Memories of an S.O.E. Historian

CHAPTER 1

Ancestry

Günter Grass was quite right to say, in The Tin Drum, that ‘no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn’t the patience to say a word or two about at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence’. So I begin with Frances Sophie Daniell, who later became my grandmother. She got engaged to be married in 1891. She wrote to her mother’s brother, the formidable John Arbuthnot Fisher – known to the Navy as Jackie – who was already a junior Naval Lord, to invite him to the wedding. She was sure that he would like her future husband, who though only twenty-five was already adjutant of his regiment.

Out of his reply there fell a ten-pound note, which caused a sensation at the breakfast table of her father, a clergyman in Southsea. She danced round the table waving it, until her mother told her to sit down and go back to the envelope – surely Jack had written a note as well?

Indeed he had. She was to get herself something nice to wear at her wedding with the enclosed, and as she was being such a damned fool as to marry a soldier, she need never expect to hear again from her affectionate Uncle Jack. Nor did she. She wrote when each of her children was born, inviting him to the christening; no reply. My grandfather wrote, when she died of the second baby, inviting him to the funeral; no reply.

Frances came from an East Anglian family of Daniells, gentry and scholars. My aunt liked to trace them back to Angers in the eleventh century. I hope Frances was related to the great lawyer and historian F W Maitland, whose mother was Emma Daniell, but have not yet clinched the connection.

Our branch of the Foot or Foote family – the final e is optional, one of my father’s first cousins used it – traces back to John Foot, son of Simon Foot, born in Truro in the 1660s, and one of the thousands of Cornishmen worried about Bishop Trelawny who marched on London during the Seven Bishops’ crisis of 1687. A Canadian cousin has a photograph of a Tudor house in Truro, which bears the family coat of arms. A succession of Foots, forenamed John and Simon in turn, reached back at least to the mid-sixteenth century, Cornish minor gentry.

The London of 1687 soon proved too hot to hold this John Foot, who had to skip to Holland, whence he came back with King William III, near whose elbow he waded through the Boyne in 1690 as an ensign in Moore’s regiment of infantry. (By a piece of family vanity, he was remembered as having been a cornet in Moore’s regiment of cavalry, which did not exist.) The king thought well enough of him to give him a small estate at the southern tip of Co Carlow, called Rosbercon, where he settled. His son Jeffery married Jane, niece of Robert Lundy, who had taken the other side in King William’s war and tried to betray Londonderry to King James II. Having had an ancestor on each side in that struggle has perhaps been a help, generations later, when trying to get a clear view of the Irish question.

John Foot was first cousin once removed to Samuel Foote the dramatist, acquaintance of Dr Johnson, a spectacular though not always respectable figure on the London stage and buried in Westminster Abbey – before that became a real distinction. John’s descendant Lundy Foot sold snuff in Dublin – Mr Grattan was a devoted customer – and figures in the Oxford English Dictionary, under ‘lundifoot’, the name of his best snuff, as well as in Ulysses, when the Viceroy’s procession goes past his shop (on which I once set eye) near Essex Bridge. He lived at Holly Park, Dublin, now a convent, in a style fit for an alderman.

When he was not quite three, he was seen at a ball in Trim dancing a few steps with his grandmother’s grandmother, who was then a hundred and twelve, and lived five years more – an Irish story, not necessarily false. For one of his sons, Randal, he bought a commission in a cavalry regiment. As Randal’s father was in retail trade, his brother officers cut him; he always seemed to be orderly officer, or to have other tiresome tasks loaded on him. He noticed that on guest nights in the mess anybody might, over the port, send his own snuffbox round the table. One night, he sent round the table a double-sided snuffbox, in one half of it his father’s best snuff, in the other a pair of balls for duelling pistols. Everyone took snuff with him, thus establishing that he was a gentleman after all. He went out eventually to Australia. I like to think of him as ancestor of the two Australian Foott brothers who won Victoria Crosses in my own lifetime – perhaps more family vanity.

