Eighty Years: Soldiering, Politics, Games

By Gen. Sir Neville Lyttelton

Begun in 1914 and first published in 1927, these are the memoirs of General Sir Neville Gerald Lyttelton, a British Army officer who served, in the Sudan, Ireland and most notably the Second Boer War. He draws upon his reminiscences with the aid of correspondence with various members of his family and from his diary entries dating back as far as 1873.

A fascinating military history read!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787208520

Gen. Sir Neville Lyttelton

General Sir Neville Gerald Lyttelton, GCB, GCVO, PC (28 October 1845 - 6 July 1931) was a British Army officer from the Lyttelton family who served against the Fenian Raids, and in the Anglo-Egyptian War, the Mahdist War and the Second Boer War. He was Chief of the General Staff at the time of the Haldane Reforms and then became Commander-in-Chief, Ireland. Born the son of 4th Baron Lyttelton and Mary Lyttelton (née Glynne) and educated at Eton College, he was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1865. After serving in Canada and the U.S., he was promoted to lieutenant in 1869, rising to the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel and awarded the Order of Osmanieh (4th Class) in 1882. Following further promotions between 1883-1892, he became Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion of his Regiment in 1893 and went on to be Commanding Officer of the 2nd Battalion of his Regiment in Ireland. He was given command of 2nd Brigade with the temporary rank of brigadier general in 1898 and led his brigade at the battle of Omdurman in September 1898 during the Mahdist War. He served in the Second Boer War as Commander of the 4th Brigade in South Africa from October 1899 and was promoted to lieutenant general for distinguished service in the field in March 1900. At war end, in 1902, he became Commander-in-Chief of the whole of South Africa and was knighted Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB). In 1904 he was appointed Chief of the General Staff and a member of the newly formed Army Council and promoted to general in 1906. He then moved on to become Commander-in-Chief, Ireland in 1908. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in 1911 and retired in 1912. In retirement he was a member of the Mesopotamia Commission which sat in 1916/17. The King insisted he was appointed as Governor of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in 1912, until his death there in 1931, aged 85.

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Text originally published in 1927 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

EIGHTY YEARS

SOLDIERING, POLITICS, GAMES

BY

GENERAL SIR NEVILLE LYTTELTON

G.C.B., G.C.V.O.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

PREFATORY NOTE 5

ILLUSTRATIONS 6

CHAPTER I—HOME 7

CHAPTER II—GEDDINGTON AND ETON 11

CHAPTER III—WINCHESTER AND CANADA 19

CHAPTER IV—ENGLAND AND IRELAND (1867–1873) 28

I 28

II 31

III 34

IV 36

CHAPTER V—INDIA (1873–1878) 40

CHAPTER VI—ENGLAND, IRELAND AND THE WAR OFFICE (1878–1882) 49

I 49

II 51

CHAPTER VII—GAMES 58

CHAPTER VIII—EGYPT (1882) 64

CHAPTER IX—WAR OFFICE—GIBRALTAR—INDIA (1882–1893) 69

CHAPTER X—IRELAND AND THE WAR OFFICE (1893–1898) 78

I 78

II 81

CHAPTER XI—MR. GLADSTONE 84

CHAPTER XII—THE SUDAN (1898) 88

CHAPTER XIII—SOUTH AFRICA (1899–1900) 95

CHAPTER XIV—SPION KOP AND VAAL KRANZ (1900) 101

CHAPTER XV—MONTE CRISTO AND RELIEF OF LADYSMITH (1900) 105

CHAPTER XVI—IN THE EASTERN TRANSVAAL (1900–1901) 110

CHAPTER XVII—LAST MONTHS OF THE WAR (1901–1902) 119

CHAPTER XVIII—C.-IN-C.: SOUTH AFRICA (1902–1904) 124

CHAPTER XIX—THE WAR OFFICE (1904–1906) 129

CHAPTER XX—HALDANE (1906–1908) 132

CHAPTER XXI—C.-IN-C.: IRELAND (1908–1912) 136

CHAPTER XXII—THE ROYAL HOSPITAL, CHELSEA (1913) 140

ENVOI 149

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 151

DEDICATION

To

MY WIFE

PREFATORY NOTE

The writer of these Reminiscences is gifted with a singularly retentive memory, which has been supplemented by his correspondence with various members of his family, and from a diary which he kept from 1873. Whatever he records may be accepted with tolerable confidence that it is correct, though no doubt there are omissions due to forgetfulness. He began writing this about 1914.

