My bedtime reading has got marginally less disturbing with Gerard Ronan's biography of the 19th-century mercenary, Eugene (Hassan Bey) O'Reilly (1828-1873).
I have been researching quite a few soldiers of fortune for my current book, but Eugene O'Reilly really does deserve the author's description of a 'remarkable life'. There were a number of British officers who served in the Ottoman army during the 19th century. Baker Pasha was an outstanding example, but few had such a varied route and subsequent career as Eugene O'Reilly.
He was born into a middle-class Dublin Catholic family of lawyers, and that appeared to be his career until he dropped out of university by refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. The Oath required any person taking public or church office to swear allegiance to the monarch as Supreme Governor of the Church. The Act was modified in 1829 to enable Catholics to hold public office, but that was not enough for O'Reilly, who, as a teenager, was involved in radical Irish politics. He was part of the Young Ireland delegation to the new provisional government in Paris that had been formed following the abdication of King Louis Philippe in February 1848. He became famous as the organiser of the ‘Blanchardstown Affair’—a shambles of a paramilitary operation aimed at taking the police barracks at Blanchardstown in Ireland, which had to be abandoned when most of the promised volunteers failed to turn up.
His father's influence got him released from prison, but he had to leave Ireland. He served as a cavalry officer in the Hungarian and Sardinian armies during their wars of independence. In 1851, he returned to England and enlisted in the 10th Hussars, although the British army refused to recognise his Sardinian rank and he was forced to enlist as a private.
In 1853, O’Reilly went to Turkey armed with a recommendation from the British Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, a friend of his father's. The Ottomans were offering a one-rank step-up, which, given his Sardinian rank, made him a bimbashi (major). His exploits commanding Bashi-Bazouks against the Russians were widely reported. The source material for this book largely comes from newspaper articles. This led to his being commissioned by the British to raise a similar regiment during the Crimean War.
After the war, he served in several Ottoman civil and military roles, mainly in Syria, as directed by the Ottoman foreign minister and later Grand Vizier, Fuad Pasha. With his career going nowhere, he conspired with two Egyptian princes and foreign investors to raise a Bedouin rebellion in the Hauran desert (spanning the present-day borders of Syria and Jordan). The rebellion did not go well, and he was lucky not to be executed. Either way, his Ottoman career was at an end, and he became a railway consultant. He died of cholera in Fez in 1873, pursuing a railway project in Morocco.
This is a cracking tale about a character long since forgotten, even though he was infamous in his lifetime. Highly recommended.
For some reason that I have forgotten, I sold my 15mm Crimean armies. But here are some slightly later 28mm Ottoman cavalry.
