The idiom in which he often writes has since passed into something close to parody, but it served as understatement to those reading his letters. “The line was awfully cut up by Boers…. The Boers gave us a warmish time…. I had a ripping bathe in the dark … fighting really is an awful game.” But already by April 1900 he was complaining, “It is too annoying this war going on as it is. I really don’t see how it is going to end. We seem to be losing instead of gaining ground.” Ten months later he had had enough: “I feel as though I have been out here all my life.” On two pages he lists the novels he has been reading, all long forgotten with the exception of those by Mrs Humphrey Ward and George Meredith. When the Coldstream took up quarters at Graaff Reinet he spent a lot of his time shooting duck and playing polo.
Gideon Jacobus Scheepers was a Boer commandant born the same year as Harry. A tribunal sentenced him to death on seven charges of murdering Boer loyalists, aggravated by additional charges of arson and train wrecking. On 17 January 1902 Harry wrote home to say that he had “the doubtful pleasure” of commanding the firing party. In his mind he was certain that the man deserved to be shot. A photograph captures the moment of execution with Harry at the centre of the drama and the regiment lined up at attention on three sides of a square. Next day he noted in his diary that only fifteen of the twenty men had loaded rifles, and jotted down the requisite orders in capital letters, “Firing Party –Volleys – Ready – Present – Fire!” He never mentioned this episode to me. Once in my hearing he said with a certain visible distaste that in South Africa he had witnessed Field Punishment Number One. This involved tying to the wheel of a field gun a soldier who had disobeyed orders in action. The man might end up with his head on the ground when the gun took up a firing position. This was the equivalent of a death sentence. Otherwise all he would say was that he wished he had bought a farm in the Karoo and settled there.
That December, the authorities at Newtown planned a reception to celebrate his return. The local Montgomery Express announced that this was cancelled: “Modest to a degree, the gallant Lieutenant would rather that we simply said he did his duty, and having done it, it was his wish to return home without any demonstration.” A band nevertheless greeted him at the station, playing “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” The mayor, Mr T. Meredith, presented a silver cup “of exquisite workmanship” and in a speech to “a vast multitude” hoped that in time to come Harry’s name “would be as well known in military circles as Sir Pryce’s had become throughout the known world (loud cheers).” Some of that vast multitude then dragged him through the town in the Dolerw carriage, and the newspaper describes him rising from his seat to say among other tactful things that, “In South Africa, Montgomeryshire men had served their country very well, and he was always pleased to meet them out there.”
Reticent, he glossed over his courtship at Beningbrough. “Delightful evening with Vere. She said goodnight to me,” or “My own darling Vere,” is about as far as he allows himself to go in his diaries. May 28, 1903 is the date of their engagement, to judge from Vere’s inscription to Harry on that day of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese:
I write with ink; thou need’st but look,
One glance need’st only dart –
I write my name within thy book,
Thou thine upon my heart.
Six months after becoming engaged, he felt obliged to postpone marriage for the sake of soldiering abroad again. “I must go to Northern Nigeria for heaps of reasons – still it may prove the turning point in my career (if I have one in store!)” Seconded to the West African Frontier Force, he was to command two companies of the First Battalion of the Northern Nigerian Regiment. His father gave him an allowance of £1,200 a year, which made him rich, though not by the standards of Coldstream officers. He passed on to Vere his mother’s assurance that with care they could live a married life on this money, “with five servants, allowing £300 for a house, but can one be got for that?”
Once again he found himself in the thick of things without any training or preparation in a mission for the Empire with only commonsense to rely on. Arriving at Lagos in February 1904 he dined at Government House with Sir Frederick Lugard (later Lord) who for all his reputation struck Harry as “an insignificant little man.” In April he set off for Katagum with sixteen Yorubas and eighteen Hausas. These carriers nicknamed him “The White Man with the big nose.” On the trek he was soon put to the test. “Some natives attacked us and insisted on a palaver! I tried to pacify them till they came so close and one arrow going through Musa my boy’s hat. I fired three shots over their heads and then dropped a man at 80 yards! This apparently settled them, tho’ I was very anxious.” He acted in self-defence but one wonders what the judgment of the ladies at Beningbrough could have been when they read about this fraught encounter.
