PENGUIN BOOKS
Patrick French is a writer and historian, born in England in 1966. He is the author of Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (‘Beautifully written, wise, balanced, fair, funny and above all extremely original’ William Dalrymple), which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature W. H. Heinemann Prize, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (‘French is the most impressive Western historian of modern India currently at work’ Herald), which won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (‘Compassionate … compelling and brilliant … far and away the best book on Tibet I have read’ Daily Telegraph) and The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (‘One of the most gripping biographies I’ve ever read’ Hilary Spurling), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hawthornden Prize. His most recent book is India: A Portrait (Allen Lane, 2011).
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
The Life of Henry Norman
Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division
Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
India: A Portrait
The Last Great Imperial Adventurer
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 1994
Published in Penguin Books 2011
Copyright © Patrick French, 1994
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-01-4-196430-0
The legal seal that seals documents,
Is not able to utter a word in witness.
It is better to mark your heart,
With the seal of justice and truth.
His Holiness the Sixth Dalai Lama, c.1700
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction
PART I
1 Younghusband: ‘Damned Rum Name’
2 Two Journeys to the Mountains
3 Playing Great Games beyond Manchuria
4 Across the Gobi and Down the Mustagh
5 ‘Impressed by My Bearing’: Bearding the Mir
6 That Sinkiang Feeling: Outwitted in High Asia
7 Loving a Splendid Colonel and Seeking God’s Kingdom
8 Clubland: Travels with a Most Superior Person
9 ‘Not Only a Fiasco’: African Intrigue
PART II
10 An Interlude in Rajputana
11 ‘A Really Magnificent Business’
12 The Sikkim Adventure
13 Sixty-seven Shirts, a Bath and an Army
14 ‘The Empire Cannot Be Run like a Tea Party’
15 ‘Bolting like Rabbits’: Blood in the Land of Snows
16 ‘Helpless as if the Sky Had Hit the Earth’
17 Fame in Disgrace and Diversion in Kashmir
PART III
18 Playing Politics, Brushing Death, Preaching Atheism
19 Fighting for Right in the Great War
20 The Quest for a World Leader on the Planet Altair
21 Running the Jog and Climbing Mount Everest
22 Religious Dramas, Peculiar Swamis and Indian Sagas
23 The Remains of His Day: Inventing Societies
24 Love in the Blitz
Epilogue: Creating the God-Child
Notes
Select Bibliography
Painted Indian miniatures of Clara Younghusband and John Younghusband (Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library (OIOC)).
Francis Younghusband’s uncle Robert Shaw in Yarkandi costume (Lees Collection (LC)).
Francis Younghusband, shortly after his fifth birthday (LC).
The Church of St John in the Wilderness (The Queen’s Empire).
A Lahauli mother and son beyond the Rhotang Pass (Richard Wingfield).
May Ewart (OIOC).
Nellie Douglas (OIOC).
Henry Newbolt in his days as a Clifton College cadet (Peter Newbolt).
The legendary pony-man Mahmood Isa (Royal Geographical Society (RGS)).
Captain Younghusband with George Macartney and the Amban of Yarkand (John Stewart).
Younghusband with Macartney and the mysterious Great Gamers Lennard and Beech (OIOC).
Younghusband and his Russian rival Colonel Grombtchevski (Eileen Younghusband Collection (EY)).
Chitrali horsemen, near Mastuj (Richard Wingfield).
The young Maharajah of Indore (John Burke Collection).
The Maharajah of Bikaner (John Burke Collection).
Helen Magniac and Francis Younghusband on their wedding day (OIOC).
Colonel Francis Younghusband, shortly before he set off to invade Tibet (EY).
A fictionalized view of the Colonel and his Mission (Le Lama Blanc, Collection Eldorado).
Younghusband holed up in the compound at Gyantse (RGS).
The Staff in Tibet, including Younghusband, Macdonald, O’Connor and Bailey (RGS).
His Holiness the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (F. Spencer Chapman’s Lhasa, The Holy City).
Agvan Dorzhiev in St Petersburg with a boy monk in attendance (Alexander Andreyev).
A senior Tibetan officer, almost certainly Depon Lhading (Peter Fleming’s Bayonets to Lhasa).
Yeshe Dolma, Queen of Sikkim (OIOC).
The Tongsa Penlop Ugyen Wangchuk, soon to become King of Bhutan (RGS).
A youthful George Curzon (Lady Alexandra Metcalfe).
The four Tibetan Cabinet Ministers who negotiated the Treaty of Lhasa (RGS).
A Sikh Pioneer flogs a Tibetan camp servant (RGS).
British troops march into Lhasa through the West Gate (RGS).
The Younghusbands with the Maharajah of Kashmir in 1908 (OIOC).
The Kashmir Resident with Shukar Ali (OIOC).
George Mallory on his way up Mount Everest (RGS).
Doctor Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (National Integration, 1964).
Younghusband clutching the Ganden Tripa’s bronze Buddha (OIOC).
A cigarette card showing Younghusband, wearing what appears to be a fez, at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924 (Nicholas Rhodes).
The Religious Drama Society in action (RADIUS).
