Lee B Croft

John Croft in Burma Lee B Croft

This is a work of "faction" based on the life of the author's great great grandfather, John Croft (1807-1883), who was born in Hertfordshire, England, served as a young officer in the British East India Company Army during the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-1826), became one of Australia's wealthiest men (1843-1859), then returned to England as a landed gentleman who married into a prominent family of industrialists, the Garretts. In this, book one of a planned trilogy, John Croft graduates from the Addiscombe Military Seminary in England at the age of sixteen, sails to Madras, India, where he witnesses the burning of "suttees," thence to Rangoon, Burma. In Burma, as an officer in the Royal Madras Fusiliers/His Majesty's 102nd Foot, he experiences two years of fierce combat pitting British explosive artillery shells and Congreve rockets against Burmese King Bagyidaw's formidable General Maha Bandula and his 60,000-man army equipped with battle elephants. He is billeted in a bamboo house in Rangoon and unexpectedly meets its owners, who are disciples of pioneer American Baptist missionaries, Rev. Adoniram and Ann Hasseltine Judson. He engages in an effort to free the Rev. Adoniram Judson from King Bagyidaw's cruel imprisonment and finds love with Burma's first woman convert to Christianity.