At Katagum, he noted that the mere presence of a white man is “such an excitement.” When a colleague with the name of Barber turned up, he and Harry sang the Eton Boating Song. On his own and out of touch, responsible for law and order as though judge and district commissioner rolled into one, he was empowered to lash whoever he thought deserved punishment. Finding a private by the name of Andu Kontagora guilty of assault, for instance, he decided that he himself would give the man twenty-four lashes and fine him five shillings. He and his carriers were also covering a wide area on behalf of a boundary commission, reaching remote places whose names he records – Zogo, Zungero, Hadeija, Tubzugna. The Morning Post that May carried a report from Zungero: “Cannibalism and human sacrifice were on the wane, and the natives were daily becoming more desirous of co-operating with the Government in the development and welfare of their country.” Addressing Lady Victoria Dawnay, his future mother-in-law, as “My dear little Mother,” he threw in some local colour, “My house is very uncomfy, being a round mud one about four yards in diameter and full of white ants which eat everything.”
I possess a pocket notebook in which he listed the men under his command, the medals he awarded, and the live ammunition he issued to each of them, with brief comments, mostly approving, on their character. He played polo with the Muslim emirs in the north. Nigeria was another country in which he would have liked to live, and he regretted leaving. Gamba, his orderly, cried at their parting and said over and over again, “Sai Wale Rana” – Goodbye till another day.
Back in England in April 1905, he lost no time marrying Vere. “We give you our darling child without a misgiving, knowing what she is to you,” Lady Victoria had written to him a year previously on hearing of Vere and Harry’s engagement. She followed this up: “One line of greeting on his wedding morning to our beloved Harry knowing well that he will prize the great treasure we are giving him today, with God’s blessing.” The fulsome style of his dear little Mother surely contains something cautionary.
In his autobiography, The Bonus of Laughter, Alan shows more affection for Lady Victoria than for his parents. During one Christmas holiday he insisted that he and I invite ourselves to lunch with the current tenant of Beningbrough. During the meal he made sure this lady, herself a dowager Countess, appreciated how glorious the background of the Dawnays had been. Alan’s grandmother was a Grey, descending from Prime Minister Grey of the Reform Bill; his grandfather a son of Viscount Downe. Lady Victoria’s sisters were Mary, wife of Lord Minto the Viceroy of India, the Countess of Antrim, and Lady Wakehurst, known as Cousin Cuckoo. “I imagine that any intellectual interest I have inherited comes from the Greys,” he writes, and the next sentence pins down his emotional ratings, “The Pryce-Joneses certainly had none.” What the Greys and Dawnays truly had were titles, connections and standing.
Twenty-one when she married, Vere knew hardly anything of the world. In a portrait painted of her at about that age, she looks demure, but the artist, Ellis Roberts, also catches the wariness of someone who would assume that the experiences of life were likely to prove demanding if not unpleasant and she would wish to be excused from anything li
ke that. Out of affection, and also in the manner of that day, her two brothers, Guy and Alan Dawnay, helped to make sure that she had no chance of moving outside the protective but limited social circle of their family and friends. All her life, they began their letters to her with the proprietary address, “Dear old thing.” As a properly brought-up child of the Victorian era, Vere kept albums, she collected autographs and crests, especially those of royal persons; she copied out uplifting poetry and she even played the violin and wrote the six verses and music of a hymn. One unconventional activity was competitive swimming and diving. For several years leading up to her marriage she won gold medals at various London clubs with swimming pools. It was a topic for the more genteel gossip columns. As a “Society Mermaid,” in the words of one magazine, The Lady’s Realm of June 1904, she was “wonderfully pretty and graceful.”
