Black Hole of Calcutta was a dungeon in old Fort William, Calcutta, India. Moreover, as prisoners, Holwell and three other men were transferred to The remaining survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta were freed the next morning on the orders of the nawab, who only learned that morning of their sufferings.The Black Hole of Calcutta was later used as a warehouse.
The site of Black Hole is located within Fort William in the city of Kolkata, though only the footprint of the small jail cell remains. The list of the men and women who survived their imprisonment in the Black Hole of Calcutta: The fort was built by the British to defend their trading interests in Calcutta. He led the troops and arrived in Bengal. The 'Black Hole' itself, being merely the guardroom in the old Fort William, disappeared shortly after the incident when the fort itself was taken down to be replaced by the new Fort William which still stands today in the Maidan to the south of B.

In the end, the Indian soldiers placed sixty four prisoners into tiny room eighteen feet (5.5 meters) long and 14 feet 10 inches (4.3 meters) wide. According to Holwell, the troops, apparently acting without orders, had packed the prisoners i… The horrifying story of the Black Hole of Calcutta starts in early 1756. Messrs. Holwell, John Zephediah, Court, Secretary Cooke, Lushington, Burdett, Ensign Walcott, Mrs. Carey, Captain Mills, Captain Dickson, Mr. Moran, John Meadows, and twelve military and militia (blacks & whites).The Black Hole of Calcutta was referenced early in the movie, "Albert, R.N." Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume 56 Issue 6 June 2006 Baillie, Esqr., the Rev. In consequence to that British indifference to his authority, Siraj ud-Daulah organised his army and laid Moreover, the desertions of allied Indian troops made ineffective the British defence of Fort William, which fell to the siege of Bengali forces on 20 June 1756. Of Counsel — E. Eyre, Esqr., Wm. The East India Company, a relative newcomer to the Indian subcontinent, had already established a popular trading base in Calcutta but this hegemony was under threat by French interests in the area.As a preventive measure, the Company decided to increase the defences of its main fort in the city, Fort William. That included Britishsoldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and civilians who had been sheltered in the Fort. He also produced evidence that Siraj-ud-daula did not order the prisoners to be shut in the black hole and knew nothing about it until afterwards.Vengeance was swift. The precise location of that guardroom is in an alleyway between the General Post Office and the adjacent building to the north, in the north west corner of B.B.D. By nine o'clock several had died, and many more were delirious. There were only two windows, and a projecting veranda outside, and thick iron bars within impeded the ventilation, while fires, raging in different parts of the fort, suggested an atmosphere of further oppressiveness. It was a room 18 feet (5.5 metres) long and 14 feet (4 metres) wide, and it had two small windows. Siraj’s final attack in force came on the morning of June 20th, a Sunday. The governor and many of his staff and the British residents ran for safety to the ships in the harbour, leaving women and children behind and a garrison of only 170 English soldiers to defend the fort under the command of John Zephaniah Holwell, who was the Company’s There were two mortars in the fort, but much of the powder was too damp to use and the grapeshot had mostly been eaten by worms while in storage. Holwell had no military experience, the situation was hopeless in any case and by the afternoon he was forced to surrender in return for what he thought was a guarantee of quarter.Holwell referred to the experience as ‘a night of horrors I will not attempt to describe, as they bar all description’, which did not prevent him describing them at length and in detail after his return to England the following year, in According to a calculation by Professor Brijen Gupta in the 1950s, the total of prisoners shut in the black hole was probably sixty-four, of whom twenty-one came out alive.

1556332. During hostilities in 1756, the fort was captured by the army of the Nawab of Bengal on 20 June. In memoriam of the dead, the British erected a 15-metre-high obelisk; it now is in the graveyard of (Anglican) St. John's Church, Calcutta. Busteed, 1888 appendix section of Echoes of Old Calcutta The surviving defenders who were captured and made prisoners of war numbered between 64 and 69, along with an unknown number of Holwell wrote about the events that occurred after the fall of Fort William. Self-control was soon lost; those in remote parts of the room struggled to reach the window, and a fearful tumult ensued, in which the weakest were trampled or pressed to death. At length, at six in the morning, Siraj-ud-Daulah awoke, and ordered the door to be opened. Holwell had erected a tablet on the site of the 'Black Hole' to commemorate the victims but, at some point (the precise date is uncertain), it disappeared. The army arrived on June 16th, and began to move slowly through the outlying areas of Calcutta, overwhelming all resistance. This is called the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756), which is still doubtful on account of the number of the perished. The memorial tablet which was once on the wall of that building beside the GPO can now be found in the nearby postal museum. Following the surrender, Holwell and the other Europeans were placed for the night in the company’s local lockup for petty offenders, popularly known as the Black Hole. Some prisoners escaped, while others attacked their guards. B. D. Bagh. The fort fell to the British in January 1757 and in February with an army of a mere 3,000 men, Clive routed Siraj’s army of perhaps 50,000 with their cannon and war-elephants at Plassey.Siraj fled to Murshidabad, where he was killed by his own people and his body thrown into the river.© Copyright 2018 History Today Ltd. Company no. He sent orders to the governor of Calcutta to stop the work on the fortifications and when the British took no notice, the nawab marched on Calcutta with a massive army, said to have numbered 50,000 men with 500 elephants and fifty cannon.
The room had two small windows.