The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  In 1864 Andrew married Isabelle De Milt Swearingen. Belle was born in Virginia in 1844, into a long established family of Dutch origin. Her parents had migrated west during the Gold Rush and were thus themselves pioneers. The family was extremely well connected, her sister Sue being the wife of the lawyer Stephen J. Field, a ‘Forty-niner’ who was already Chief Justice of California and was later appointed to the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. The wedding took place at Grace Church in San Francisco, but no guests were invited and the subsequent announcement took the city’s society by surprise.

  Andrew’s wealth allowed the couple to travel to Europe regularly and Belle was greatly attracted to the Old World. Andrew bought for her Castello di Urio, a villa on Lake Como, as well as a house in Paris, and she increasingly spent her time at one of these and later also in substantial rented properties in England, collecting a large number of fine paintings and tapestries. She entered British society at a high level and was even considered to be one of the Prince of Wales’s set, whilst Andrew, for the most part, preferred to remain in California. If Andrew and Belle were not estranged, they certainly led very separate lives.

  In addition to his main home in San Francisco Andrew bought a country property north-west of the city, though this was later sold. In 1895 he paid $98,000 for the Rancho Real de los Aguilas. This ranch of more than 30,000 acres lay in San Benito County in the country east of the Gabilans, the range of hills inland from Monterey. The initial land grant had been made by the Mexican Government in 1844, prior to the acquisition of California by the United States. Andrew spent much time there in his later years and acquired other parcels of nearby land, including the Langtry Farms owned by Lily Langtry, the actress and former lover of the Prince of Wales. The whole property was usually referred to as the McCreery Ranch. Andrew also owned a farm near Baltimore, where he had worked immediately after his arrival in the United States, although he appears to have spent little time there.

  Notwithstanding their frequent travelling and several homes, the McCreerys found time to have three sons – Richard, born in 1866, Lawrence, born in 1869, and Walter, born in Zurich on 13 August 1871. The brothers were brought up in an atmosphere of gracious living, and Walter Adolph McCreery became in due course as cosmopolitan as his parents, sharing his mother’s affection for Europe. He was privately educated in the United States and then followed his brother Lawrence to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1891, graduating with a 2nd Class law degree in 1894. He had no need to earn his living, so enjoyed the life of an English country gentleman, with a strong focus on equestrian sports. Having learnt to ride at an early age, he became a highly accomplished polo player and in his twenties developed a great enthusiasm for foxhunting. Through social contacts he became a member of the Blackmore Vale Hunt, whose country lay in north Dorset and south-west Somerset. He would stay for the season at Compton Castle, a Victorian Gothic pile at Compton Pauncefoot, rented for about five years in the mid to late 1890s by his mother Belle, and during one such visit he met Emilia Jane (‘Minnie’) McAdam.

  The fortunes of the McAdam family had been established by Minnie’s great, great grandfather, John Loudon McAdam. Born in Ayr, in 1756, financial difficulties in his family in 1770 forced him to go to New York to work for his uncle as a merchant and prize agent, selling ships captured by the Royal Navy. The outbreak of the War of Independence in 1775 caused problems for Loyalists and McAdam’s uncle decided to retire, but he himself continued with the business and married the daughter of a wealthy lawyer. By the time of American independence in 1783 he was able to sell the business and return to Scotland with more than enough to buy a house and country estate and, among other activities, to become a trustee of the Ayrshire Turnpike. However, renewed financial problems caused him to go south to Bristol and it was while he was there that he proposed to a parliamentary committee a new method of road-building, involving cambering for better drainage and the application of compressed stone and gravel on a firm surface, replacing the muddy tracks that had been used since the Romans left. Known as ‘macadamization’, it was universally adopted in Britain and later spread throughout the world.

