Ernest Stephen Garratt was the eldest son of the Reverend Samuel Garratt, Honorary Canon of Norwich and Vicar of St Margaret’s, Ipswich, and Loetitia Sarah Bathsua, his wife, daughter of the Reverend Bowater James Vernon, who was Senior Chaplain to the Forces in St Helena at the time of the death of the Emperor Napoleon I, when the 66th Regiment happened to be stationed on the island. Garratt was born on 28 September 1845 and was educated at Marlborough and under private tutors at Geneva and elsewhere. In 1865, at the age of nineteen, he obtained a direct commission as Ensign in the 66th Regiment, then lately returned from India. In July 1867 he became Lieutenant, and during the five years the Regiment was on home service he was quartered at Aldershot, the Channel Islands, Plymouth and the Curragh. He embarked with the Regiment in the spring of 1870 when it was again ordered to India, and obtained his company while on the voyage out.
General Barclay, formerly Lieutenant-Colonel of the 66th, giving his opinion of Garratt during the period of his Indian service, wrote: “I first made his acquaintance at Belgaum in 1875; he was then in command of a detachment at the fort, and I was much struck, on inspecting his company, with the thoughtful manner in which all arrangements for the comfort of his men were carried out. No care or even expense was spared. His company, from his Colour-Sergeant to the youngest soldier, would have done anything for him.” A brother officer, who lived on terms of great intimacy with him, added: “One thing which always struck me about him was his great kindness of heart. I never remember to have heard him speak a harsh or unkind word of anybody, and if a disparaging word was said of anyone in his presence, he would always put in a kind word for the subject of the remarks.” During this period he also nursed his brother officer, Captain McMath, through a long and dangerous illness—the result of an encounter with a wounded panther—and was, as McMath himself affirmed, instrumental in saving his life.
After serving for some years at various stations in Bombay, Garratt returned on leave to England, married, and rejoined the Regiment at Ahmadnagar. After another voyage home, during which he held an appointment at the Depot at Reading for eighteen months, he was once more ordered to India in the autumn of 1879, three months before the departure of the 66th from Karachi to Kandahar.
While at Kandahar he was much occupied with experiments in telegraphy. “He was a first-rate electrician,” wrote Lieutenant Hamilton of the 2nd Queen’s, Aide-de-Camp to General Primrose, to whose quarters Garratt frequently resorted to test his telephones; and the General himself remarked: “I have always heard him spoken of in high terms by those who knew him; and I was particularly struck with the amount of intelligence he always displayed. He was considered a very good officer, and scientific in his pursuits, which made itself prominent by his knowledge and practice of telegraphy and the telephone.”
“We are all like brothers,” he wrote to his wife during this period, referring to the officers of the Regiment, between whom and himself there evidently existed a strong feeling of friendship—“the more pleasant to think of, since in their deaths they were not divided.” Before the letter closed, the action with the Wali’s troops near Girishk had taken place. After describing the pursuit and capture of the guns, he continued: “Then, as the enemy still held the valley to which they had retreated, we were ordered to clear it; and in this three of our men were wounded badly. One or two shots came so close to me that my horse shied”—he was senior Captain on active service and doing Field Officer’s duty—“and nearly threw me, as I was acting galloper between the General and the Regiment.”
A fortnight later, on 27 July 1880, the battle of Maiwand was fought. “When they were surrounded at the end,” wrote one of the officers of the 66th in a private letter, “he turned the rear-rank of his company about to fire to the rear as well as to the front.” His death occurred as the Regiment was retiring to the garden where the last stand was made. One of the men of his company recorded: “I saw Captain Garratt fall. I stopped to see if I could render him any assistance. I then noticed that he had a bullet wound between the temple and the jaw bone, and that his eyes were closed. I raised his arm and found that he was dead.” General Primrose, referring to Garratt and his brother officer Captain Cullen in his letter to the Adjutant-General published in the Gazette of 31 December 1880, wrote that they “were both killed on the field in front of the nullah, up to the last moment commanding their companies and giving their orders with as much coolness as if on ordinary Regimental parade.”
A large pile of stones marks the place where the Afghans themselves buried those whom they found dead on the field. There Garratt’s body lies with the rest of those with whom he fell. The burial-place of the 66th was left undisturbed by either friend or foe.