Nona, later Countess of Essex (Jennifer Armstrong).
Younghusband with Herbert Samuel and Gilbert Murray (George Seaver’s Francis Younghusband: Explorer and Mystic).
Madeline Lees flanked by her husband and seven children, a year before she met Francis Younghusband (LC).
Younghusband reclining in an armchair (EY).
I would like to thank the following people for their help: Janet Adam Smith, Alexander Andreyev (who supplied rare information on Dorzhiev), Anthony Aris, Michael Aris, Jennifer Armstrong, Mike Baddeley, Frederica Barkley, the Bedis, David Blake (who catalogued the monstrous volume of paper in the Younghusband Collection at the India Office Library), Chris Bonington, Michaela Bosquet, Louisa Bouskell, John Bray, John Burke, Sue Byrne, Edward Carpenter, Nirad Chaudhuri, Terry Coleman, Tim Concannon, Roger Croston, Olive Dalrymple, Willy Dalrymple, Julian Daly, Richard Davenport-Hines, Dawa Norbu, Hubert Decleer, Michael Dillon, Bill Dolby, Donkar Topden, Jerome Edou, Nona Countess of Essex, Gerald Evered, Jerry Fisher, Michael Fishwick (that incomparable editor), Zara Fleming, Lionello Fogliano, Dave French (no relation), Lavinia French (for advice on psychological matters), Maurice French (for advice on military matters), Alan Furness, Elizabeth Furness, David Gilmour, Gyurme Dorje, Lady Hallifax, Duff Hart-Davis, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, Pat Heron, James Hill, Michael Holroyd, Kath Hopkirk, Peter Hopkirk, John Hunt, Robin Huws Jones (Eileen Younghusband’s executor, who saved many papers from the shredder and gave me much help), Fredrick Hyde-Chambers, Samuel Hynes, Lois Wyse Jackson, Jamyang Norbu, Greta Jansen, Jetsun Pema, Jigdol Densapa, Kathleen Jones (for essential insights into the Younghusband family), Tamio Kaneko (who revealed the workings of the Fight for Right), Karma Topden, Pat Kattenhorn, John Keay, Nikolai Kuleshov, Tessa Lambourne, Sir Thomas Lees, Gennady Leonov, the late Sir Jack Longland, Mary Lutyens, Parshotam Mehra, Jan Morris, Andrew Macdonald, Dominic Martin, John Michell, Naomi Mitchison, Robert Morrell, the late John Grey Murray, Joseph Needham, Miss Neema, Peter Newbolt, Pamela Nightingale, Maggie Noach (my literary agent), Christina Noble, Norbu Sangpo (who interpreted some crucial conversations), Alex Norman, Penny Olsen, Pushpa Pandya, Bill Peters, Ahmed Rashid, Katherine Rawlinson, Emma Reeves, Hugh Richardson, Rinchen Kazi, Rinzin Wangmo, Isabelle Ritchie, Annie Robertson, Kenneth Rose, John Rowley, the late Sir Algernon Rumbold, Kit Russell, Peter Seaver, Sioban Shirley, my multifarious siblings (Emily and Hugh in particular), Clive Stace, John Stewart, James Symington (for information on the Gilgit Agency), Tashi Densapa, Mary Anne Taylor, Tenzin Geyche Tethong, Thinly Woser, Thondup Kyibuk, Dorothy Thorold, Geshe Thubten Jinpa, Betty Townsend, Sir George Trevelyan, Tsering Shakya (who shared his remarkable knowledge of Tibetan history with me, time after time), Tsewang Topgyal, Frank Tuohy, Richard Wheaton (a comparably incomparable editor) and Richard Wingfield.
I would also like to thank the Society of Authors for enabling my research in India and Sikkim to take place by kindly awarding me a Travelling Scholarship, and all the staff of the India Office Library; Edward Smyth of the Alpine Club, Chitrabhanu Sen of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Neil Somerville of the BBC Written Archives Centre, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Janet Johnstone of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Robin Barton and Derek Winterbottom of Clifton College, Mrs M. B. Nicholson of the Dartington Hall Trust, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Lambeth Palace Library, Lobsang Shastri and Norbu Choephel of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Rebecca Lang and Fiona Philpott of Liverpool Museum, Mrs E. Sandwell of the Men of the Trees, Mr C. P. Mathur of the National Archives of India, Giustina Ryan of the National Institute for Social Work, the National Library of Scotland, Jennifer Scarce of the National Museum of Scotland, the National Sound Archives, Jean Kennedy and Freda Wilkins-Jones of the Norfolk Record Office, the Public Record Office, Charlotte Evans, Gwen Hawkins and Helen Clarke of RADIUS, Michael Bott of Reading University Library, Lady de Bellaigue of the Royal Archives, Thom Richardson of the Oriental Collection of the Royal Armouries, Frances Devereux and George Pettifar of the Royal Fusiliers Museum, Christine Kelly, Nicky Sherriff and Peter Clark of the Royal Geographical Society, Kate Thaxton of the Royal Norfolk Regimental Museum, Marinel FitzSimons of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, the Royal Society of Literature, the School of Oriental and African Studies Library, the Society for Psychical Research, the West Bengal State Archives, Trinity College Cambridge Library, the monks of Tse Chok Ling monastery in Dharamsala, John Clarke of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Hiren Chakrabarti of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, the West Sussex Record Office, and Marcus Braybrooke and Helen Garton of the World Congress of Faiths.
