Colonel of the month - March

Turning from the upright, Boy's-Own-Paper derring-do of the Campbells and Hayes-Newingtons for a while, we take time to explore the dark side of the colonial colonel this month, through the personage of the thrilling yet disturbing Richard Meinertzhagen.

I first encountered Meinertzhagen in an entertaining passage in Bill Bryson's excellent book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything', detailing the consternation at the Natural History Museum when they opened the crates of bird specimens left to them by Meinertzhagen and discovered the museum's own labels on most of the contents. This, Bryson notes "explained his habit of wearing a large overcoat even in warm weather".

I have also come across quotes from him in various accounts of the campaign in East Africa in WWI, throughout which he appears to have sat on a deckchair behind the lines smoking a pipe and criticising his superiors - a dream job for most of us, I suspect.

There is an outstanding Wikipedia biography, from which the following quotes come:

Colonel Richard Henry Meinertzhagen CBE DSO (March 3, 1878 - June 17, 1967) was a British soldier, intelligence officer, ornithologist and expert on bird lice. He was influential in life and had a legendary reputation for his exploits around the world. Studies on his work on birds and historic notes after his death however raised serious questions on his integrity and have made him a controversial character.

In East Africa in 1905, he crushed a major revolt by killing the Orkoiyot (spiritual leader) who led it. He collected some of the tribal artefacts after this revolt. Some of these artefacts, including a walking stick and baton belonging to the Nandi tribal leader Koitalel arap Samoei, were returned to Kenya in 2006.

His unpublished diaries hint at a successful rescue attempt of one of the Russian Grand Duchesses, possibly Tatiana

Tom Segev considers that Meinertzhagen was "at once a great antisemite and a great Zionist". He justifies this analysis by this excerpt from Meinertzhagen's Middle East Diary : "I am imbued with antisemitic feelings. It was indeed an accursed day that allowed Jews and not Christians to introduce to the world the principles of Zionism and that allowed Jewish brains and Jewish money to carry them out, almost unhelped by Christians save a handful of enthusiasts in England".

He was a prolific diarist and published four books based on his diaries, which make fascinating and often insightful reading. However, his Middle East Diary (1959) contains dozens of entries that are probably fictional, including those on T. E. Lawrence and on Hitler. Meinertzhagen's claimed to have mocked Hitler by giving a Heil Meinertzhagen salute in response to those given by the men around Hitler. He also claimed to have carried a loaded gun in his coat pocket at a meeting with Hitler and von Ribbentrop in July 1939 and was "seriously troubled" about not shooting when he had the chance, adding "If this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two." Lockman in his book shows that Meinertzhagen later falsified his entries on T. E. Lawrence. The original diaries kept in the Rhodes House Library contain differences in the paper used for certain entries as well as in the typewriter ribbon used, and there are oddities in the page numbering.

"Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain..."
– T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Note the equating of the beating to death of unarmed POWs with "an unscrupulous jest".

While in India he killed one of his personal assistants in a fit of rage and had the local police officer cover it up as a death due to plague...

Gavin Maxwell wrote about how his parents would scare him and other children to behave themselves when Meinertzhagen visited with "...remember...he has killed people with his bare hands..."

Meinertzhagen's second wife, the ornithologist Anne Constance Jackson, died in 1928 at age 40 in a remote Scottish village in an incident that was ruled a shooting accident. The official finding was that she accidentally shot herself in the head with a revolver during target practice alone with Richard.

That has to be the most magnificently colonelesque inquest verdict ever...

Colonel of the month - February

Moving forward in time from the heroic and much-wounded Campbell, we come to an equally delightful character of WWII vintage - Col Eric 'Crazy' Hayes-Newington, "the oldest surviving officer of the 4th Bombay Grenadiers".

My source for this is the Daily Telegraph (of course) obituary, posted here.

As usual for a Torygraph 'moustache' obituary, it dedicates much of its first part to an account of the action in Burma in which he won the DSO:

Hayes-Newington sustained a wound in his shoulder, but this gave no pause to his vigorous leadership, and he himself slew three Japanese soldiers at point-blank range as they bore down on the tanks, shrieking.

So far so good. It then details his career up to that point, which involved the quintessentially colonial colonel activity of fighting in Waziristan - "a very active service which involved climbing peaks and
avoiding accurate sniping by tribesmen who regarded fighting as a normal
way of life".

After retiring from the Indian army he moved to Kenya, Lest anyone think that 'retirement' is a time for taking it easy, the Telegraph puts us straight:

When the Mau Mau insurrection broke out in the 1950s, Hayes-Newington joined the police, and was soon running the operations room at Nyeri.
During his 12 years' service he became Acting Superintendent of the Kenya Police, and on retirement was awarded the Colonial Police Medal.
In his late 70s he became Chief Game Warden ("Number One White Hunter") at Treetops Hotel, where he escorted Royalty, and appeared on a BBC Blue Peter television programme.

I remember that programme, which of course gave barely a hint of the man's daredevil courage and homicidal magnificence.

But what, I hear you ask, of personal eccentricity and field-sports, without which no portrait of a true colonel is complete?

Although very modest and reticent, he had a low threshold of boredom and if he felt that a dinner party was too dull, would begin eating his table napkin or do something equally unusual.
As a young man, "Crazy" had been a good hockey and soccer player, and he was always a first-class shot. He enjoyed riding a powerful Norton motor-bicycle, in spite of the practice being deplored by his seniors.
Invariably cheerful, with a dry sense of humour, he was an excellent organiser, and extremely good at putting people at their ease. Part of his younger days had been spent in Ireland, where he had become a skilled trout fisherman and a good horseman, and partly in Bruges, where he became fluent in the language. He skied, skated, won medals at cross-country running, played polo, and planned and built his own home in Kenya - where he developed a great fondness and affinity for elephants.

Present and correct on all counts, sah!

Colonel of the month - January

One of the things that first drew me towards No Good Boyo as a connoisseur of the amusing (rather than the "certain diminutive evil Welchman" that one of my trainers warned me of on my first day in the same workplace) was our shared delight in the foibles of gloriously moustachioed military and colonial gentlemen. For those who share our passion, either currently or in the near future after reading this, I offer up a few highlights on one of my personal favourites: Colonel (later Major-General) David Graham Muschet "Soarer" Campbell of the 9th Lancers.

The nickname 'Soarer' comes from the horse he rode to victory in the 1896 Grand National. I first came across this delightful character in Richard Holmes's excellent book "Tommy - The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918", in which Holmes quotes the medical officer who found Campbell lying in the long grass after charging into a superior force of German cavalry in September 1914. "I'm sorry to find you like this, sir" the medical officer recalled saying.
"Nonsense my dear boy - I've just had the best quarter of an hour of my entire life!" retorted the thrice-wounded Campbell.
Subsequently he was promoted to command of the 21st Division - a 'New Army' formation composed primarily of men who had answered Kitchener's 'Your Country Needs You' call. He was in command of this division when it was badly mauled in 1918, and said of the affair "Monday (27 May) was the worst day I have spent in this war, which is saying a lot".

Blimpishness aside, it says much about the man's character that his 'best quarter of an hour' involved leading from the front, crossing swords with the enemy and receiving multiple wounds, while his 'worst day' involved being in command but behind the lines while his men were suffering.

There is a good short biography on Birmingham University's Centre for First World War Studies page, which features the magnificent aside "Wounds were to be a feature of his military career". Though British generals of WWI have not enjoyed a high reputation on the whole, there were nonetheless some genuinely brave and charismatic men among them. Campbell certainly seems to have been such a man.