Note 215 — 1814.

Private Henry Scrafield behaved with spirit in overpowering two armed sentinels in the Senate-house, and taking them prisoners. A more uncompromisingly independent man perhaps never lived. Once he complained, in a petition to George IV., of the conduct of an officer, but it ended without the concession of the redress which he unwarrantably sought from His Majesty. In February, 1831, he endeavoured to save the lives of five boys who had fallen into Mulgrave Reservoir, at Woolwich. An orange had been thrown on the ice by some reckless fellow, and the unfortunate youths, scrambling after it, fell into the water. Scrafield was soon on the spot, and at imminent personal risk, crossed the broken ice on ladders, and, with ropes and grapnels, succeeded in rescuing the poor boys, but not till all life had departed. The first youth was got up in ten minutes after the catastrophe. For his judgment and intrepidity on the occasion he was promoted to be second-corporal, and the Royal Humane Society granted him a pecuniary reward. Pensioned in November, 1833, he afterwards obtained a lucrative situation on a railway, and died at Bletchington, of cholera, in September, 1849.