by Sapper
Copyright & Information
Bulldog Drummond
First published in 1920
© Trustees of the Estate of H.C. McNeile; House of Stratus 1920-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of H.C. McNeile (Sapper) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,
Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
1842325434 9781842325438 Print
0755122860 9780755122868 Pdf
0755123034 9780755123032 Mobi
0755123212 9780755123216 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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About the Author
Herman Cyril McNeile, who wrote under the pseudonym Sapper, was born in Bodmin, Cornwall, on 28 September 1888 to Captain Malcolm McNeile RN and his wife, Christiana Mary. He was educated at Cheltenham College, and then went on to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, before joining the Royal Engineers in 1907, from which he derived his pseudonym – ‘sappers’ being the nickname of the Engineers.
During World War One he served first as a Captain, seeing action at both the First and the Second Battle of Ypres, and won the Military Cross before retiring from the army as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1919. Prior to this, in 1914 he met and married Violet Baird, daughter of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Cameron Highlanders. They eventually had two sons.
Somewhat remarkably, he managed to publish a number of books during the war and whilst still serving, (serving officers were not permitted to publish under their own names – hence the need for a pseudonym), commencing with The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E. in 1915. Lord Northcliff, the owner of the Daily Mail, was so impressed by this writing that he attempted, but failed, to have McNeile released from the army so he could work as a war correspondent.
McNeile's first full length novel, Mufti, was published in 1919, but it was in 1920 that his greatest hit Bulldog Drummond, was published. This concerned the exploits of a demobilised officer, Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, ‘who found peace dull’. This was an immediate and enduring success and has been filmed and performed on stage both in the UK and USA. Further Drummond adventures were to follow, along with other novels, notably those featuring the private detective Ronald Standish.
Much of his writing is based upon the atmosphere, rather than experiences, he absorbed from public school and London Gentleman’s Clubs. His heroes are most decidedly ‘English’ in character and ‘do the right thing’, whilst his villains are foreign and ‘do not play by the rules’. Ian Fleming once noted that his own hero James Bond was ‘Sapper’ from the waist up.
McNeile died in 1937 at his home in Sussex, having lived a relatively quiet and content life, in sharp contrast to the characters in his books. His friend Gerard Fairlie, thought to be the model for Drummond, went on to write seven more adventures. Many of his books are collections of short stories, with most having a twist in the tail, usually surprising the reader by totally flawing anticipations with regard to their ending within the last few sentences. They are as popular today as ever and eagerly adopted by succeeding generations as amongst the best of their genre.
House of Stratus was pleased to gain the right to publish from McNeile’s estate in 1999 and has since continually held his major works in print.
INTRODUCTION
Richard Usborne
Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC, late of His Majesty’s Loamshires, defends England against a wicked world of fiends and foreigners. He is rich, strong, charmingly ugly and, at first, a bachelor. He rescues a pretty damsel in distress and, since this is 1920, marries her at the end of the first book. He has to rescue dear ever-loyal Phyllis many times in subsequent stories. But Husband-Rescues-Wife doesn’t have much mileage in sequels, serializations, plays and films. In later books the romance, such as it is, is given to Hugh’s pals – Algy, Toby, Peter – and their topping girls. But Drummond remains leader of the pack, captain of The Gentlemen, a blunt instrument powered with brain, brawn, cheerful courage and good contacts with Whitehall and Scotland Yard.
Hugh’s enemy, England’s enemy, in the first four novels is an international villain who, though he appears under various other names and in any number of disguises, is basically Carl Peterson. We never learn what either his nationality or his real name is. His retinue of henchmen in England seems to be mostly Boches or Bolsheviks. When Carl goes down in The Final Count, his mistress Irma is good for several more books, bent, under those slinky gowns, on terrible revenge against the man who killed her man.