This Lundy’s grandson, also Lundy Foot, son and father of clergymen, was rector of Long Bredy in Dorset for over thirty years, an archdeacon and a canon of Salisbury. One of his younger sons, by his second wife Harriett Cunningham, was my great-grandfather. Harriett was a daughter of J W Cunningham, once fifth wrangler at Cambridge, later a figure in the Clapham sect, and for fifty years vicar of Harrow. He makes a brief appearance in the Dictionary of National Biography, inserted by his dutiful nephew-in-law, the editor. Peel, Palmerston, and Aberdeen, all Harrow men later Prime Ministers, must have known him, but none of them put him up for a bishopric. One of Harriett’s sisters married Sir James Fitzjames Stephen the judge, son of Mr Over-Secretary Stephen of the colonial office and brother of Sir Leslie Stephen the founder-editor of DNB, so Harriett was an aunt-in-law of Virginia Woolf as well as a connexion of Thackeray, though I do not think my branch of the family took in the fact. I certainly did not, till I was past eighty. Nor did I realise till I read Hermione Lee’s life of Virginia Woolf that one of Fitzjames Stephen’s daughters, Barbara, married a nephew of Florence Nightingale, another connexion of which to be proud.

My future grandfather was the third of the six sons of the Reverend Cunningham Noel Foot, who was a younger son of Lundy Foot of Long Bredy and became rector of Dogmersfield in northern Hampshire. Now Dogmersfield was a plum, like Hawarden: one of the few parishes in the Church of England that had a sizeable stipend attached to it, something like £3,000 a year, an unusually large sum for the 1860s, several times the average. This plum may have fallen to him by a stroke of luck, for he was up at Trinity, Cambridge, where he took a bachelor’s degree in divinity, with young Mildmay, the local squire who inherited the living and was my grandfather’s godfather.

Edwin, the eldest of the six sons, ran away on his twenty-first birthday. He returned thirty years later, bronzed, with a grown-up daughter; he had retired on his pension. Who had pensioned him? The Lion of Judah and Emperor of Abyssinia, whose chief forester he had been for many years. He wrote a grammar of the Galla language, reprinted by Oxford University Press in the 1970s. He settled at Wimborne Minster in Dorset, remarried (his first wife, whom none of the rest of the family met, was dead), and died early in 1940. His cottage was destroyed by a chance incendiary bomb jettisoned by a fleeing German bomber later that year. I turned out to be among his legatees when his widow died at the end of the war. My share in the estate came to a thousand pounds, which I put into a house purchase, a few pieces of furniture, and £150 in cash (which I blued on a life subscription to the London Library – where it now will not cover half a single year’s membership, so it was a lucky investment).

The second brother, Cunningham, went into the Navy. He was a term-mate in Britannia with Prince George, the future King George V, long before it was clear that the prince (Wales’s second son) was going to become king. I knew Cunningham when I was at Winchester; he lived within bicycling distance at Wickham. By then his wife was dead. They had had no children, and he rather enjoyed having me to talk to. He did a lot to clarify the way I expressed myself on paper. He claimed to have been one of the midshipmen present at a navigation class in the North Sea, at which the instructor said to another – trying unsuccessfully to establish the ship’s position – ‘Young man, take off your hat. You are standing in York Minster.’ This may only be one of the stories sailors enjoy telling each other.

By 1916 Cunningham had risen to be a Captain and to command a pre-Dreadnought battleship, still kept in commission by the Navy in a squadron of sister ships in the Thames estuary. They weighed anchor to take part in the battle of Jutland, but it was over before they got there. At the end of the war he retired from the sea, with a CBE, and settled near Dinan in Brittany with his wife, who was a descendant of Bligh who survived the mutiny in the Bounty in 1789, and has been turned by Hollywood into a villain (he had been in his day the next most popular captain to Nelson in the Navy). Cunningham’s generation moved up the Navy List automatically, as naval officers had done for centuries, so that he died a full admiral in 1940. One of his forenames was de Clare, to celebrate what his parents believed to be his descent from the earls of Clare who included Strongbow, who first asked the Irish question in 1169, and William Marshall who made King John sign Magna Carta. I am now sorry I never got him to trace out the descent for me.

Even royal descent, on the wrong side of the blanket, has been claimed for the family. Benjamin Fayle (floruit in the late eighteenth century), whose granddaughter Sophia married C N Foot is supposed to have married a by-blow of George II. There is in the family a good mid-eighteenth-century chair, upholstered in dark red plush with a fleur-de-lys motif, handed on for several generations as ‘the King’s chair’. A stronger piece of evidence is that my father and the Duke of Gloucester who was brother to George VI looked very much alike circa 1946. I leave this point inconclusive.

Sophia Fayle’s sister Isabella married an Indian army officer called Freddie Bagshaw, who fought in the second Sikh war, and was shot dead on the day the mutiny of 1857 broke out at Jullundur. His wife had just been confined, and came out of labour to find her stillborn son one side of her and her husband’s body on the other. She survived to recount this to my father long afterwards.