My greatest thanks are reserved for Jane Brian, Kunsang Chodon, Adrian Moon and Tashi Tsering, without whose help it would have been hard to write this book, and Abigail Ashton-Johnson, my closest friend, wife and occasional travelling companion.
Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer is dedicated to the memory of Dzonga Tadhey Tsering Palzom.
PATRICK FRENCH, December 1993.
Chelsea Rectory – Lachung Chu – Salisbury Plain.
While travelling through Central Asia at the age of nineteen, seeking some elusive land where childhood dreams and present realities might come face to face, I heard that Tibet was being opened up to outsiders. Taking the chance, I headed down towards the snow mountains of Amdo, through grey-green valleys and over rickety wooden bridges to the edge of the Amnye Machen range.
On reaching the remains of an ancient Buddhist monastery, I found I had acquired a memorable illness of the stomach, and so lay for days on end in a brightly painted room reading books. The more that I read about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, the more it came to fascinate me. Soldiers and porters and beasts had crossed the Himalayas in their thousands, marching to the forbidden city of Lhasa, marching through wild, unfeasible terrain in pursuit of some forgotten imperial dream. Most intriguing of all was the character of the expedition’s leader, Francis Younghusband.
Despite being a colonialist colonel, with the obligatory walrus moustache, he had apparently had a revelatory experience on a Tibetan hillside, abandoned militarism on the spot, and ended his days as a mystical visionary. His life seemed to reflect the West’s fascination with the East, conquest and wonder dancing hand in hand. There was an emblematic quality to his transformation which stuck in my mind.
The maroon-robed Tibetan monks could tell me little about him or his exploits. It was clear that the Chinese invasion of 1950 was a more pressing piece of history: the excesses of the Cultural Revolution had left many of them hollow-eyed and wary of questions. But I did gain two bits of information: that Younghusband’s army had used sorcery to overcome the Dalai Lama’s troops, and that somehow, somewhere a British army pith helmet had found its way into a Tibetan Buddhist temple, where it still sits today as an offering alongside sweet biscuits, white silk scarves and yak-butter sculptures.
When I got back to Britain I tracked down the only biography of Younghusband. It was a dreary example of neo-Victorian hagiography, long out of print, and it failed to offer a believable portrait. There were other mentions of him in various books, but nothing that caught him as a full person. The reason for this soon became apparent. His daughter, Dame Eileen Younghusband, had guarded his papers and his reputation keenly, shooing off inquisitive historians. When she died, her father’s huge collection of letters, notes, documents and journals passed to the India Office Library in London. By the time that I came to investigate, these papers had just been catalogued into 680 bulging boxes.
A wide variety of Sir Francis Younghusbands were to be found. He was a journalist, spy, guru, geographer, writer, staunch imperialist, Indian nationalist, philosopher and explorer; his friends ranged from Sir Henry Newbolt to Shri Purohit Swami. Peter Fleming praised him as ‘a thruster’, Kenneth Mason judged him ‘the father of Karakoram exploration’, while Peter Hopkirk considered him ‘a member of the Great Game elite’ whose exploits managed ‘to thrill a whole generation of Englishmen’. He was, according to taste, the promoter of ‘a religion of atheism’ (Bertrand Russell), ‘a devout Christian’ (D.N.B.), a prophet of ‘Anti-Christ himself’ (the Tablet) or ‘a visionary of rare radiance’ (Baron Palmstierna). To the Herald Tribune he was nothing less than ‘a legendary hero … like Ulysses’.
At the age of only twenty-four he found a new land route across the Gobi Desert, descending the impassable Mustagh Pass wearing nothing on his feet but a pair of worn leather stockings. His supposed death in the Pamirs at the hands of Russian agents almost caused an Indo-Russian war. As a prominent Great Gamer he mapped swathes of Central Asia and tried to tame the Mir of Hunza (‘no doubt he was impressed by my bearing,’ Younghusband recorded at the time).
Yet after retiring from frontier life he began to preach free love to shocked Edwardians, and set up a strange patriotic movement during the First World War with ‘Jerusalem’ as its specially composed rallying song. He wrote over thirty published books, founded numerous outlandish societies, attempted to start a new world religion and organized the first four expeditions up Mount Everest. He took cold baths at very low temperatures, had great faith in the power of cosmic rays, and claimed there were extra-terrestrials with translucent flesh on a planet called Altair.
It was the very incongruity of his interests and achievements that so fascinated me. How had a blimpish colonialist managed to end up as a premature hippy? Each piece of information drew me closer into his orbit. For a time I was deterred by the news that previous attempts to write his life had ended in failure. One person had died in the process, two had given up, while another had suffered a mental collapse after three decades of research. It would be impossible, I was told, to understand and reconcile the different phases of his career. The military explorer could never be united with the saintly mystic. A certain obstinacy drove me onwards. I wanted to track him down, to create a travelling biography, a living biography, a bio-biography – which allowed my journey to become part of the story. I was almost twenty-one when I conceived this vain aspiration.
