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, he was appointed ADC to General Sir Charles Douglas, then GOC Southern Command. When Douglas became Inspector-General of Home Forces, Harry went with him as Private Secretary until April 1914. Peacetime routine was formal, even boring, right up to the scare of war. “Isn’t this Austrian Tragedy dreadful?” was Harry’s reaction to the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the end of June 1914. The declaration of war on 5 August happened to coincide with Vere’s wedding day. “I feel I am slowly dying by inches,” she noted, “one manages to bear up in public, though in private one is absolutely overwhelmed with waves of despair.” Six days later, Harry’s battalion marched out of Victoria Barracks. The adjutant was Alan Dawnay, his brother-in-law who had been engaged and just had time to find a vicar to rush through a wedding service. After parting, Vere went home, “feeling like a stone, and crept into bed and laid my head in the dent of Harry’s pillow where his own dear one had been – all was over! They had no idea where they were going, not even the Colonel had a notion.” To his mother Harry wrote, “Take care of yourself and don’t worry about me.” On 12 August, the day the battalion sailed for France, his stiff-upper-lip tone was hardly modified for Vere:
I still cannot quite realize what is happening, and feel as if I have been through a succession of awful nightmares. I do realize what a dreadful time it is for all of you who have to go on living the same life from day to day and all the time having this dreadful blackness hanging over you, but I know you will realize it is really for the best and that we must come out alright in the long run.
At the start of this war, Harry was thirty-six. Within days he was sleeping on straw in a farmer’s shed, and by the end of the month he was in action, soon confessing to have cut buttons embossed with a crown off the uniform of a dead German and handing one of them to a fellow officer as a souvenir. In France for the entire duration of the war, he kept a diary and wrote letters to Vere that are vividly descriptive yet free from anything like literary effect. With extreme modesty he does not dwell on the occasions when he was mentioned in dispatches. “Found a pair of new boots and 25 cigarettes in each boot from Vere. Boots v. comfy,” is a typically restricted entry. He asked her to send fifty cigarettes every other day, and also, “some Brand’s meat lozenges and chocolate and acid drops and tobacco each week.” Vere quoted another Coldstreamer telling his wife that “H. P-J. comes down here every other night from the Trenches. He is always splendidly cheery about everything.” Vere’s nerves soon went. “I cannot any longer stand the thought of you remaining in those trenches.” She would lobby to get him a safer posting. “You can trust me not to say anything I ought not to say … you are having a million million harder time than dear old Alan.” The latter was soon imploring him to accept the offer of a staff job “in fairness to Vere. When you consider the intense relief it would be to her, I feel that your personal feelings ought not to weigh … take it, do, old boy.” As a staff officer at headquarters of the 38th (Welsh) Division he found himself at Amiens. The Eton College Chronicle published a list of 209 Old Etonian officers from the top ranks downwards who held a dinner at the front in October 1917, and his name appears at Table 7. When the Second Coldstream returned to Victoria Barracks on 25 February 1919 many of the officers including the colonel had been killed and of the thousand or so non-commissioned officers and men who had marched out only fifteen survived and just two had served with the same company throughout the war.
Alan Dawnay made his name as a member of the Arab Bureau, the wartime think-tank in Cairo influencing British policy in the Middle East. He was the liaison officer between the Egyptian Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Allenby and Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein and leader of the Arab revolt in the desert against the Ottomans. Faisal’s champion was Lawrence of Arabia. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s account of this campaign, is a masochistic psychodrama that has established the lasting misperception of Arabs as victims of betrayal and the British as traitorous victimisers. He achieved this effect by describing his British colleagues in language that compacts praise with denigration. Alan Dawnay, for instance, was “Allenby’s greatest gift to us – greater than thousands of baggage camels…. His was a brilliant mind, understanding to a degree, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion, and developing them.” “To a degree” conveys “not at all.” Writing from an address in Heliopolis on 10 July 1916 to congratulate Harry on his Military Cross, Alan Dawnay came clean about Egypt as he found it. “This is not a nice
