Lieutenant Charles Maidman: A Young Officer Lost in India

Lieutenant Charles Maidman belonged to the generation of young British officers who made their careers in the armies of the East India Company.

He served with the Madras Native Infantry, one of the Company’s presidency armies in southern India. These regiments were made up largely of Indian soldiers commanded by British officers and formed a major part of Britain’s military presence in India during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The details of Maidman’s life are difficult to reconstruct with certainty from the surviving online records. The memorial information associated with Fareham records a young officer whose life ended far from home, and whose death was remembered by his family in England.

This was a familiar pattern for military families of the period. A son might leave Britain in his late teens or early twenties, spend years serving in India, and perhaps never return. Disease, accident and the hazards of travel killed many officers long before they reached senior rank. Contemporary studies of the Madras army show just how significant mortality remained among troops serving in India during the 1840s.

The story attached to Maidman is especially tragic because it records that he was newly married when disaster struck. He and his wife were said to have drowned off India, turning what should have been the beginning of their married life into a double family loss.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul therefore connects Fareham with another side of Britain’s nineteenth-century overseas world. Alongside the admirals who returned home after long careers were younger men who left for imperial service and died thousands of miles away.

A stone in Fareham could sometimes be the only grave a family had close enough to visit.