Francis Younghusband was to colonize nearly five years of my life. My original intentions altered as I came to realize that definitive biographies could never be written, and that only in specific instances could the story of my own adventures help to elucidate his. I also saw that the subject I was dealing with went far wider than one person. I had to try to make sense of a generation – and eight decades of rapidly changing history. The age of imperialism and the age of anti-imperialism formed no part of my direct or indirect personal experience: the British left India twenty years before I was born.
The pursuit took me from chaotic archives in Calcutta to the cold snows of the western Himalayas and the blank expanse of the Gobi Desert. I sought out Tibetan material in an effort to understand the response of a Buddhist theocracy to the appearance on its borders of Colonel Younghusband’s invading modern army. Risking disappointment and blind alleys, I followed the leads and clues that I could see before me, chasing the elusive shadows of history, seeking the perfect information that would make the story complete. In the end I came closest to him not in Asia, but in a dusty attic in Dorset. Tumbling out of ancient cardboard boxes came passionate, mystical letters between Younghusband and Madeline, Lady Lees. At the age of seventy-six, after a sad and sexless marriage, he had met the great love of his life, with whom he could share his remarkable prophecies.
Younghusband proved to be a more coherent personality than I had expected. There was no sudden change of character, no Jekyll and Hyde adjustment: the seeds of the mystic were there in his earliest years, and the traces of the imperialist remained to his death. In his own mind, his actions were never contradictory. There was an absurd sincerity and idealism within his most offensive pronouncements, and a clear unpredictability that maintained my attention to the end. I came to realize the complexity of each person: a character who is abominable one year might be oddly endearing the next. I learned the need for scrupulous research and selection, as well as intuition, empathy and compassion. I saw the difficulty of trying to judge another era or condemn an individual’s motivation, preferring to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader.
While this book was metamorphosing, Younghusband-like, from a hardback to a paperback, I received some interesting letters. An old woman told me that Sir Francis had been her greatest friend when she was a schoolgirl, while one man invited me to come and stay – the only caveat being that I should arrive with shorts and gym-shoes. A great-niece of Beech the Great Gamer informed me that her great-uncle’s name was Reginald, not Richard. He had died of tuberculosis in Kashmir at a young age. An indirect descendant of Younghusband showed me a reference to the 1925 tour of Britain by a group of Tibetan monks. Sir Francis had arranged for them to engage in public debate, wearing ‘flowing robes and exotic headgear’, with none other than Bertrand Russell. Hugh Richardson, the last surviving representative of British India to have worked in pre-Communist Tibet, wrote to say that the Tibetan officer in the photograph on the first page of the second section was not Depon Lhading. In fact it was Kyibuk, the Dzongpon of Phari, who was also killed in the massacre at Chumi Shengo. To them all, many thanks.
Although he always took pride in his Anglo-Saxon roots, it was in Asia that the course of Francis Edward Younghusband’s life was decided. He was born on 31 May 1863 at Murree, a hill station on the North West Frontier of India, the son of Clara Jane and John William Younghusband. His mother’s family, the Shaws, were moderately rich Evangelicals from Somerset. In 1842, after her husband’s premature death, the formidable Martha Shaw (Francis’s grandmother) shocked her relations by setting off from Bath on a Grand European Tour. With her four daughters and one son in tow, together with a clutch of maids and a French governess, she swooped through France, Switzerland and Italy. Each morning her daughters executed drawings of Venetian palaces, or wrote essays on the history of landscape painting, while in the afternoon Mademoiselle instructed them in French and Italian. Robert, the youngest child and only boy, was tended by a nurse and plied with broth in an effort to improve his weak constitution.
Martha Shaw’s leather-bound notebooks show that the purpose of these journeys was essentially moral rather than aesthetic. Amidst the descriptions of French chateaux and Renaissance paintings are frilly-edged religious pictures, and extracts from the stricter sections of the Bible. She was a fervent Evangelical, viewing Continental travel as a means to self-improvement and ethical instruction. Conscious perhaps of the growing revolutionary fervour in Europe, her notes mention the Sinfulness of Man, Temples of Lasciviousness, the Papists (who are ‘inflated with pride’), and contain frequent reminders that ‘the wages of Sin are death’. There are neat columns on opposite pages recording income and expenditure, and details of the spiritual development of her children. Each year her daughters were issued with ‘a review of your conduct since your last birthday’.1
Martha’s writings reveal a mixture of vision and repression. She had a wide knowledge of European culture, while remaining suspicious of its possibilities, and of the risk that Art might lure her towards decadence and corruption. She passed on this ambivalence to her solemn daughter Clara, who had substantial ability as an artist. Clara remained wary of her own talent, limiting herself to sketches and pale landscapes. The pictures she drew were fluent and accomplished, but never developed beyond a formal style; she would not allow her proficiency to be contaminated by originality or exuberance. When Clara Shaw was in her late teens she met a short but respectably dashing young officer who had been sent home from the Indian frontier with a fever. All of Somerset had heard of his adventures among the Wild Tribes, and he was called John Younghusband.