Sapper, Conan Doyle, Haggard, Hornung, Buchan and Dornford Yates were the enchanters and life-enhancers of my boyhood. They were writing stuff that I greatly preferred to the works of the authors I was supposed to be reading: Dickens, Thackeray, Homer, Virgil and those boring Lake Poets. I know ‘belief’ can mean anything, everything or nothing. When I was fourteen I believed in Drummond and Carl Peterson more intensely than in the Holy Ghost or the Communion of Saints to which I testified aloud, in church or chapel, every Sunday. Among other enthusiastic readers of Drummond’s exploits, from the start shortly after World War I, was an exact contemporary of mine, Ian Fleming. Fleming, shortly after World War II, remembered the Drummond books shrewdly in planning his James Bond. He gave Bond a sex life more in keeping with the demands of the fiction of the 1950s and ’60s. But he went, professionally and gratefully, for the essentials of the Sapper plot, movement and supra-national villainy.
In revisiting, in the 1980s, the bestsellers those wonderful authors wrote for (these were Conan Doyle’s words) ‘the boy who is half a man and the man who is half a boy’, we must measure their messages against the values of their own days. We speak today of Britain; a much reduced Britain, and it includes people of many colours, religions and lifestyles. They spoke of England and, notionally if not overtly, that meant the white man (‘clean white through and through’ in character, too), home or colonial, probably upstanding, certainly a match for any two foreigners: a society led by gentlemen, with Royalty at the top. Starting at Calais were the niggers, the Frogs, the Boches, the Bolshies, the dagoes and the stateless Jews. England had the Navy and command of the seven seas. Of course the foreigners envied us, and with many of them envy meant hate. I can remember thinking like that and believing that my values were certainties.
Sapper, perhaps most confidently of all those authors, put the Englishman on a pedestal above the lesser breeds. His favoured Englishmen fought with their fists, punched to the jaw, shot straight, rode straight, played straight, lit cigarettes all the time, spoke in jovial ‘old boy’ slang to each other when relaxed, curtly when speaking to cads. His foreigners fought dirty, carried knives, emitted guttural snarls, used thumbscrews and little known Asiatic poisons: and their eyes were full of malignant hate. Sapper’s narrative style set a pace that encouraged very fast reading. He used a remarkably small vocabulary, with frequent repetitions of formulaic phrases. You could virtually read down the midd
le of a Sapper page and know you weren’t missing anything near the margins.
Sapper’s stance was doctrinaire, if not chauvinistic. But I wolfed his books first at an age when I wanted to be taught: how to shoot the pip out of the Ace of Diamonds at twenty paces; how to order a Martini cocktail; how to belong to a West End club; how to twist a poker into knots; how to drive a Bentley; how to survive when, doped rigid by villains, I was put at the wheel of my Rolls and sent over the weir into the river; how to disguise myself and get instantly taken on as a waiter in the Ritz in Paris, or taken for a fanatical Moslem in Cairo; how to catch an ugly-looking knife thrown at me in a barroom brawl in Valparaiso and throw it back to pin the dago to the wall by his arm; how to wear riding boots and a monocle: how to be a Man, my son. Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond series and Jim Maitland stories were my textbooks for all this.
Although the Sapper style hardened long before any of his books were made into films, his narrative always seems to me remarkably cinematic, with many of its effects calling for under-the-chin lighting and the cosy close-up. Drummond’s eyes, showing him to be a ‘a sportsman and a gentleman…an unbeatable product’; Phyllis’ feet, ‘perfectly shod’; a villain’s eyes ‘full of malignant fury’; ‘a cold, merciless face’ (Lakington’s); Carl Peterson’s fingers tapping on his knee; Carl’s hands, ‘large and white and utterly ruthless’; the hooded cobra in the Lakington curtains; the face (Lakington’s again) in which ‘shone a fiendish satisfaction’. In this book you will find a woman shuddering audibly. And surely only the cinema could do justice to Phyllis’ facial expression for the sentence ‘…with an inscrutable look at Hugh, in which thankfulness and apprehension seemed mingled, the girl left the room.’ All this, and car chases, sudden blackouts (Drummond has shot out the single light in the villain’s drawing-room), a fight with a partially grown gorilla and Drummond’s rooftop singing in the dawn in Godalming.