  John Loudon McAdam declined the offer of a baronetcy, but one was later accepted by his son and Minnie’s great grandfather, James Nicoll McAdam, who became surveyor to a large number of turnpike trusts and was popularly known as the ‘Colossus of Roads’.2 James Nicoll McAdam’s grandson, James John Loudon McAdam, joined the 10th Hussars from Sandhurst at the very young age of 17, served in the Indian Mutiny and then transferred to the 7th Dragoon Guards. In 1871 he married Frances Elizabeth Monck, the daughter of John Bligh Monck of Coley Park in Berkshire, and Minnie was born in 1874.

  When Walter and Minnie met, she was living with her parents at Greenhill House in Sherborne, built in 1607 and regarded as the best house of its era in the town. Her father had retired from the Army with the rank of major and, having sold the McAdam’s Tindon End Estate in Essex for nearly £50,000, had moved to Dorset in order to hunt with the Blackmore Vale. He was a man of some substance locally, becoming a Justice of the Peace and a Governor of Sherborne School. After a brief courtship Walter and Minnie were married in Sherborne Abbey on 6 April 1897. They may have visited the United States that year, but seem to have spent more time in England and it was at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire that their eldest son, Richard Loudon McCreery, was born on 1 February 1898.

  Chapter 2

  Childhood and Schooldays

  In spite of his Scottish and Irish roots and the American background of his father,1 Dick McCreery was brought up and educated as then befitted an upper middle-class Englishman. Not long after he was born the family moved into a large house called The Coplow, at Billesdon in Leicestershire, where Minnie produced two more boys in quick succession, Robert Bruce (‘Bob’) in January 1899 and Walter Selby (‘Selby’) in April 1900. It was not until 1906 that the last of Walter and Minnie’s children, John Buchanan (‘Jack’), was born. The first three brothers grew up together and became very close.

  Walter had probably located the family in Leicestershire for the excellent hunting (The Coplow used to host a meet annually for the Quorn), but he was looking for a permanent home and in 1902 he found one in the shape of Bilton Park, just outside Rugby. Bilton Park boasted a substantial house of eleven bedrooms, together with two cottages and extensive farm buildings and stabling, all situated in more than 90 acres of grounds – but best of all it had a full-sized polo ground and training gallops. This appealed immensely to Walter, who had by this time become a serious polo player, competing successfully in the sport at the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris. Under the rules of the day, team events could comprise members of different nationalities. Walter’s was led by the French Comte Jean de Madre, whilst the other two members, Frederick Freake and Walter Buckmaster, were both Englishmen. Competing under the title of BLO Polo Club, Rugby, they took the silver medal. In the same year both Walter and his brother Lawrence represented the United States in a match against an English team in which both Freake and Buckmaster played, but more frequently Walter, and occasionally Lawrence, played alongside the two Englishmen in a team of Cambridge graduates called the Old Cantabs which was unbeaten for two years, winning the Champion Cup at Hurlingham in 1900.

  Unsurprisingly the boys were taught to ride almost as soon as they could walk and Dick, Bob and Selby all became excellent horsemen. Walter in the meantime turned Bilton Park into a venue for polo, hosting a regular tournament there, and also owned and ran a number of racehorses. Equestrian sport was not his only enthusiasm, however, as he also had a passion for modern methods of transport, notably the car and the aeroplane. He bought increasingly larger and faster cars – one of his great pleasures was racing the train to Rugby all the way from London – and took every opportunity to go aloft in the primitive flying machines of the day. One of the earliest of these to be seen in the Midlands was actually assembled in a shed on the Bilton estate.

  In 1903 Dick and Bob travelled for
the first time with their parents to the United States. They sailed for New York on the White Star liner Cedric, a voyage on which Dick realized for the first time that he was prone to travel sickness. Their brief stay in New York included a visit to the zoo, after which they travelled to California by train. Both children much preferred the train to the boat and loved going through the Rockies, which were still covered in snow. In San Francisco they stayed in the Palace Hotel before visiting their grandparents at their ranch.