The name Younghusband is the most striking feature: imperious, unlikely, teetering on the edge of absurdity. It has been rendered variously as Young, Husband, Houngbushand, Young-Husband, ‘Young’ Husband, Youngblood, House-husband, Loving-husband, Yang-ta-jen and (in the case of a Manchu official) Yang-hasi-pan. ‘Younghusband? Damned rum name that is,’ observed Sir Charles Macgregor when he first met Francis Younghusband.2 The name came originally from Osban (a variation on Oswald); Osban’s son was known as Young Osban, which in turn transmuted into Younghusband. The family could trace itself through many years of Northumbrian history, including a fifteenth-century Sheriff of Newcastle and an assortment of local dignitaries.
John Younghusband was born in 1823, spending his childhood in Italy and Wiltshire before joining the army at the age of seventeen. His father had been a Major-General in the Royal Artillery, and his uncle had captained a ship in the Battle of the Nile. John fought in the First Afghan War, before acting as aide-de-camp to Sir Charles Napier during the conquest of Sind. After the capture of Hyderabad in 1843 he was accused of involvement in the looting of the town and the sale of ‘Prize Property’. It was alleged that he and other soldiers had held an auction of jewellery, tapestries and even clothing and undergarments looted from ‘the Ladies of the Ameer of Sinde’.3 Following the campaign, Napier made him a Lieutenant of Police, with responsibility for raising a new police force. Younghusband was apparently ‘actively employed in Upper Sind, hunting down and chastising marauders and rebels, and the official records of the time contain frequent honourable mentions of his name’.4
An obituary in the Sind Gazette notes that John Younghusband ‘was greatly loved and esteemed by a large circle of friends, and it is difficult to imagine his having ever made an enemy’.5 References to him often stress his affability and capacity for friendship, but given the job he was doing he must have had a ruthlessly coercive streak. The police force he helped set up was full of rough paramilitaries who could be deployed to quell unrest in fractious territory, a tradition that has continued in India to the present day. The grainy photographs of John and his fellow officers capture the atmosphere of the time. Harsh men with mutton-chop whiskers sit with their knees open to the camera and scabby dogs at their feet. Occasionally there is a woman in the picture, sensuous in a dark bonnet. The figures have none of the ardent pomposity of the late Victorian period, looking more like adventurous American frontiersmen than stiff-necked imperial servants.
Clara Shaw and John Younghusband were aged twenty-three and thirty-three respectively when they married, in some considerable style, on 21 February 1856.6 As the Crimean War came to an end they left Somerset and began a three-month sea-voyage to India, until finally, by horse, they reached the small Himalayan hill station of Dharamsala. In a clearing in the pine forest above the Church of St John in the Wilderness, local craftsmen built a bungalow with a wooden verandah. Dodging the bears, Clara climbed the ridges above the forest and painted watercolours of the mountainous landscape. Although few other European women chose to go to remote parts of India at this time, Clara seemed content with her isolated life. The house was idyllic, she was in good health, and at the end of 1856 she became pregnant. Then the Indian Mutiny broke out.
For the previous 250 years, the status of the British in India had fluctuated. During the first half of the nineteenth century they had expanded steadily from their base in Bengal, conquering territory and strengthening their political control. Having taken Sind and the Punjab, the East India Company had a firm control of the country’s northern borders and significant influence over the princes of Rajputana. By 1857 the situation in parts of India had come close to breaking-point: conflict was finally sparked by British mistreatment of Indian troops. As unrest grew, John Younghusband and his men rode through the country stamping out any hint of revolt, and trying to ensure that insurrection did not spread to the Punjab. News came through that his brother Edward had been killed in the fighting, and shortly afterwards a letter from his friend Dighton Probyn revealed that another brother had been shot through the lungs during the siege of Delhi. Meanwhile Clara was left, heavily pregnant, in a remote village with scarcely a European in sight. Her mother sent cataclysmic letters on the flimsiest of writing-paper, bewailing ‘the ardour of the insurgents … Great God forgive such impiety – for who have we else to trust to and who besides can help us – with Thy help we are safe even when destruction itself seems inevitable and without Thee we are lost.’7 In August 1857 their first child, Clara Emily (Emmie) was born, and after months of violence the British suppressed the Mutiny. The Punjab had ‘held’ throughout, but John Younghusband’s fears about the dangers of lax discipline were confirmed.
Some historians now regard the Mutiny as India’s first war of independence. In certain respects this is accurate: although it was never a co-ordinated revolution it was more than a sepoy’s revolt, since it gave a voice to the mute resistance of many northern Indians. The Mutiny was old India’s last attempt to stave off the Westernization of its culture, and marked a permanent change in the relationship between Britain and India. The power of the East India Company was transferred to the British Crown, and the governor-general took on the authority of a viceroy, guided by the Secretary of State for India back in Whitehall. The Viceroy was given immense power, and an influence that the government in London would have trouble controlling. When George Curzon became Viceroy, he would manipulate it to instigate his own forceful policy in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Any mutual trust that had existed between Britishers and Indians was destroyed, and social contact was severed. The early envoys of the East India Company had worn Indian clothing, smoked hookahs and married Indian women, but after the Mutiny stiff collars, chota pegs and memsahibs took their place. More troops were sent out from Britain, and Indian regiments were put under strict control. The British stuck to their cantonments on the edges of settlements, or else restricted Indians to certain areas of the towns: dogs and Indians were barred from walking in the Mall at Simla until 1918. Trade – the bedrock of British involvement in India – had been superseded by an era of racial supremacy.
