Promotion came to him slowly, for he was repeatedly passed over 'by three sots and two fools'.

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 198.

The British Army now approaching Cawnpore was commanded by Brigadier-General Henry Havelock. Early impressions of Havelock could be misleading. There were those who found him rather absurd, 'an old fossil dug up and only fit to be turned into pipe clay'.1 Scarcely more than five feet in height, he walked as though he wore iron ramrods in the back of his jacket and never dined without his sword together with such a quantity of medals, like rows of five-shilling pieces, that Lady Canning thought he looked 'almost ridiculous', 'as if he carried his money tied up in a bunch on his shoulders'. But she, like most others, soon grew to respect him. He was, she said, deemed by many to be too outdated for words; 'but all the same we believe he will do well. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome, but his little, old, stiff figure looks as fit and active for use as if he were made of steel.'

He was sixty-two years old. His hair and moustache were white; his brown, leathery face deeply lined; his firmly set mouth fringed by a beard of extremely old-fashioned cut. Born in Sunderland, the son of a rich, opinionated shipbuilder who had moved south to a large country house in Kent which he was obliged to sell when his business failed, Henry Havelock had not wanted to be a soldier but a lawyer. After leaving Charterhouse he had for a time trained in a special pleader's office; but, having quarrelled with his father, who refused to continue paying his allowance, he was obliged to accept the offer of a commission in the army made to him by his elder brother, an officer whose conduct at Waterloo had so aroused the admiration of General von Alten that he had been promised a commission for anyone he cared to name.

Once in the army, Havelock displayed an eager determination to succeed in it, so exasperating his fellow subalterns who found him laboriously studying the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great that they would throw his books out of the window and jump on his head. And when his father lost the little money he had salvaged from the wreck of the shipbuilding business - a misfortune which persuaded Henry he would have to go out to serve in India where poor officers stood a better chance of promotion - he immediately enrolled at the Oriental Institute in Leicester Square so as to become proficient in Persian and Hindustani.

In India his diligent studies were continued, and his reputation for earnestness and industry increased. When other young men in his regiment amused themselves with racing, drinking and nautch girls, he preferred the company of Baptist missionaries under whose influence he was persuaded that it was his 'solemn Christian duty to devote his time and attention to the spiritual welfare of his men', to hold religious meetings, to preach sermons, to give Bible lessons, to take part in the singing of hymns, to persist in his attempts to win friends for Jesus 'in the very teeth of ridicule and opposition'. Aloof, argumentative, ambitious and censorious, he concealed a deep need of affection behind a manner at once reticent and ruminative. Promotion came to him slowly, for he was repeatedly passed over 'by three sots and two fools'. But in a series of campaigns in which he displayed coolness and great courage, he gained the reputation of a reliable soldier. Yet he had never achieved his main ambition, which was to command an army in the field.