Sergeant-Major Harry Hamilton DEMPSEY (1869–1898)

Harry Hamilton Dempsey was born at St Helier, Jersey on 9 January 1869 and baptised there on 10 February. He was the son of the army corporal William Hamilton Dempsey and Elizabeth Jacobs.

He enlisted in the Oxford Light Infantry on 18 July 1883 when he was aged fourteen and served as a bugler from 1883 to 1889. He was promoted to Lance-Corporal in 1888; to Corporal and then Sergeant in 1891; and finally to Colour Sergeant with the rank of Warrant Officer in 1894.

Towards the end of 1895 in Bareilly, Ireland he married Mary Ellen Morrissey (born 1877). Their son, Harry Hamilton Dempsey junior, was born in Bareilly just a couple of months later on 20 November 1895.

In 1897 Harry Hamilton Dempsey served as a Sergeant Major (regimental no. 1150) in the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry both on the Punjab Frontier and at Tirah. On 29 December that year pickets placed by the Oxfordshire Light Infantry at Ali Musjid were fired upon, and the Guardian reported on 5 January 1898 that Sergeant Major H. H. Dempsey was dangerously wounded. On 3 January 1898 The Times reported thus on the fighting:

The Times of 3 February 1898 (p. 12) quotes a long extract of a letter from an officer describing in full detail what happened at Ali Musjid, explaining that Sergeant Dempsey was hit by a bullet in his stomach which lodged in his spine when he was carrying a man who had been wounded. He was awarded the Disinguished Conduct Medal.

Sergeant-Major Dempsey died spent nearly three months at the Base Hospital at Nowshera in the Punjab and died there on 19 March 1898 at the age of 29 and was buried there two days later. The Tirah Memorial in Oxford followed the newspaper reports and stated that he died of wounds, but Duncan Taylor reveals that in fact he was expected to recover but died of food poisoning after eating a tin of contaminated peas. He was posthumously awarded the India Medal with two clasps.

His obituary appeared in the Oxfordshire Light Infantry Chronicle of 1898, pp. 281–2, with his portrait opposite p. 281.

His son of the same name also joined the army, rising to the rank of Brigadier by the time of the Second World War. He died in 1973.