Clara and John Younghusband settled back into their old pattern of life, more wary than before. Another two children were born in rapid succession (George and Ethel) and then a baby girl called Gertrude who died after a few weeks. John investigated the possibility of buying a tea plantation, and was assisted by his brother-in-law Robert Shaw who had come out from England to improve his health in the Himalayan air. Realizing that the increasingly popular China tea would grow there, and that the planters were ‘exclusively gentlemen’, they purchased a plot of land in Dharamsala and went into partnership.8 Robert Shaw soon became secretary of the Kangra Valley Planters Association. Clara and her brother enjoyed a good relationship, going on several expeditions together to the valleys beyond Simla. When John was promoted, Robert Shaw took on the business alone and the Younghusband family moved north to Murree.
The birth of Francis Edward in May 1863 was followed by a series of upheavals. At the end of the year Clara and her four children, including the rather sickly baby Francis, set sail for England. She tended her dying mother in Bath, and soon gave birth to another child, named Leslie Napier after the legendary conqueror of Sind. Two years of relative stability followed, until Clara and John had to return to India while their children were dispersed to various schools and relations. Francis, aged four and a half, was sent to live with his father’s two unmarried sisters in Freshford near Bath. The Aunts were stringently religious; any hint of moral laxity in their young charge was beaten out of him with the aid of a leather strap. ‘They were of the sternest stuff,’ wrote Francis a year before his death, ‘dressed in poke bonnets and living in the greatest simplicity. Strict teetotallers waging a war against drunkenness and teaching in the Sunday school.’9
Three years of severity and austerity followed until his parents returned. The reunited family moved back to Bath and Francis was sent to a local school, but the emphasis on discipline remained unchanged. There were family prayers at least twice a day, and frequent visits to church; any disobedience resulted in a beating. One day Francis was found stealing a coin from a servant’s purse. The subsequent punishment, and its emphasis on his irredeemable wickedness, convinced him he had betrayed his family and his God. ‘I lost my childhood’s happiness, and became serious. Indeed I doubt if I ever completely recovered it till my old age.’10
In 1873 he travelled out to India with his parents. William Ewart Gladstone was coming to the end of his first term in office, and the Tsar’s army was riding south through Uzbek territory, expanding the Russian Empire. The Suez Canal had just opened, reducing the journey time to three weeks, and many more women and children were now going to the subcontinent. The Younghusbands stayed at Lahore and Dalhousie before returning to Murree, but shortly after his twelfth birthday Francis was sent to England to be educated. Clifton College was the chosen establishment, an all-male boarding school in Bristol. Although it had been founded only a decade earlier, it had already caught the attention of many British officials serving abroad. Francis’s elder brother George was there, as were several of his cousins. Clifton was to have a profound influence upon him for the rest of his life. Although his time there was not especially happy, he retained a traditional British loyalty to the alma mater, and an instinctive empathy towards other Old Cliftonians. During his schooldays he formed the social and racial philosophy which took him into adulthood.
Clifton was one of a crop of boarding schools to spring up in the wake of the celebrated Dr Arnold of Rugby. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain’s public schools were, supposedly, the very seats and nurseries of vice. Arnold aimed to introduce a system of schooling based upon patrician ideals of morality, which would turn out ‘Christian Gentlemen’. John Percival, who was appointed Clifton’s first headmaster, endorsed Arnold’s vision and spoke of ‘a nursery or seed-plot for high-minded men, devoted to the highest service of the country, a new Christian chivalry of patriotic service’.11
When Francis Younghusband arrived at Clifton in 1876 he was immediately assailed by this ethos of stern athleticism. Percival had surrounded himself with a squad of earnest and enthusiastic assistant masters, many of whom were still in their early twenties. Rugby, cricket, running and athletics were the principal means of instruction; academic study was of secondary importance. There were lessons in military history and strategy, geography, classics, map-making, even rudimentary mathematics, but any hint of intellectualism or sentiment was scorned. Reverence for manly vigour and the doctrine of mens sana in corpore sano were the guiding principles. Fortunately for Francis he could move at great speed, so he won numerous medals for his running skills. When he was only sixteen he came third in the cross-country race, and received the ultimate accolade: ‘There were lines of cheering boys all down the Avenue, and Reynolds the head of the house hugged me.’12 Although physical contact was officially discouraged, sporting victory was clearly regarded as a suitable occasion for the display of emotion.