There were three younger Foot brothers, siblings of my grandfather: Alfred who never married, Charles who went into business in Sheffield, and St John who went away to Canada and set up an early motor car business. Edwin, Charles and St John all also have living descendants.

My grandfather, Richard Mildmay Foot (RMF), was born at Dogmersfield in October 1865, just in Lord Palmerston’s lifetime. He went to Westward Ho!, Price’s new public school on the Devon coast near Bideford, where he met and befriended the young Kipling, a couple of months younger than himself; he was I believe the original of Dick Tertius, a minor character in Stalky & Co. He and Kipling exchanged Christmas cards often thereafter, but were never (so far as I know) close friends, though they both became freemasons. He can be seen, wearing a prominent Albert watch-chain, in a well known photograph of the schoolboy Kipling among his companions. RMF went on to Sandhurst, where he was a term-mate of Haig, and passed out moderately. He became an officer in the Inniskilling Fusiliers, an Ulster county regiment (the 27th Foot) with a fine fighting record in the past, immortalised by Kipling in his soldier stories as the Black Tyrone. He was with it on the last occasion when the British Army fought in red coats, at a battle on the Umvolosi River in the now almost forgotten second Zulu war of 1888. Of the two British battalions present, the Inniskillings wore blue, but the Royal Scots wore red.

The Inniskillings had arrived late for the battle of Waterloo. They did not arrive as late as Lord Portarlington, whose private arrangements kept him off the battlefield until seven in the evening – he arrived just in time to have his horse shot under him in one of the last charges of the day – but they arrived late. Indeed, their colonel was still at sea, with all the majors and several other officers who were good at whist, enjoying a leisurely journey home from the United States, where they had helped to burn the President’s house (which had to be repainted White) when the British captured Washington. They handed the bulk of the regiment over to the senior captain, Hare, who was made acting major for the journey, and was in command on the afternoon of 18 June 1815 when they marched on to the ridge beyond Waterloo, and were ordered to hold its centre. Next morning they were still there, in an eyewitness’s words ‘lying dead in square’. This spectacle is said to have triggered off Wellington’s well-known remark that, next to a battle lost, the most melancholy sight he knew was of a battle won. Of the seventeen officers present, all were knocked down except Hare and one other, and the two still upright were both wounded, but they held their square. Three in five of their men were killed or severely wounded, but they too held their square. During the battle, a neighbouring regiment sent word across – plenty of subalterns to spare, would the 27th care to borrow some? Hare replied that the sergeants rather enjoyed commanding the companies, and he was loth to deprive them of the privilege.

One of the regiment’s drummer-boys, aged twelve, survived the battle, and lived on into his own nineties; the regiment kept him, as a sort of human mascot. Not long before he died he gave his Waterloo medal to the adjutant’s daughter, then a little girl of two. This was my father’s only sibling, Lindsey, who left the medal to me (it was stolen from me during a house move). This means the battle of Waterloo is only two very long lifetimes away – a point drummed in to me by a Times obituary on 7 November 2002, of Eugenie Fraser, née Scholts, who was dandled on the knee of an old lady who could remember having seen Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow in 1812.

My father, Richard Cunningham Foot (Dickie to the family, Daddy to me) was born at Dover in November 1892. The regiment then moved to Ireland – it is a myth that Irish regiments were never stationed on Irish soil – and his sister Lindsey Kathleen was born at Kinsale in 1894. But her mother never recovered, and died a few months later at Rincurran in Co Cork, leaving my grandfather with two small children to bring up as best he could. He stayed with the regiment, having no other source of income, and the children had largely to be left to nursemaids. Their upbringing was strict. At breakfast, for example, one could have butter or marmalade on one’s toast, to have both at once was greedy. Dickie once decided he would not eat his porridge at breakfast. He got nothing else for breakfast, and had the porridge put in front of him at lunch, at tea, at supper, at breakfast next day, and so on till it grew a mould and he was at last allowed something else to eat. Lindsey, when aged about twelve, got up every morning to be dressed with a holly sprig in the neck of her blouse, to teach her to keep her head upright; which indeed she did, for she always carried herself superbly, showing off a fine Roman nose, for which the gene must be lurking in the family somewhere – though, like the gene for my mother’s fine shade of auburn hair, it has not yet shown up again.