  At about this time a new and important person entered Dick’s life in the person of Miss Catherine Stay, who had been employed as the boys’ governess. Always called ‘Da’, she became a firm favourite with all of them, very much a part of the family, and right up to her death well into her nineties Dick would visit her frequently at her home in Sherborne and write to her when he was away. She taught the children not only when they were at Bilton but also on their travels, accompanying them across the Atlantic.

  The first proper school which Dick attended was the nearby Bilton Grange. However, as with all those of his social group, a more rigorous education beckoned and in 1906 he was sent away to board at St Michael’s School, Westgate-on-Sea. St Michael’s had been founded in 1869 by the Reverend John Hawtrey, who had been a boy at Eton and, after becoming a master there, had decided with the permission of the college to remove the lowest forms of the school for their preparatory education. Situated initially in some buildings in Slough, it was removed to Westgate, on the north coast of Kent near Margate, by Hawtrey’s son Edward, in 1883. The close relationship with Eton was maintained and a high percentage of the boys went on there at the age of 13 for their secondary education.

  There is virtually no information about Dick’s career at St Michael’s, as all the school records have disappeared. He certainly made satisfactory academic progress, as he was second in the school trials2 in the first term of his final year and was awarded the First Division prize in July 1911 at the conclusion of his prep school career. He played cricket, writing to his grandmother in his first summer term that he was practising every day and that he had made 18, 21 and 40 runs, but whether he ever represented the school or what other activities he undertook remain unknown.

  Whilst Dick was at St Michael’s, his parents’ marriage started to fall apart. The fault lay with Walter, who had begun to behave erratically. At the end of January 1909 he returned from San Francisco to Bilton Park, where he became violent and abusive – indeed it was subsequently alleged that he tried to kill Minnie.3 Minnie, a woman of strong character, summoned a doctor who ordered Walter to be put under the control of two male nurses. Lunacy proceedings were instituted against him and in April a court order was obtained, appointing a receiver of his property. Proceedings were also begun to give Minnie custody of the children. Walter managed to escape to Belgium and thence to San Francisco, where he filed in the California Superior Court a petition for divorce against Minnie on the grounds of her cruelty in having him confined and a receiver appointed. Minnie, supported by her powerful mother, responded by filing for alimony for herself and maintenance for the children.

  Walter then applied to the Court of Appeal in the United Kingdom for the receiver’s appointment to be discharged and this was done provisionally in February 1910. Although subsequent proceedings were brought by Minnie to have the receiver re-appointed, the terms of a settlement were agreed and on 10 March a memorandum of agreement was executed between them under California law, giving her custody of the children and providing for her support and for their education and maintenance, following which the receiver was finally discharged and the divorce proceedings dropped. Walter and Minnie lived separate lives from this time, Walter in California and at Bilton Park, Minnie with her mother and the children at Greenhill House. She had legal custody, while he had the right to visit the children at any time and the obligation to pay for their visits to him. There was also provision for access by Andrew and Belle to their grandchildren. Walter retained Bilton Park, although Minnie took much of the furniture. The final provision was that if she remarried the payment would be reduced to cover only the children’s education.

  Walter’s settlement with Minnie was not the end of the matter. His family in the United States was also deeply concerned by his behaviour and in 1912 he was put under restraint there and declared to be an incompetent person by the California Superior Court, which appointed a Mr McPike as the guardian of his person and estate. Somehow Walter managed to escape back to England where he found that Bilton Park had been stripped of its furniture and let to a tenant and that his beloved motor cars had also disappeared, under the instructions of McPike. He took McPike and various other parties to the High Court in London, which in due course found in his favour and ordered his property to be restored to him, largely on the strength of an opinion from two eminent doctors that he was sane and capable of managing his affairs. The ban of incompetency in the United States, however, remained until February 1914, when Walter succeeded in having it lifted.

