to Gregynog and abandoned the constituency.
One of Sir Pryce’s four daughters had married a Powell and lived at Plas-y-Bryn near Newtown. Commissioned by a magazine to interview Dilys Powell, a relation of theirs and the veteran film critic of The Sunday Times, I discovered quite fortuitously that she was a Plas-y-Bryn cousin, and probably the last person alive able to recall visits to Dolerw before the First War. At tea on the lawn one summer day when she was still a child, she recalled, Sir Pryce had sat her on his knee.
My grandfather Harry, the youngest of Sir Pryce’s sons, gave me the present of a toy horse and cart in wood that the estate carpenter at Dolerw had made for him. His nanny had taught him some nursery songs in Welsh, as folklore rather than genuine culture. Unlike his brothers, he played no part in the Royal Welsh Warehouse. Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, thoroughly anglicized him. His social standing changed. Popular, called PJ by his friends, he exemplified the English gentleman of his day. The gaze was firm, the manners polite, the voice reserved. The slope of his shoulders made him appear slight, at a physical disadvantage, but this was misleading. He excelled at all sports with a ball. Decades after the event, he still minded that he had played well all one summer in the Eton cricket eleven only to be dropped to twelfth man for the all-important match against Harrow. Almost every day he wore the tie of a cricket club, either the MCC or I Zingari. If ever he felt socially insecure as the son of a tradesman who furthermore was illegitimate, he gave no sign of it.
A very good shot, he received invitations to grand houses for shooting weekends with grand people. According to his game book, he was regularly invited to shoot with Lord Pembroke at Wilton. Another of the guns there was Guy Dawnay, who further invited him to shoot at Beningbrough in Yorkshire, the house of his parents Colonel Lewis and Lady Victoria Dawnay. Guy had a younger brother Alan, and a sister Vere. At first sight, Harry fell for Vere though too shy to declare it to her. Lewis Dawnay and both his sons were in the Coldstream Guards and seemingly swept a willing Harry away into the regiment. He and Guy reported to Wellington barracks together in October 1899, two weeks after the outbreak of the Boer war.
A short month later, with no preparation and even less training, and aged only twenty-one, he was in action. “We started at 4 A.M. and met the enemy at 6.30 at Modder River,” as he described the battle to his mother at Dolerw, “they were heavily entrenched, in a very strong position, about 5,000…. I personally had a rough day of it, as I swam the river twice with Colonel Codrington and a few others to find we were cut off and the Boers were on us … when it got dark, they suddenly began, they simply poured shots into us … we were simply lying in the open. I really gave up all hopes and only prayed that I should be finished off without pain. We were ordered to cease fire and retire, had the enemy advanced we must have been annihilated, as they were 800 opposite our 100 and only about 300 yards away.” As so often in that war, courage narrowly averted military disaster.
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
