John Archibald Ballard

Lieutenant General John Archibald Ballard, CB LLD RE (20 June 1829 – 1 April 1880) was a British soldier.

Ballard was born in Portbury, Somerset, the second son of George Ballard, a Calcutta Merchant, and Jane Tod daughter of Alexander Tod and Charlote Bruere. He was educated at the East India Company's military seminary at Addiscombe, near Croydon, in 1847–8; and in 1850 he was commissioned into the Bengal Engineers. His early years in India were uneventful, and in the spring of 1854 Lieutenant Ballard was ordered to Europe on medical certificate.

It is likely that he had heard reports of the events then going on in the Danubian principalities, from Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth who was a relative of his brother's wife, and he turned aside to Constantinople proceeding to Omar Pasha's camp at Shumla, where he was invested by that general with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Turkish army, and deputed to Silistria as a member of the council of war in that fortress, which was then besieged by the Russians. Prior to Ballard's arrival, on 13 June 1854, two other British officers, Captain Butler of the Ceylon rifles and Lieutenant Nasmyth of the Bombay artillery, later to become a Brigade-Major in the Honourable East India Company, had been aiding the garrison in the defence of the place; but Butler had been fatally wounded and Nasmyth was called away to Omar Pasha's camp a few days after Ballard's arrival. During the remainder of the siege, which was raised by the Russians on 28 June, Ballard was the only British officer in the fortress, and it was mainly owing to his exertions, and the influence which he exercised over the garrison, that the defence was successfully maintained. At the subsequent attack and capture of the Russian position at Giurgevo, Ballard commanded the skirmishers, and kept back the enemy until the Turks could entrench themselves. He received the thanks of her majesty's government for his services at Silistria, and from the Turkish government a gold medal and a sword of honour.

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