I didn’t feel that Samuel Goldwyn, his scriptwriters and cameramen did anything like full justice to Sapper’s book when, in Hollywood, in black and white, in the 1920s, they produced the film with Ronald Colman and Constance Bennett (an American Phyllis). They got practically everything hilariously wrong in their portrayal of English manners and customs. I saw the film again on television recently. It was full of delicious memories and absurdities for me. Drummond and his silly-ass friend Algy (who was dressed in evening tails, white tie and monocle from start to finish of the picture) put on their hats (Algy’s was an opera hat, of course) to sit up at the bar of their West End club, the Senior Conservatives. In the bar-parlour of the Green Bay pub in Godalming (Drummond had taken the bridal suite upstairs) the local yokels were singing the ‘Wine inspires us and fires us’ song in close harmony, waving beer mugs and long after midnight. And, when the peasants had left, in the small hours, the counter-tenor was, in an inglenook near a huge open fire, canoodling with the barmaid and, accompanying himself now on an accordion, singing the ‘You are the only girl in the world for me’ song. There was no acid bath and Drummond had to kill Lakington off-stage in shadow-play. There was no crack when the neck broke.
I never saw the du Maurier/Sapper play in the West End. But it can’t have been any more of a smash hit than the one-night version that was played in Hall at Charterhouse at the end of the short Spring Term (or Long Quarter, as we whimsically called it) in 1927. It was chosen, produced, directed and (as a last-minute substitute for an Algy Longworth who went down with mumps) acted in by Lionel Hale. Lionel, one of the best, and far the laziest, classical scholar of his year, went on to write plays, to review books and plays for the old News Chronicle and to become a name on BBC radio. A very clever fellow, Lionel.
Of course we all, from new boys to Sixth Formers, had read Bulldog Drummond: it was in every House library. And many had seen the play in London. Lionel’s determined, and probably unauthorized, adaptation of the script for school use was masterly. I can remember the frisson produced in the audience by his rewriting of the curtain-line of Act I to end with the single word ‘Godalming’. Much of the action of Bulldog Drummond does take place in Godalming. But Godalming was also the school’s postal address. ‘Charterhouse, Godalming, Surrey’ was the address on the envelopes of our parents’ letters, and at the top of our letters home to them. Tomorrow we would all be taking a dawn train home from Godalming Station. Lionel’s curtain-line was a brilliant emendation. The thumb-screwing, the acid bath, the cobra on the darkened stairs – that was all happening down the hill, and we ought to be seeing it in Act II. Thrill, thrill.
Lionel’s substitute for the infernal gas-making machine, secreted in the coal scuttle, that has Drummond and his pals sprawling insensible in their chairs, was equally daringly emended: doped cigarettes… Smoking at Charterhouse in those days rated a Headmaster’s beating, but Lionel had talked the authorities into letting Drummond and his friends smoke on stage, knowing the added spice of danger this would give to the scene. And the wicked Irma Peterson was played by the wife of one of the school chaplains. She had never smoked in her life and was now required to chain-smoke cigarettes through a 24-inch holder. She hated it and did it unconvincingly.
Lionel also put an extra snap, literally, into the great fight between Drummond (John Fletcher, later an RAF bomber pilot and killed in a raid over Germany) and Lakington (Noel Carlile, grandson of the Prebendary and later Racing Correspondent on The Times). He gave Drummond a pencil to hide up his sleeve. When he had got Lakington in a strangle-hold (Olaki the Jap had taught him this for use in No-Man’s-Land on nights out from the trenches in France) and was bending his head further and further back, he contrived to break the pencil with a crack that resounded through Hall and utterly convinced us that Peterson’s evil henchman had become an instant corpse. Yes, a clever lad, Lionel. He would go far. Incidentally, Drummond’s neck was swelling with incipient mumps as he broke Lakington’s. John Fletcher joined the original Algy in the San for the first week or so of the holidays.
