RAMBLINGS OF A MILITARY HISTORIAN
My last job for Her Majesty was to command what had been the Training Depot Brigade of Gurkhas in Hong Kong, renamed the Gurkha Training Wing, and set it up in the UK. We were responsible for training recruits for the Brigade and running courses for Officers and NCOs. It was great fun, enormously satisfying and has ensured that until I reach the age of ninety I shall know at least some serving Gurkhas. Sadly, the Army does not allow one to stay until the age of ninety, or I would still be there, dribbling down my waistcoat and boring subalterns at guest nights, and for my last couple of years my wife had been casually enquiring what it was that I intended to do when I eventually went on pension. My usual answer was that I had no idea but that something would doubtless turn up. The rapid approach of the time to hand in my kit and a telephone enquiry from some chinless functionary wanting to know if I was interested in becoming a Gentleman at Arms (I thought I already was) began to concentrate the mind and I started to give serious consideration as to how I was going to spend the next fifty years (those of my family who do not get killed in wars all live to a very great age). I knew that I did not want to work for anyone else – the army had been kind to me, tolerated my eccentricities and given me lots of independent jobs: I was well aware that working for a civilian would get me sacked in the first week, probably for telling the boss that he was incompetent or corrupt or both, so whatever I did I had to be self-employed. As there is not a great call for the skills of killing people and blowing things up in civilian life, at least not if one wishes to stay inside the law, I calculated that the only things that I knew a great deal about, and which might earn me a living, were horses and history. As working with horses is a recipe for going bust (going bust in style, leaving a trail of empty champagne bottles and unpaid bills behind one, but going bust nevertheless) it had to be history. I thought I could write (don’t we all?) and while I was still serving I sat down each evening and bashed out what became my first published book, about the Indian Corps on the Western Front in the Great War. With my wife as driver and navigator, as well as index complier, I tramped over every battle in which Indians and Gurkhas were involved, read copious reports in what was then known as the Public Records Office (now The National Archives) and the Indian Office Library in Blackfriars (now the Asian and Oriental Section of the British Library). Having finished it I had no idea what to do with it, but a friend who was already a published author found a publisher who was interested in military history, and the book was duly published shortly after I left the Army. It sold well for a niche market work but there was no advance and it made me little money – in any case royalties for books come in dribs and drabs and only a very few authors of history make a decent living from books alone.
My next book – about Wellington – again sold well but for a small publisher and so earnings were paltry, but it and Sepoys in the Trenches brought me to the attention of a big publisher and now things began to look up. Mud, Blood and Poppycock – Britain and the First World War got me a sizeable advance from Orion and became a best seller, in non-fiction terms, with 10,000 hard back sales and at the time of writing nearly 90,000 in paperback and still in print. Subsequent books have also earned me respectable amounts – but still not enough to keep a hunter, a decent wine cellar and a wife, so other sources of income had to be found. Shortly after leaving the army I began to conduct battlefield tours: fairly modest ones at first, to the Western Front, Normandy, Waterloo and the like, but which repertoire expanded to include Slovenia (Lt Rommel’s hunt for the Pour Le Merite), India (the Mutiny, the Mahratta and Mysore Wars), Pakistan, Nepal, North Africa, Tunisia and, of course, Spain and Portugal for the Peninsular War. Battlefield tours are hard work. There is not just the requirement to carry huge amounts of information in one’s head (I try to avoid using notes) but the constant questions and the need to be sociable in the evenings. Altogether one is on duty from breakfast time until perhaps eleven at night. You are on duty all day and half the night in the army as well, sometimes all night, but in the service such duty is with people you have known for many years, who share the same values and who are capable of getting to the top of whatever hill you designate. You hope that is the case with your guests on a tour, but you also have to put up with the old, the sick, the unfit and the incontinent. Shortly after I started one of my clients dropped dead, very suddenly in the middle of the street in Ypres. As my tour manager was my wife (twenty years an officer in the WRAC and AG Corps) I was able to direct that bodies were admin and therefore her problem, so I off-loaded the ex-client’s kit from the coach and left my dear wife with one body, associated suitcases and hysterical daughter of ex-client on the side of the road as the tour went on exactly as programmed. Imogen coped perfectly well, only slightly irritated by receiving a bill from the morgue for ‘overnight stay’, remonstrating perfectly properly that as there had presumably been no need to provide morning tea and a newspaper the charges seemed excessive. On another occasion I carried the enormously fat wife (as I thought) of a client down a mountainside in Slovenia when she broke her ankle. Both had been on several tours with me before, so I was surprised when the ‘husband’ became increasingly agitated when I lodged the woman in a brand new state-of-the-art hospital in Tolmein, and arranged for both of them to fly back to UK direct once she was discharged, a couple of days after the rest of the tour had returned. As all this was covered by insurance I could not see the problem until the male took me aside and in a conspiratorial whisper explained that both were indeed married, but not to each other, and that explanations to respective spouses would be difficult as said spouses knew perfectly well when the tour ended. Would I ring up his wife and her husband and say that the flights to UK had been delayed by strikes/bad weather/terrorism? I had to explain that while I would not report their adultery I could not lie for them and they were on their own. They were displeased and have not been back on tour since.