Francis developed the tough skin necessary for survival in this harsh, masculine environment, but underneath he had a tense sensitivity; the singing of the choir could move him to the brink of tears. Although he was ‘good at games’, he was too serious and withdrawn to be popular within the school. His religious sensibility was continually troubled by the notion that he was guilty of dreadful sins. ‘I have been indulging bad thoughts and they have taken a root on me.’ This fear was not helped by the books he was plied with by his parents and the Freshford Aunts. In his pocket he would carry a copy of Farrar’s Sermons, detailing: ‘The Courage of the Saints possible in Boyhood’, ‘The Evil of Depression’ and ‘The Need for Constant Cleansing from Constant Assoilment’. Although Francis enjoyed reading, his academic work was unremarkable. There were numerous studies of the Peninsular War, and essays with titles such as ‘Discretion is the better part of Valour’.13
Clifton’s ambition was to produce the sort of men who would run the British Empire; it was extraordinarily effective at this task. Over the years thousands of Old Cliftonians sallied forth – soldiers, sailors, political officers, box wallahs and colonial servants – to every country that was coloured red on the map. They were generally not the visionaries or the viceroys, but the middle-class stalwarts who formed the backbone of the imperial administration. Their training had given them the discreet arrogance and lack of self-doubt that was required to fight the Great War, or administer thousands of square miles of frontier territory with the aid of nothing but a clipped voice and a light rattan cane. Francis described them as ‘men of moral and political integrity, men imbued with the qualities of administration and leadership, men unsparing and unstinting of themselves in their country’s service’.14
His own year was unusual in that a remarkable number of his contemporaries and friends went on to become eminent in different fields. There was Jack McTaggart (‘a limp, melancholy, asymmetrical figure’, useless at games) who ended up a revered Hegelian philosopher; William ‘Birdie’ Birdwood, who was to command the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli and become a Field-Marshal; Arthur Quiller-Couch, the jingoistic Cornish writer and literary critic; Roger Fry, the art critic, who nourished an enduring hatred of Clifton; and Douglas Haig, Chief of Staff in India, architect of trench warfare and Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force. Most significant of all was Henry Newbolt, the poet laureate of High Imperialism, with whom Francis remained friends for life. After the invasion of Tibet, Newbolt wrote an ‘Epistle’ honouring their schooldays together and sent it out to Lhasa:
The victories of our youth we count for gain
Only because they steeled our hearts to pain,
And hold no longer even Clifton great
Save as she schooled our wills to serve the State.
Nay, England’s self, whose thousand-year-old name
Burns in our blood like ever-smouldering flame.15
Although most of his poems were a substantial technical improvement on this one, Henry Newbolt was not only a poet. He had a notable influence on the academic development of English literature and language, promoting its study as a means of encouraging national pride and social cohesion. His famous poem Vitai Lampada encapsulates the philosophy of Clifton. In the opening stanza, the captain of the school cricket team rallies the players (with ‘Ten to make and the match to win’) by appealing to their sense of honour. In the next stanza he reappears in the thick of a battle, in some far-flung outpost of the Empire:
The sand of the desert is sodden red,–
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;–
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’16
The ethos of the Victorian public school extended far into public life. At a dinner given in his honour after the invasion of Tibet, Francis spoke of the Old Cliftonians who had accompanied him on the expedition: ‘They all have that trait so characteristic of Clifton, and which has been so finely inculcated by Henry Newbolt, of playing the game. They may have nasty jobs to do but it is the game and they will play it through.’17 The invasion of Tibet was itself only an extension of that ultimate manifestation of imperial game-playing, the Great Game. The players believed they had a moral duty to propagate the ideas upon which their own civilization was based. It would be many years before Francis began to challenge that philosophy, and play the game according to different rules.
Before leaving England to follow Francis Younghusband’s footsteps across the Himalayas, I went on a visit to Clifton College, searching for traces of the spirit that had animated him. To my surprise I found the school haunted by memories of past glory, twisting back into its own history.
‘Park yourself here,’ the Head of Classics said to me, ‘while I see what I can find.’ I sat at a long oak table in the Percival Library and looked out of a gothic window at the hordes of scurrying boys. They were dressed in rugby kit, whooping, jumping, throwing and running, just as they would have done a century before. ‘Practising for Saturday’s match,’ said the Head of Classics, returning with a manuscript letter in his hand. ‘Sirs,’ it began:
We are Old Cliftonians who left the School long ago, but are still, and more than ever, concerned for its lasting welfare … The present age is generally felt to be more chaotic than those which went before it … Life has become more controversial; controversy is more violent; the unintelligent are perverting science into a new form of superstition … We who now write are men of different character and experiences, but we have at least this in common … the desire to find God in the universe and to understand our relation to Him.
