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Given the nickname of “Tiger Tom” and described by his comrades as a “strict, indeed severe, but always impartial and just” disciplinarian, Sir Thomas Willshire had an illustrious military career. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1789, Willshire was the eldest surviving son of Captain John Willshire, a renowned member of the 38th regiment, who obtained regimental commissions for his three sons while they were still children. At the age of ten Thomas Willshire went on to join the military, fighting in no less than six battles by the time he was twenty, even serving in the unsuccessful Walcheren campaign in the Netherlands where his father eventually died in 1809. Following this, Willshire and his regiment joined the forces in the Peninsular Wars of 1808-1814; a violent series of battles that ultimately led to Spanish independence and the downfall of Napoleon as a commanding force in Europe. Serving in several other campaigns in the ensuing years, Willshire was appointed brigadier-general in India and was part of the primary forces leading the 1838 invasion of Afghanistan. Rising in rank as his involvement in the “march to the Indus” increased, his military prowess and dedication is evidenced by the swords engraved on the pair of silver covered dishes. Ordered to unseat the Mehrab Khan of Kalat, a border town between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan and whose resistance threatened British conquest, Willshire’s troops fought and won despite being greatly outnumbered by Khan forces. Belonging to the Mehrab Khan and his assistant general, the embossed swords represent Whillshires’s achievements in the Middle East, feats which won him further titles and the thanks of Parliament. It was only a sunstroke in 1840 that obliged this formidable commander to return to England, where he married and was promoted to Knight Grand Cross (G.C.B), one of the highest honours of chivalry before he died in 1862.