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| The Kmety Obelisk in Kensal Green Cemetery |
Hungarian
General György Kmety's funeral took place in Kensal Green on Monday 1st May 1865. The
newspapers reported that the General was buried in the morning “in the presence
of a numerous assemblage of private and personal friends. The procession
consisted of two mutes in silk robes, state lid of feathers, hearse surmounted
feathers, drawn by four horses with feathers and velvet trappings, ten mourning
coaches, each drawn by two horses with feathers and velvet trappings. The
private carriages of his Excellency the Turkish Ambassador, the Earl of Ducie,
Lord Dufferin, Count Svtaray, and a number of carriages of the ambassador's
suite and the friends of the late general, followed…… The brass engraved plate
on the lid of the coffin bore the following inscription: —'General George
Kmety (Ismail Pacha), of the Imperial Turkish and the late Hungarian Armies.
Born May, 1813, in Hungary; died in London April 25, 1865.'" (Dublin
Evening Mail 03 May 1865).
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| General Kmety with his troops during the Crimean War |
The
General was born in 1813 in Pokoragy, a village now on the Hungarian-Slovack
border. His father, a protestant clergyman, died when he was four and his mother
took him to live with her uncle, also a clergyman. He was a bright youngster
who did well enough at school to be sent to the Protestant Lyceum in Pressburg
and to win a scholarship to a German University. Unfortunately a clerical error
awarded his place to another student with the same name. “This disappointment so
much chagrined the youth that he went to Vienna and turned soldier,” said the General’s
obituary in the London Standard. In 1848 Kmety joined the Hungarian revolution
as a Captain and ended it as a General after distinguishing himself in several engagements.
With the failure of the revolution and under sentence of death he fled to the Ottoman empire and joined
the army as Ismail Pasha (though he never converted to Islam). He was
instrumental in modernising the Ottoman Army and served with his old comrade Józef
Bem (one of the leaders of the 1848 revolution in Hungary) who had become a Muslim and been rewarded by being made the Governor of Aleppo. When Bem died in 1850 Kmety moved
to London where he kicked his heels for a couple of years and relieved the tedium of civilian life by entering into a public squabble with
another Hungarian General, Artúr Görgey who had published a book trying to justify his controversial leadership during the revolution. When
the Crimean War broke out Kmety raced back to Constantinople and rejoined the
Ottoman Army. He became famous serving under the British commander, General William Fenwick Williams, at the heroic siege of
Kars where only cholera and starvation eventually forced the gallant garrison to surrender to the Russians. He retired in 1861 and returned to London where
he died four years later.
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| Kmety by Károly Brocky (or Charles Brocky as he became known), a fellow Hungarian exile and member of the Royal Academy |