The letter was signed by Newbolt, Younghusband, Birdwood and Haig. It was the last will and testament of a fading generation, a desperate attempt to make sure their romantic, outdated brand of patriotism did not die with them. According to the 1928 copy of The Cliftonian in which it was printed, the letter was ‘the outcome of a conversation between Lord Haig and Sir Francis Younghusband during the Prince of Wales’s visit to the School last summer’.18
‘I think we ought to head for Big School now,’ said the Head of Classics, ‘if we want to be on time for lunch.’ He was a short man with craggy eyebrows and punctilious manners. ‘You’ll have to run the gauntlet, I’m afraid,’ he announced, as we strode down flights of stone steps past archaic classrooms and the Newbolt Room. Running the gauntlet involved walking through rows of uninterested boys with loose ties and gelled hair, and a few girls in raunchy versions of the school uniform. I wondered what Colonel Younghusband and Field Marshal Haig would have made of them. ‘Gave up formal meals a while back, I’m afraid,’ said the Head of Classics apologetically. ‘Cafeteria system now. Not the same thing at all.’ We ate shredded turkey and lumps of stuffing and gravy off plastic plates.
I sat opposite the Head of History, a quick man with a slightly threatening manner and a pair of Philip Larkin spectacles. He was an expert on Henry Newbolt, I gathered.
‘The thing about Newbolt,’ I suggested, ‘is that however ridiculous his ideas seem now, some of his poems are quite good. I mean from a technical point of view.’
This was clearly a mistake. His eyes narrowed behind the spectacles and he muttered, ‘I think that depends on just what you mean by ridiculous.’
‘Man’s just done a book on Haig,’ he said to me in the clubbish atmosphere of the Masters’ Common Room after lunch. ‘Said Haig didn’t know what he was up to and falsified his journals. Ridiculous book.’
The Head of Classics took me to look at the Chapel. As he stood in the doorway he whispered, ‘Did you ever read Newbolt’s poem Clifton Chapel? “To set the cause above renown, to love the game beyond the prize.” That one.’ We marched past a memorial to the Old Cliftonians who were killed in the South African War. In front of the playing fields (‘Chap from Clifton once scored 618 runs in one match. World record, you know’) was a huge statue of Field Marshal Haig in a greatcoat with a map open on his knee. ‘I ran the Clifton Cadet Corps for a long time,’ said the Head of Classics. ‘Old link between Greek and the Army. Used the Haig statue for Ceremonial Parades. Lined the boys up in front of it and let him do the work for me. Did the trick.’
We walked back to the front of the school. ‘It’s difficult for us to be dispassionate about this place and its history, you know,’ he said, cocking his head a little to one side. ‘I sometimes think about what it must have been like for Younghusband and his chums, the boys who were here a century ago. When Clifton had only just been founded. How they must have gone out into the world, so conscious that they were the first, that it was up to them to set the School’s reputation. Did all right though, didn’t they?’
Having toyed with the idea of going into the Navy, Francis followed his father’s advice and took the exam for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. After failing twice he tried for Sandhurst instead. Despite some doubts about his shortness and feeble physique, they accepted him in February 1881. He spent a year there learning the intricacies of tactics, manoeuvres and boot polishing. Running continued to excite him, and he came first in a three-mile race between Sandhurst, Woolwich and several universities. Most of his spare time was spent alone, either reading biographies of eminent soldiers or going on long walks. He already had a sense that he would achieve remarkable things, that he had a special purpose of some kind. One day he plucked up his courage and decided to explain this feeling to his eldest sister, Emmie. After dodging round the subject for a while, he suddenly blurted out: ‘I feel that one day I shall do something.’ But Emmie did not grasp the significance of his proclamation and replied: ‘Do your duty.’19
Emmie was the only person with whom he felt able to communicate on a personal level. In the absence of any sign of affection from his mother (who had taken to dressing in black and regarded the world as a ‘vale of woe’) or any softness at Clifton or Sandhurst, he was left emotionally stunted. His moment of contact with Emmie occurred almost by accident. When he was sixteen he fainted in church during the evening service and Emmie took him home to bed. Something unspecified then happened which enabled him to release a flood of emotion, and the suppressed feelings inside him found an outlet for the first time. ‘I always felt rather ashamed of myself,’ Francis wrote to her afterwards, ‘and so my old darling you cannot know the joy I felt that night when you first showed that you loved me. I never could be happier because I had so loved you before that and longed to talk openly with you. But I never could get over my sensitiveness and was always afraid I had done something that you did not like.’20
Over the years that followed the link between them grew stronger, although always in an atmosphere of the greatest secrecy. In a family which regarded dancing as evil, they had to be careful to hide their intimacy. Francis would send Emmie letters using a code that was worthy of the Great Game. If the final word of the address was underlined on the envelope, it meant that there were two letters inside – one for public consumption signed ‘Ever your affect. brother Frank’, and another couched in the language of adolescent love. ‘Now my darling,’ he wrote in one, ‘I got your note just as I was getting into bed so I had a jolly long think of you in bed. I did so long to see you, old horror.’
The period reticence of their correspondence makes it hard to establish the exact nature of the contact between them. Their letters are charged with a high sexual tension, but the passion is never made explicit. Certainly their relationship was emotionally incestuous, although to what extent it also had a physical dimension is open to question. For Francis it was significant primarily as a psychological breakthrough. He became able to articulate his worries and emotions, knowing that Emmie would sympathize. She was six years older than he was, and began to take on the role of his mother, lover, friend and confessor. ‘I sometimes wish we had known each other sooner but I think it was God’s will that we shd. not,’ Francis told her. ‘I would have been too young for such love as yours.’
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