ILLUSTRATIONS

General Rt. Hon. Sir Neville Lyttelton, G.C.B., G.C.V.O., when Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, 1908–1912

The Eight Lyttelton Brothers

N. G. L. as an Ensign in Canada, 1865

N. G. L. as Brevet Colonel, 3rd Batt. Rifle Brigade,

2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade storming Boer position at Bergendaal, Transvaal, 1900

General Botha (left), en route to Vereenigen Conference, 1902, conversing with N. G. L. under Flag of Truce

Generals De Wet, Louis Botha, N. G. L., Delarey, and Lady Lyttelton at Pretoria, June, 1902

Founders’ Day, The Royal Hospital, 1925

Founders’ Day, 1926

CHAPTER I—HOME

I WAS born on the 28th October, 1845, at Hagley, the country place of the Lyttelton family in Worcestershire, the fifth child and third son in a family of twelve, eight of whom were sons, a tall lot ranging from 6 feet 3½ inches to 5 feet 10½ inches.{1} My father succeeded to the title while an undergraduate at Cambridge, where he had a highly distinguished career. He had been Newcastle Classical Medallist at Eton, and at Cambridge he won the Craven Scholarship, was Senior Classic and Chancellor’s Medallist, in both bracketed with Dr. Vaughan, afterwards Head Master of Harrow. As he was also in the University cricket eleven he may be said to have left his mark at Cambridge.

He and the famous statesman Mr. Gladstone were married on the same day, 25th July, 1839, to the daughters of Sir Stephen Glynne of Hawarden. My mother died in 1857. The pathetic scene was unforgettable when we were summoned to her deathbed. She saw all her elder children separately, giving each one wise and tender words of loving advice. Her calmness was wonderful, though she broke down a little when the youngest child, Alfred, a magnificent baby five months old, was brought in.

I do not propose to go into details of my early surroundings, which were not particularly exciting. My earliest distinct recollection was the laying of the first stone of the Rectory by my eldest brother in August, 1849, when I was nearly three months short of four years old. He rode a small Shetland pony, Fenella by name, a local band clad in a sort of white uniform provided the music, and I distinctly remember one of the tunes they played.

From my earliest days history has always had a great attraction for me. I remember driving in the dickey of the britska, the old family carriage, seated beside my (later) brother-in-law, John Talbot,{2} and his telling me the story of Romulus and Remus. I could read by the time I was four. Seeing my interest in the story he sent me a copy of Little Arthur’s History of Rome, which I remember reading to myself.

For the next two or three years my recollections are rather indistinct and blurred, except that I remember being at Brighton, St. Leonards and Rhyl, many of us often requiring sea air, though we were never seriously ill. But early in 1854 I was taken by Rowe, my father’s valet, to see the Scots Fusilier Guards, as the Scots Guards were then designated» paraded before the Queen and Royal Family at Buckingham Palace on the day they started for the Crimea. I was close to the right of the line, and can see now the right-hand man, a very tall, grey-haired warrior—those were the days of life service—and a splendid old veteran he looked. In the ranks was a Colour-Sergeant Knox, who gained a V.C. in the Crimea, and a commission in my regiment, the Rifle Brigade; and twenty years later he told me he knew that man well, and said that his name was Walker, and that in spite of his age he lasted through the campaign.

I should imagine that life at Hagley was much the same as that at many other country houses. We dwelt among our own people, we entertained our neighbours in a rather formal fashion, we knew most of the villagers, played cricket with the boys, and all our interests were local. The servants had mostly grown grey in our service, and some of them, notably Mrs. Ellis the housekeeper, remained with us for fifty years and more.

My father was a High Churchman of the earlier type, and remained so all his life; but whether he would have been attracted by the developments of later days I cannot say. He brought us up on stricter lines than prevail now, especially as regards church observance. That (inherited I presume from Evangelical days) was a reality—two services on Sunday and one on Saints’ days, no games on Sunday, indoors or out, no novel-reading till after Sunday morning service, and daily family prayers. But our life was very far from being one of dismal austerity; we played games of various descriptions not only out of doors but inside, and I am afraid the furniture suffered from this freedom of action. I still remember vividly the feeling of the sharp points of the Grinling Gibbons carving against my head when fielding at indoor cricket. When he came into his inheritance my eldest brother must have realized the unwisdom of this laxity, but having been a prominent partaker himself he could not say much.

For the first eight or ten years of my life I was anything but a strong child, and in infancy in particular it was mainly due to the unremitting care of our family nurse, Grace Newman, that I grew up into an exceptionally healthy man. She brought up all twelve of us, and lived, a much loved and honoured friend, till she was a few days short of ninety.

After the death of my mother, my three elder sisters—Merial, Lucy and Lavinia {3}—reigned in succession till my father married again, after eleven years widowerhood; but my grandmother, Lady Lyttelton (born Lady Sarah Spencer), lived a good deal at Hagley, and kept an eye on things there. She was a very cultivated and clever woman, and her reminiscences were extraordinarily interesting. She remembered as a small child seeing Horace Walpole and Gibbon the historian at Althorp, her father’s house.{4} He was the Lord Spencer who later on was First Lord of the Admiralty, and the great Admirals of those days—Howe, Nelson, Jervis, Hood and Collingwood—were frequent visitors at Spencer House. She told me the following anecdote of the Duke of Clarence, later on King William IV. He was on a visit to Althorp, where he attended family prayers probably for the first time in his life. He listened quietly enough for a short time when he ejaculated, A d——d good institution, too.