  In March 1913 Andrew McCreery died, leaving $100,000 in trust for Minnie for the support and education of her children, with interests in the remainder for each of them on their 21st birthdays. A year after his death, a new modifying memorandum was entered into by Walter and Minnie, the main provisions of which were to transfer Walter’s one-sixth share of Andrew’s estate to a trust. There was a first charge on the trust’s income, of which two-thirds was for the support, education and maintenance of the children. The income would be paid directly to the boys after their 21st birthdays. The new memorandum also referred to the setting up of the McCreery Estate Company by Andrew’s heirs to hold all his real property assets, including the McCreery Ranch, and Walter’s trust receiving stock in the new corporation which on his death would pass to his children. The effect of all these agreements was to provide a degree of financial security for Dick and his brothers for the rest of their lives, although there were a number of occasions when Dick’s lack of cash management resulted in his running an overdraft.

  It is difficult to assess the precise impact on his children of Walter’s behaviour and the subsequent separation, but Da was later to say that Dick had had a difficult boyhood. Certainly it was one of the elements which forged his character, including almost certainly his own attitude to marriage, but perhaps also other traits such as his approach to alcohol, which he rarely consumed and then only in moderation, unlike his father who was a considerable tippler. It does seem, however, that the strong bonds with his mother, grandmother and brothers provided a significant measure of stability.

  It was against this backdrop that Dick went to Eton, where he was placed in Hugh de Havilland’s House in the Michaelmas Half of 1911.4 Although he had not been admitted as a scholar, he began immediately to distinguish himself academically, graduating from the Fourth Form to the Removes after his first term. From the outset he was recognized as a ‘bona fide Army Class candidate’, so it seems that his choice of future career was made at a young age, doubtless fostered by his maternal grandfather5 and even by Walter, whose activities on the polo field brought him into frequent contact with British Army officers.

  The Army Class was a feature of Eton and certain other public schools with a tradition of providing officers for the Army. Its aim was to prepare boys for the entrance examination to either the Royal Military College at Sandhurst or the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, rather than for the Higher School Certificate. Admission to the Army Class was by performance in the school trials and could be achieved either from the Removes – the class between the Fourth and Fifth Forms – or from the Fifth Form itself. A high standard was demanded, both overall and specifically in maths. The curriculum was focused on science, maths, history and English, with French for the top division of the class. This was at the expense of the classical subjects, Latin and Greek, studied in the rest of the school.

  Dick entered the Army Class at the earliest possible opportunity, after a year in the Removes, and made rapid progress
thereafter, moving up a class in every one of the next four halves and arriving in the top Army Class IA in his penultimate half. His exceptionally rapid progress meant that he was as much as two years ahead of some of his contemporaries. A. S. C. Brown, who was in his class and later a fellow officer in his regiment, recalled: ‘He was much cleverer than most of us and to us older ones he was very quiet and shy.’6 Notwithstanding the age difference, Dick performed at the top of each of his classes, winning the Trials Prize three times out of his six terms in the Army Class and the Divinity Prize on one occasion as well. The prizes were always books and the first was a handsome red leather bound copy of Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities by R. S. Surtees, a very appropriate choice in the light of Dick’s enthusiasm for hunting.

  Dick never made it into the record books for sporting achievement. This may be partly because he grew slowly at first, before shooting up and possibly outgrowing his strength, remaining for the rest of his life very slightly built for his height, and partly because he left the school at a very early age. He certainly played cricket and in the summer of 1914 he coxed de Havilland’s second boat in the Junior House Fours bumping races, but he never represented the school in any sport. Bob and Selby joined Dick at de Havilland’s, the former in the Michaelmas Half of 1912 and the latter in the Lent Half of 1914, but unlike Dick both remained in the school for a full four years and were thus old enough to play for the house cricket XI.

  One activity which Dick did pursue was membership of the Officers’ Training Corps, which he joined in the Lent Half of 1913. The OTC was an entirely voluntary organization, remaining so even after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, but membership was probably considered highly desirable for those anticipating a full-time army career. He left before he could gain promotion beyond the rank of private.