#2597, Alfred DIXON

The late Lt. Col. Alfred Dixon, Royal Horse Artillery (founded 1793) went to Addiscombe the Military College for the Indian Army in Surrey in 1856.  Until 1885 the institution was known as the East India Company Military Seminary (a name the cadets always disliked) and then became the East India Company Military College.  In 1858 when the college was taken over by the Government it was renamed Royal India Military College.  Alfred was gazetted to the Bengal Artillery and shortly transferred to the Bengal Horse Artillery.  He went to India in 1857 and served through the latter part of the mutiny.  He was at the occupation of the Alumbagh and the siege of Lucknow for which he received the Indian Mutiny medal with a clasp for Lucknow.

He was promoted Captain in the Royal Horse Artillery on 24th March 1865, and on June 11th 1867 he married Alice Elizabeth Brandreth, daughter of Lt. Col. Frederic Gandy (late Scots Fusilier Guards) at Eversham Church.  He became a Major on 4th February 1874 and was gazetted Brevet Lt. Col. on June 1st 1881, only on 30th November that year to be accidentally shot by a sentry at Peshawur.  After nearly six months of the most intense suffering he died at Kasauli on 17th May 1882 aged just 43 years.  Lt. Col. Dixon was brother to Mr Spencer Dixon of this town (Kendal) and nephew of Mr J C Cobbold.  He was educated we believe with his two brothers at the Ipswich Grammar School.

Westmorland Gazette

REGARDING the late Major Dixon, RA, who was killed by a shot fired at him by a native sentry at Peshawur, "UBIQUE" writes to the Pioneer:   "A paragraph in your paper of the 20th ultimo, and the obituary in the same of the 22nd, contained an announcement which, to the world at large, and even to many of the R A Regiment, merely conveyed the information that an officer of the R.H.A. had been cut down in the prime of life, but to those who knew that officer (and to know him was to love him) was of sad and painful import.  Alfred Dixon was a man of singularly pleasing presence and winning manners.  he was a gallant officer and a gentleman, and, excelling in all manly pursuits, he was the most modest, and rarer still, unselfish, of men ever known; and I am proud to say I knew him from his early life at college.  I am sure I express the feeling of all who knew him when I add that by his death we have lost for ever, in this life, the highest of companions and the best of friends."