Once married, Harry returned to regimental soldiering with the Second Battalion of the Coldstream Guards stationed at Victoria Barracks in Windsor. In the interests of his career, he and Vere set up a London house in Buckingham Palace Road. Promoted captain in 1909, he was appointed ADC to General Sir Charles Douglas, then GOC Southern Command. When Douglas became Inspector-General of Home Forces, Harry went with him as Private Secretary until April 1914. Peacetime routine was formal, even boring, right up to the scare of war. “Isn’t this Austrian Tragedy dreadful?” was Harry’s reaction to the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the end of June 1914. The declaration of war on 5 August happened to coincide with Vere’s wedding day. “I feel I am slowly dying by inches,” she noted, “one manages to bear up in public, though in private one is absolutely overwhelmed with waves of despair.” Six days later, Harry’s battalion marched out of Victoria Barracks. The adjutant was Alan Dawnay, his brother-in-law who had been engaged and just had time to find a vicar to rush through a wedding service. After parting, Vere went home, “feeling like a stone, and crept into bed and laid my head in the dent of Harry’s pillow where his own dear one had been – all was over! They had no idea where they were going, not even the Colonel had a notion.” To his mother Harry wrote, “Take care of yourself and don’t worry about me.” On 12 August, the day the battalion sailed for France, his stiff-upper-lip tone was hardly modified for Vere:
I still cannot quite realize what is happening, and feel as if I have been through a succession of awful nightmares. I do realize what a dreadful time it is for all of you who have to go on living the same life from day to day and all the time having this dreadful blackness hanging over you, but I know you will realize it is really for the best and that we must come out alright in the long run.
At the start of this war, Harry was thirty-six. Within days he was sleeping on straw in a farmer’s shed, and by the end of the month he was in action, soon confessing to have cut buttons embossed with a crown off the uniform of a dead German and handing one of them to a fellow officer as a souvenir. In France for the entire duration of the war, he kept a diary and wrote letters to Vere that are vividly descriptive yet free from anything like literary effect. With extreme modesty he does not dwell on the occasions when he was mentioned in dispatches. “Found a pair of new boots and 25 cigarettes in each boot from Vere. Boots v. comfy,” is a typically restricted entry. He asked her to send fifty cigarettes every other day, and also, “some Brand’s meat lozenges and chocolate and acid drops and tobacco each week.” Vere quoted another Coldstreamer telling his wife that “H. P-J. comes down here every other night from the Trenches. He is always splendidly cheery about everything.” Vere’s nerves soon went. “I cannot any longer stand the thought of you remaining in those trenches.” She would lobby to get him a safer posting. “You can trust me not to say anything I ought not to say … you are having a million million harder time than dear old Alan.” The latter was soon imploring him to accept the offer of a staff job “in fairness to Vere. When you consider the intense relief it would be to her, I feel that your personal feelings ought not to weigh … take it, do, old boy.” As a staff officer at headquarters of the 38th (Welsh) Division he found himself at Amiens. The Eton College Chronicle published a list of 209 Old Etonian officers from the top ranks downwards who held a dinner at the front in October 1917, and his name appears at Table 7. When the Second Coldstream returned to Victoria Barracks on 25 February 1919 many of the officers including the colonel had been killed and of the thousand or so non-commissioned officers and men who had marched out only fifteen survived and just two had served with the same company throughout the war.
Alan Dawnay made his name as a member of the Arab Bureau, the wartime think-tank in Cairo influencing British policy in the Middle East. He was the liaison officer between the Egyptian Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Allenby and Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein and leader of the Arab revolt in the desert against the Ottomans. Faisal’s champion was Lawrence of Arabia. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s account of this campaign, is a masochistic psychodrama that has established the lasting misperception of Arabs as victims of betrayal and the British as traitorous victimisers. He achieved this effect by describing his British colleagues in language that compacts praise with denigration. Alan Dawnay, for instance, was “Allenby’s greatest gift to us – greater than thousands of baggage camels…. His was a brilliant mind, understanding to a degree, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion, and developing them.” “To a degree” conveys “not at all.” Writing from an address in Heliopolis on 10 July 1916 to congratulate Harry on his Military Cross, Alan Dawnay came clean about Egypt as he found it. “This is not a nice country, the people are too loathsome and one gets so tired of the desert.”
Guy Dawnay was thirty-seven in 1914. A staff officer with Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli, he reported to London that the expedition was a disaster, and he recommended evacuation. Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Council, found Dawnay, “disagreeable and too big for his boots.” Lord Kitchener, the Minister responsible, took Dawnay’s side and drew the line under this military disaster. Dawnay then joined the Arab Bureau, and in Seven Pillars Lawrence heaped his usual destructive praise on him. “Dawnay’s cold, shy mind gazed upon our efforts with bleak eye, always thinking, thinking. Beneath this mathematical surface he hid passionate many-sided convictions, a reasoned scholarship in higher warfare, and the brilliant bitterness of a judgment disappointed with us: and with life.”
