Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
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 like 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,