RMF had a few friends outside the regiment, including the Cooper family, whose recent ancestor had made a great deal of money, over a million pounds – then a colossal sum – out of Cooper’s Sheep Dip in Australia, where it saved sheep from ravaging attacks by ticks. This family settled in England, and had two large country houses: the grander at Shenstone Court near Lichfield, later a madhouse, the other at Ashlyns near Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, now vanished. Richard, its head, became a baronet in 1905.

My grandfather happened to be staying at Ashlyns in the autumn of 1899, on leave, when he got a telegram from his successor as adjutant: the regiment had just received a warning order to proceed overseas to South Africa, where trouble was impending with the Boers. My grandfather made his apologies to his hostess, and asked if he might see a railway timetable. The womenfolk fussed over him: who was going to look after him? They supposed he had a batman – was he any good? My grandfather indicated, no. Well, would he like to take one of their footmen? My grandfather had rather taken to Herbert – did he mean Ashlyns Herbert, or Shenstone Herbert? Ashlyns Herbert was sent for, and asked whether he would like to go with Captain Foot to fight in South Africa? He would like to very much, and was sworn in to the Inniskillings a few hours later. This was Herbert Camfield, my grandfather ’s constant companion for the rest of his life. He was a tall, quiet, gentle man, who became a dissenting lay preacher, infinitely patient with children – though married by the time I knew him, he had none of his own – and always conscious of his place below the salt.

The 27th were in Hart’s Irish brigade, and soon in action on the advance to relieve Ladysmith. On 27 February 1900, in the final battle of this campaign at Pieter’s Hill, my grandfather was wounded in the head, and left isolated in front of the battalion. Some nearby Boers called on him to surrender. He gave the correct reply, ‘I’ll die first’, or so the newspaper legend soon had it. His own diary says that he called out an ancient Ulster slogan, ‘No surrender’ Either way, he survived, and with a corporal’s help managed after dark to roll over and over, away down the hill, rejoining the Irish lines next morning with seven companions, all wounded.

The incident caught the fancy of a war correspondent, and the story was telegraphed home. It earned RMF a full-page illustration in The Sphere, then a large-format illustrated weekly. He and his brother officers thought this rather bad form, as one’s name was never supposed to appear in the papers at all, except for birth, marriage and death, but nothing could be done about it. (The picture reappeared, without his name attached to it, in a recent volume of Inniskilling diaries.) The tale stayed buried in the files, and then emerged again; most of his short obituaries when he died in 1933 were headlined ‘Boer War Hero’. The high command was also impressed. He was offered the choice of a DSO or a brevet majority. As the brevet would be paid, he accepted that, not knowing that the 27th’s field officer casualties were so heavy that in three weeks’ time he was promoted major anyway. Later, he reckoned that he had made a mistake, because a DSO against his name would have helped to distinguish him from most of his fellows, and might – had he stayed in the regular army – have led on to a command of importance.

When he had recovered from his wound, he was transferred to army administration, with which he saw out the war. Towards the end of it, he fell under the spell of the eldest Cooper daughter, christened Lucy Anne but always known as Dolly, who had gone out to Cape Town in search of a husband; they were married there in May 1902. The villagers of Shenstone presented her, as the squire’s eldest daughter, with a silver salver on the occasion of her marriage, a custom that seems to have died out. She did not care for garrison life, and a few years later persuaded RMF, as there were still too many majors senior to him in the regiment for him to have any chance of commanding it, that he would do better to resign and live on her money, as he did. They settled at White Hill, Berkhampstead, where Herbert Camfield became their butler.

Soon thereafter, my grandfather got a persuasive personal letter from R. B. Haldane, the new Secretary of State for War. The various reserve forces were about to be amalgamated into a new second-line force, to be called the Territorial Force. RMF was exactly the sort of man to form one of its new units; would he do so? He thus became the founder lieutenant-colonel of the 4th East Anglian Field Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (TF), from 1907 to May 1914, when for the second time he retired. On retirement, his fellow officers presented him with a silver salver, of a design by Hester Bateman, with his coat of arms on the front and all their names on the back – another custom that seems to have died out.