Touring in Pakistan (in this case the NW Frontier) is best done by ruthless exploitation of the old boy net with the Pakistan army, the third political party in Pakistan and the only one that is not corrupt, and so one spends a lot of time in military bases, messes and the like. Fortunately while Pakistan is dry, the army is not and hospitality is generous. One punter had come on my tour as a Squadron Leader, and always put his name in the visitors’ books of the various messes as Squadron Leader, RAF. As the tour went on I became increasingly suspicious as he seemed to know even less about air power than I did, and so I telephoned a chum in MOD (Air) (a mobile phone network of sorts had just arrived in Pakistan at that time, but you had to be on a hill, in my case the top of the Khyber Pass) to check the Squadron Leader out. It transpired that he had never been in any of the Services. Thereafter as he put his name in visitors’ books I crossed out ‘Squadron Leader RAF’ and inserted ‘Mr’. Inevitably he wrote a letter of complaint to the company for whom I was conducting the tour, but the only things he could actually complain about were that I had on one occasion been late for dinner in Islamabad (true – helping the British Defence Attaché, an old friend, to finish a bottle of very good malt) and that I had not spoken to his wife the entire tour (not sure – could be true). I wrote a cringing letter back apologising profusely for failing to speak to his wife, explaining that had I known she was his wife I would of course have spoken to her.
I got into television purely by accident, when David Chandler, Britain’s leading Napoleonic scholar, had a stroke and recommended me as his replacement – have a dinner party and you can bore ten people, write a book and bore ten thousand, get on telly and bore millions... I enjoy TV and I do not find it difficult, and nor would anyone who has been a soldier and spent most of his life speaking on the hoof, but fortunately the makers of TV films do think it is difficult and pay accordingly, although not the excessive amounts that were available some years ago. The golden age of TV when there were only two commercial channels for advertisers to pour money into has long gone, and while there are now myriad channels the total cash available for advertising has risen only marginally. My friends’ impression of my going to exotic places, doing very little and getting paid vast amounts is false, more’s the pity. A typical day’s filming now starts at around 0600 to get the light, or the absence of crowds, can involve eight or ten pieces to camera (my record is fourteen) and then a long drive to the next location, getting there at midnight and spending an hour or so working on the next day’s script over a plate of sandwiches. Documentaries are not filmed in chronological sequence, but by location, so one can start with the closing scene, then switch to the middle, then to the beginning and so on. Continuity becomes important – a green pullover in one scene and a black one in a scene that in the film will follow immediately but which might be filmed days apart is an obvious error, as is short hair suddenly becoming long. British Airways losing my baggage between Dallas, Texas, and France meant that we could not do the intended shoots until the suitcase containing the right clothes eventually turned up, although on that occasion we were able to do some filming for another episode of the series, also in France, using what kit I could borrow and buy locally. If possible I always tried to work with the same crew: that way everybody gets to know how the others work and there is a mutual understanding and trust. Once, filming about Marlborough in Germany, I was to gallop up a hill on a grey horse (Marlborough always rode a grey), pull up in front of the camera and deliver my piece. We had a new cameraman and I had explained that I would start at the bottom of the hill and pull up exactly on the third dandelion from the left six feet in front of the camera and he should adjust his focus accordingly. Unfortunately the cameraman did not believe me, and seeing half a ton of horseflesh coming straight at him at great speed he abandoned his post and ran. I pulled up where I said I would. It took three takes to convince the cameraman that I could stop the beast where I said I could!
I am sometimes asked what my favourite historical period is. I have written books about the Hundred Years War, the Peninsular War and both World Wars, taken battlefield tours from Alfred the Great to Arnhem, lectured from Agincourt to the use of technology as a force multiplier and made TV documentaries from Henry V to stealth bombers, and I would argue that as you can only understand how any particular campaign was waged by understanding how the previous one was conducted, one should avoid becoming pigeon holed, but if nailed to a wall and forced to declare a favourite it would probably be the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, particularly the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain. In a sense it was a war that saw huge advances in the military art and the emergence of the first truly professional British Army since the New Model. It was an age when participants wrote about their experiences, when there were sufficient literate Other Ranks to know what they, and not just the officers, were thinking and a war of which many of the battlefields are little changed. It was also a war in which a tiny British army, operating as part of a coalition, consistently beat far larger enemy armies by a combination of professionalism and training, the use of technology and an understanding of logistics. There are, perhaps, still lessons for today if only our politicians would see them.
Someone once said that he who fails to study history is doomed to repeat it. I prefer to compare history to map reading – how do you know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been, and how do you know where you are going if you don’t know where you are?
TO BE CONTINUED
I very much enjoyed reading this Gordon ,full of good advice for the budding tour guide/author too!
Loved this Gordon! Thank you