as Henry Jennings? And if so, why did he give a false name to the Census Officer? With all this evidence to the contrary it is felt that the original supplied information was based purely on a similarity of name.
Assuming too, that Henry Jennings was 18/19 years of age when he enlisted in 1839, this would have made his date of birth 1820/21, and the age at death of the man recorded above would not have corresponded with this.