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Met chief Sir Ian Blair, who will unveil a new commemoration stone at Highgate Cemetery |
Top brass will salute VC hero laid to rest in a pauper’s grave
A pauper’s grave which holds the body of one of Britain’s bravest soldiers is to be rededicated with full military and police honours.
Robert Grant won the highest award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross, for rescuing a fellow soldier under fire in India but died aged 30 as a penniless police constable in Highgate.
He was buried with nine others in a common grave at Highgate Cemetery, with no stone to mark his resting place.
But 141 years later, PC Grant’s gallantry as a Fusiliers corporal will be commemorated by the highest-ranking serving officers in his old regiment and the Met police.
This follows painstaking research by assistant gravedigger Phil Seaton, as reported in the New Journal in December.
For two years, crime prevention officer Dave King, based, like PC Grant, in Kentish Town, has lobbied his bosses at Scotland Yard to commemorate the forgotten hero.
He said: “It is very pleasing that we have been able to properly remember this man. It will be a proud moment for the Fusiliers and the Met police. As a member of the old Y Division [based around Kentish Town], he was very much one of ‘us’, and he policed Highgate, so it is fitting that we should commemorate him.”
The grave, until now known only by the number 15054, will carry a permanent monument. A short service of rededication attended by serving Fusiliers officers and a regimental bugler will end with the unveiling of a new stone by Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair at a ceremony in late June.
The forgotten soldier was a 20-year-old corporal in the 5th (Northumberland Fusiliers) Regiment of Foot when he risked his life to save a comrade during brutal fighting at what was then known as the Indian Mutiny.
He was revered by generations of soldiers
at his regiment but his burial place was unknown until Mr Seaton’s research connected the dead PC Robert Grant, buried at the parish’s expense in 1867, with the hero of Alumbagh 10 years earlier.
Mr Seaton, one of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, said: “He was never lost, he was just misplaced for a while. All I have done is collate all the information and put it all together.”
Captain Tony Adamson, the regimental secretary of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is jointly funding the new monument, said VC winners were part of the regiment’s history and tradition.
He added: “We are a family regiment and we don’t forget the people who served with distinction, and in Robert Grant’s case with extreme valour. Sgt Grant’s conduct on that day was an example to his colleagues, and continues to be an example.” |
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