He lived the life of a country gentleman, and sent his children to decent schools. Dickie went to Hillside, Godalming, where he met several Huxleys and Gielguds, and then on to Winchester, where he spent four energetic years, winning in his last half the school’s French prize. A. P. Herbert, Stafford Cripps, Oswald Mosley, Charles Portal, and A. J. Toynbee were among his schoolfellows, though he knew none of them well. Rockley Wilson who taught him French was still teaching French over twenty-five years later, as Clement Vavasour Durell who had taught him maths was still teaching maths. Lindsey went to Wycombe Abbey, where – grander than her brother – she became head girl.

My grandfather had one sister, Catharine, who married a Dr Grove, and died young, leaving a boy, Peter, on whom she asked my grandfather to keep an eye. Peter went (at my grandfather’s expense) to Cambridge, to read engineering, but this left no money, as Dolly was disinclined to provide it, for my father to go to Oxford or Cambridge. He went instead to the School of Mines in South Kensington, commuting in daily by train from Berkhampstead. He spent four years there, playing rugger (Harlequins, wing three-quarter) and enjoying himself, while also working hard. In 1912 his father said to him that he did not like the look of the newspapers; he thought there would soon be another Great War. Had Dickie not better join his TF unit? He did, and Second Lieutenant R. C. Foot’s is one of the names on the back of the Bateman salver.

Dickie never forgot being sent down a mine near St Just, in Cornwall, and along a gallery in it till he could hear waves breaking just above his head. He may not have needed this exercise much, having been struck by some lines he had to utter while acting Julius Caesar in a school play at Hillside, and often quoted later:

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.

When it came to his finals, he and a few friends discovered that their last paper was to be a chemistry practical, from two to four in the afternoon. They decided to celebrate by taking some girls out on the river at Maidenhead. For that, and the restaurant they meant to dine in, white tie and tails were in those days indispensable. Where were they going to change, if they caught the 4.30 from Paddington, a twenty-minute walk across the park from the School? There would be no time to change at the School, no facilities on the train, and no gentleman dreamed of entering a public lavatory. They looked closely at the university’s rules for academic dress, and turned up to take their chemistry practical in white tie and tails. They were all rusticated for impertinence, which meant that they had to take their degrees all over again in September. But this was in June 1914; by September they were all in uniform. My father was the only survivor.

He went out, with a territorial division, to relieve regular troops in Egypt, and was sent for by the senior Royal Artillery officer there. He was a gunner, therefore he knew about survey? Yes he did, because he had studied it at the School of Mines. So he was sent off into the Sinai desert, with a bombardier and a theodolite and a small camel corps escort (the general predicted, correctly, that he would have no trouble with the Turks), and came back a month later with his survey of the peninsula complete. A great many years later, when he was living in Australia on his final career as an export-import merchant, an Israeli customer with whom he had made friends by letter came to visit him, bringing with him the maps on which he had fought the Six Days’ War of 1967. My father was delighted to find that the senior on the list of surveys on which the maps were founded was ‘Foot, 1915’. After his death, I tried to trace his original map through the woman who had just taken charge of the army’s mapping department. She could not find it. We supposed it to have been burned during the great flap in Cairo in July 1942, when the staff believed Rommel was about to arrive. Auchinleck the commander-in-chief had steadier nerves. Rommel was repulsed at First Alamein, and then beaten back by Alexander, Montgomery and the Eighth Army at Second Alamein in the autumn.

My father was promoted major as a reward for his survey, and posted to the Western Front. There he commanded D battery of 4.5-inch howitzers in 310 Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, in Braithwaite’s 62nd Division, for the rest of the war. The task of these howitzer batteries was to provide close-range support for the infantry in front of them, both in barrages to check enemy attacks and in counter-battery fire against enemy field guns that were causing our infantry discomfort. In his seventies he wrote an account of his war, which I have lodged at the Imperial War Museum and hope one day to publish.

He remembered an evening when he went forward, as his own observation officer, to an infantry brigade he had not visited before. He found its headquarters, not the usual thousand yards or so behind the front line, but right in it, in a dug-out. They were New Zealanders, and the brigade commander, about his own age, was already wearing a DSO. He was invited to stay to dinner, after which the brigadier-general told his brigade major to wake him in half an hour, dropped his head on his hands, and instantly fell fast asleep. He woke at a touch on his elbow, and invited my father to come for a walk with him. His idea of a walk was to go through both sets of wire, and lie close under the German parapet for a few minutes, trying to pick up some intelligence of interest. This was Freyberg, later VC, of whom Dickie wrote afterwards that ‘in battle he had no peer’.

He left out of his memoirs a story I once heard him tell. In 1916 he was riding over French downland, some way behind the lines, with