Reginald Dyer

Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, born at Murree on 9 October 1864, was the British officer who ordered the firing at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi, 13 April 1919. In 1919 he was a colonel holding the temporary rank of brigadier-general and commanded the 45th Infantry Brigade at Jalandhar, which is why both Colonel Dyer and General Dyer are used for him. Wikipedia gives his substantive rank as colonel from March 1915 and a temporary brigadier-general from February 1916 and again from March 1918.

Key moments

• 13 April 1919: Dyer took 50 riflemen, 25 Gurkhas of the 1/9th Gurkha Rifles and 25 Pathans and Baluch of the 59th Sindh Rifles, and 40 Gurkhas armed with khukris, into the Bagh. His two armoured cars could not get through the entrance. He opened fire without warning on a crowd the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism puts at 15,000 to 20,000, firing about 1,650 rounds.
• The toll: the Hunter Committee's figure was 379 dead, with about 1,100 wounded (the Encyclopaedia says 1,200). Madan Mohan Malaviya put the dead above 1,000, and Dyer's own estimate was 200 to 300. Wikipedia, citing Nigel Collett's biography, reports his justification: that he could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back to laugh at him, and that he aimed at a moral effect across the Punjab.
• Days later: the Golden Temple management under the sarbrah Arur Singh honoured him with a siropa at the Akal Takht. Prof Mohinder Singh's The Akali Movement, cited by the Tribune, says Arur Singh urged him to become a Sikh and that Dyer declined. The honour drove demands for Arur Singh's removal; he resigned and in August 1920 apologised at a meeting at Jallianwala Bagh. The Tribune says the episode set the stage for the Akali struggle.
• 1920: the Hunter Committee held that he had acted under a mistaken notion of duty. The Army Council relieved him of command and the Commander-in-Chief told him to resign. He retired on 17 July 1920, keeping the rank of colonel. On 8 July 1920 Winston Churchill told the Commons that Dyer had been removed from his appointment, passed over for promotion and placed on half-pay, and called the firing a monstrous event.
• The Morning Post raised a fund of 26,000 pounds for him. He died on 23 July 1927 at Long Ashton, near Bristol, after a series of strokes.

Remembered for: the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and for the honour that Darbar Sahib's managers gave him, which Sikh reformers cited in demanding that the Panth take back its shrines.