SHOT DEAD BY FANATIC

Shannon News, 14 September 1926, Page 4

SHOT DEAD BY FANATIC

AN INDIAN STREET TRAGEDY. BRITISH OPFI6ERS' FATE. SECRETS OF NATIVE REBELS. Colonel Henry Arthur Bransbury, D. 5.0., shot dead by a fanatic in the < streets of Lucknow, was the victim of an irresistible attraction towards . India and the fanaticism of its natives. Only 49 years old, and unmarried, the colonel has been in command of the Lucknow Hospital since last December. He was shot dead ' in the street by a bearer, who alsc attacked,his groom and killed the groom's wife. The deceased had a passion for probing mysteries associated with rare diseases, and he undertook perilous adventures into remote parts of India arid other countries, with the object of" adding to his store of knowledge! In these quests, always fraught with danger, from pestilence, or from the hate of the native he encountered, he developed a rare knowledge of the people and their ways. His passion for rubbing shoulders with danger, and his enthusiam for learning all he could about tropical diseases, caused him to make long" excursions in his ho.lidays into the interior, and to mix with the natives as one of themselves —a thing he was able to do because he had mastered the language, the dialects and the customs of the people. Among: the Fanatics. Colonel Bransbury came in to contact with every undercurrent of unrest in India, and no man had a clearer conception of what was going on under the surface in that part of the Empire. One of the things for-* ,ced upon him shortly before his death was the growing number of fanatics who were let loose in the country with the fixed determination to kill someone associated with "the hated English rule." As recently as a month before his death Colonel Bransbury had urged ' that everything pointed to a stale of unrest in the lower strata of the native population, suggestive of the days of the Munity, and he had pressed on political officers the need for taking measures to deal with the evil. It was, therefore, all the more remarkable that he himself should be the first victim of the fanatics whose presence in the country he had found out when mixing with the throngs in the bazaars he used to frequent In order to perfect his knowledge of the people and their ways. Despite his detestation of the methods of the Indian revolutionaries Colonel Bransbury was one of the old school of Indian administrators, who / had immense admiration for the people, and had their confidence as an officer brought up with a passionate love for justice and the finer traditions of British rule in India.