'Palampar Church', Punjab, India, 1905 (c)

Photograph, India, 1905 (c).

Cemetery and the severely damaged church at Palampur.

The Kangra region in Himachal Pradesh was hit by a major earthquake on 4 April 1905. A detachment of the 23rd Sikh Pioneers was sent to Kangra to help with relief after the earthquake which is reported to have killed around 20,000 people.

On 10 April 1905 Hansard records that in the House of Lords, the Under-Secretary of State for India made a statement in which he quoted a telegram from the Government of India received on the previous day, reporting on the damage of the earthquake in the Kangra district on 4 April 1905, 'It is clear that towns of Dharmsala, Kangra, and Palampur are virtually destroyed, that loss of life has been very great, and that full measure of catastrophe, owing to difficulty of communication, cannot be ascertained for some time'.

From an album of 88 photographs compiled by Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) William Arthur Henry Bird OBE, 23rd Sikh Pioneers, 1905-1920 (c).

Bird was born 6 November 1884 and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1904. He served with the 23rd Sikh Pioneers, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He served in Aden and Somaliland in 1914-1915. He retired from the Army in 1933, and died in 1950, in Cuckfield, West Sussex.