Granny Vere never spoke to me about her brothers. Controller of Programmes at the BBC in the mid-Thirties, Alan committed suicide in 1938. Guy became a successful businessman, founder of the investment bank Dawnay Day and chairman of Armstrong Whitworth. I could well have met him and his descendants but we had all gone our separate ways. One day my father gave me a pair of Arab jars about a foot high, the bronze metal beautifully worked, with holes for sprinkling at the top of elegant elongated necks. They had been the gift of Lawrence of Arabia to Uncle Alan, he said. Take out the stoppers and these jars have a lingering perfume of rosewater.
SIX
Here He Is!
“IT WAS NO ACCIDENT, Pryce-Jones, that you have lived near three royal palaces,” runs a private joke in Where Engels Fears to Tread, Cyril Connolly’s unsurpassed satire of the bourgeois writer mimicking a revolutionary proletarian in the heyday of the fellow-travelling Thirties. The first of these three was Buckingham Palace. On 18 November 1908 Alan was born in his parents’ house in Buckingham Palace Road. Harry and Vere will have taken it for granted that they had to do for Alan whatever had been done for them. A dutiful couple, they were bound by the conventions to which ladies and gentlemen of their generation subscribed without question. To the end of his life, Alan spoke about the limitations of his parents. He couldn’t help patronizing them. The best that parents of this kind could do wasn’t good enough.
Vere overdid motherhood. She dealt in superlatives. Things were either uniquely wonderful or uniquely dreadful. A series of miscarriages hadn’t helped what Alan summed up as “the nervous tensions that beset
my mother.” Alan thought himself spoiled “in the sense of being humoured,” and at the same time neglected. Photographed as an infant, he had been put into a layered lace dress like a girl’s, and for a portrait when he was about ten he wore a pale blue velvet suit with an elaborate lace collar. Delighting in his gifts and precociousness and fearful of the roughness of other boys, Vere felt too protective to send him to school. She preserved the youthful poems that he had no trouble writing; she listened to him playing the piano, her very own Bechstein grand; she considered him a genius.
A Harley Street specialist by the name of Maurice Craig obligingly told her what she wanted to hear, writing to her in April 1917.
I am certain that at the present moment school would be the worst thing in the world for him and I speak from the experience of constantly seeing school tried. I should let him do no lessons till he is nearly ten…. Music lessons ought to be very short and difficult exercises kept down to a minimum. I strongly advise that he should be kept away from parties and entertainments…. The main point in bringing him up is to retard mental development and keep the physical if possible a little ahead of the mental, though I am afraid this will be very difficult.”
Thirty years later, her opinion hadn’t changed. She wrote to Alan, “You, of course, were the most brilliant child who has ever been born into this world, in any country, and in your case I am still sure we were wise never to let you go to a private school at all.”
Alan grew up with the sense that he was numbered among those with the means and the standing to be able to live as they pleased. He was ten in September 1918 when his brother Adrian was born and the difference in age guaranteed an unequal relationship. Less was expected of Adrian, he did not write poems or play the piano, he was allowed to go to a prep school. The education of their two sons cost more than the parents could easily afford. Although much decorated and mentioned in dispatches in the war, Harry had not risen above the rank of colonel. Seconded to Field Marshal Haig’s staff quartered in Montreuil, of all places, he had lost seniority. Between the wars, he still had a paid job and an office in the Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, dealing with the recruitment and training of the Territorial Army. “No kinder, quieter man ever lived,” is one of many a backhand compliment that Alan pays him. To go straight on to say that he was not a practical man was to cut away the ground under someone engaged in military administration. Perhaps it was Harry’s conception of correct behaviour that obliged Vere to keep accounts of her expenditure, which neither of them ever added up. It turned out that he never asked to see Vere’s marriage settlement, so its investments remained exactly the same as on the day when they were made, except that some by then no longer existed or were bankrupt.
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