Was there a real-life Bulldog Drummond? The more one establishes favourites in fiction, the more one wants to know who it was that their authors had in mind when shaping them. The answer is almost always dusty, and for Hugh Drummond the answer is dustier than usual because his author was such a compulsive storyteller. (How often in his books does a character – good at games, plenty of money, lazy smile and all that – get extra marks for being good at telling a story?) Instead of the modest ‘Oh, I don’t know, you know’ with which many authors wriggle out of this boring (to them) question, Sapper seems blithely to have spun yarns. He once said in a radio interview, when he was with his young friend Gerard (Joe) Fairlie, that Joe was his idea of Hugh Drummond. Fairlie would have been the last to claim that there had been much of a likeness. He had been just too young to have fought in the 1914–18 war, though he was a subaltern in a smart regiment shortly afterwards. He was a good golfer, and got through five rounds in one Amateur Championship. Golf was not one of Drummond’s sports. Joe had been a good boxer and, like Drummond, had had his nose broken at it. With the best will in the world, you have to admit that Drummond in the books seems to be almost illiterate. Joe was already a writer and was to follow in Sapper’s footsteps as author of Bulldog Drummond’s doings. He very much admired Sapper’s writings. Sapper, knowing that Joe wanted to establish himself as a writer, taught him not a little of the tricks of the trade and helped get him started in print. When Sapper knew he was dying, he gave his blessing to an arrangement whereby Joe should go on ‘following Sapper’ with the Bulldog Drummond character and stories, sharing the rewards with the Sapper estate.
Sapper gave his elder son to believe that a certain Colonel Stapleton-Cotton had been his inspiration for Drummond. As Michael McNeile now recalls and records, his father had told him that they had met, the two officers, McNeile the sapper and Stapleton-Cotton the gunner, when they were both on leave from France in 1917. Sapper, getting off a tram, found this huge man standing in his way and lightly touched him on the shoulder to sugge
st that he might move sideways. The colonel, resenting this, had picked up the major and dumped him inescapably in a large litter bin. The big man had extracted the smaller one after some minutes of futile struggle, and they went off to a pub on the Victoria Embankment and became friends for life. Stapleton-Cotton was rich, a boxer, a golfer, a bachelor, and he drove a Bentley. They met again in France, where, Sapper told his son, Stapleton-Cotton helped to hold up one end of a pontoon bridge on his shoulders, standing in a stream, while men, vehicles and horses crossed. And, on another leave, they were playing golf together in Scotland when someone drove a ball into Stapleton-Cotton’s back. He bided his time and then picked up the offender (who happened to be a General) and dumped him in a boggy patch of the course head first. Sapper had other vivid stories about this big, strong, rich, attractive, bachelor colonel.
One difficulty about Colonel Bill Stapleton-Cotton is that none of the three officers of that name in the Army Lists of 1914–18 fits this heroic hunk of a man. The only one with a W in his initials, V W Stapleton-Cotton, was a Captain in the Chinese Labour Corps: not a gunner, not a colonel. Not, arguably, Hugh Drummond. And, if you look carefully, you’ll find that in this first volume of the saga Hugh Drummond, though strong, isn’t yet egregiously tall. He visibly acquires height, breadth and strength in the next novel, The Black Gang, and keeps it thereafter.
Sapper must have wished he hadn’t married Hugh to Phyllis at the end of this first book. She gets short shrift in the books that follow. If she isn’t ignominiously bundled off to France for golf and gambling with friends in the first pages, she is soon wishing she had been. She is kidnapped, threatened, sent rat-sized whistling spiders in boxes marked ‘Aspreys’, knocked out by poisonous fumes blown at her down the speaking tubes of taxis and manhandled by Russian soldiers in Essex mansions. She does, however, in a later novel, prove her worth as a wife by killing, with a spanner, one of the circumambient baddies.