In later years the atmosphere at Hagley was distinctly musical. Every one of the eight brothers could sing parts by ear, and Spencer, the fourth brother, had a really fine bass voice. I found recorded in his diary that Leslie, the well-known musical conductor, told him that if he would get properly trained in Italy, and become a professional, he would certainly make £2,000 a year. The number of festivals, Monday Popular, and Crystal Palace concerts that Spencer records his attending, very frequently with A. J. Balfour and Hubert Parry, is incredible. We always patronized the Birmingham Festival, and well I remember my brother Alfred, about seven years old, trembling all over as he sat next me when the great opening chorus in the Messiah, And the Glory of the Lord, began.

CHAPTER II—GEDDINGTON AND ETON

IN September, 1854, my elder brother Albert and I went to school at Geddington near Kettering in Northamptonshire, when my childhood may be said to have ended and my boyhood begun.

In those days good private schools were few. They were often run by country clergymen, many of them perhaps with no particular qualifications for their difficult task. There was nothing to prevent anybody starting such a school, no certificate of fitness for the job, or qualification for it was required, nor was any inspection ever made.

Geddington was a small school, the numbers rarely exceeding twenty. The master was the Rev. William Montagu Church, the rector of the parish, to which he had been presented by the Duke of Buccleuch who sent his own son there, and this may have given the school its aristocratic character. Certainly there was a considerable sprinkling of young aristocrats—Kerrs, Scotts, Northcotes Boscawens, etc.—and some of them rose to eminence in after life, such as Edward Talbot afterwards Bishop of Winchester, Lord Walter Kerr, Admiral of the Fleet, Admirals Lord C. Scott and Arthur Moore, and myself the first Chief of the General Staff.

Geddington is about a mile or two from Boughton, one of the many country houses of the Duke of Buccleuch with some 50 miles of elm avenues. In it stood a fine Queen Eleanor’s Cross, near which were the village stocks in which I once saw a culprit confined for drunkenness. He was kept there nearly all day, but he was not molested in any way, nor did he seem to feel in any way ashamed at being thus made a public example.

At the school we were well fed and looked after; no boy in the school died during its existence of nearly twenty years; and we were well grounded in Scripture, history and the rudiments of classics; but considering that the great majority of boys were destined for Eton it was a pity that hardly any attention was devoted to Latin verse, an important consideration in the Eton entrance examination. The consequence was that only two Geddington boys ever took Remove, the highest form attainable, of whom I was not one.

There was quite a spacious playing-field, at the bottom of which was a small stream abounding in perch, roach and dace, with an occasional pike and eel, which afforded us sport of a sort, and some variation in the otherwise monotonous diet we enjoyed.

The discipline was severe; but when this is the case, it is essential that the disciplinarian should be able to control his temper. Of this Mr. Church was incapable, and the result was that the punishment was unduly frequent, and the instrument of correction, a sort of leather trace about two feet long, was in continual operation. Punishment followed the crime with startling rapidity and few there were who escaped it, and it was very seldom tempered with mercy. Five Moore brothers, none bad or idle boys, were I think the most frequent sufferers, and my brother Spencer, who was flogged every day for a week for not completing his tale of work by 12 noon. The strap was administered on the hand for minor offences, and a tergo for more serious ones; but I rather think the boys preferred the latter, as it could be made innocuous by a copy-book used as a sort of shield inserted under the garment.

I don’t think we were unhappy under these apparently trying conditions; we were pretty tough customers, and regarded them as the normal accompaniments of a schoolboy life. We had plenty of cricket and a primitive sort of football with no particular rules except to get the ball through the opponents’ goal by hook or by crook. I remember once playing a village match at home under the same conditions, against a neighbouring village, in a field about 300 yards long, in which players dropped in or out as the spirit moved them. The field of action had to be shortened, as there was a low fence across it which we had not noticed till we began.

A fat Frenchman taught us a very little occasional French, one village schoolmaster about the same amount of arithmetic, and another still less music. After an indifferent start I finished up in a blaze of triumph with six first prizes, and the highest number of marks in one week ever made in the school.

I carried away with me one legacy, a crooked left arm caused by a fall from a see-saw. I have never been able to bend it properly since, though I was never inconvenienced by it. The surgical treatment I received was leeches, the only instance I ever came across of these reptiles being used.

Almost the pleasantest recollection I took away from Geddington was my introduction to Marryatt’s novels. I had developed mistaken symptoms of measles, or some other infectious complaint, and was banished to a remote bedroom. This had also been used for the storage of several novels by that prince of naval authors banned because of their profanity. I lit upon this collection and simply revelled in it, nor have I ever lost my taste for these books. Church got a good deal of work out of us, it was all done in school, nor were we allowed out till the tale was completed—an admirable stimulus. Every week a notice was pinned up on the schoolroom door, showing the number of marks gained by each boy and his place in his class. In the 1st class we read Virgil, Cæsar, Greek Testament and Homer, and in my last half my old friend North-cote, now Lord Iddesleigh, and I read Hecuba, the only instance I believe of a Geddington boy being promoted to the giddy elevation of a Greek play.

I left Geddington in December, 1857, and never saw the place again till 1921. It looked very small to me and to my wife too, who was horrified when she saw into what small and unventilated spaces we had been crowded by night and day.

For many years my father used to hold periodical examinations for the whole family, girls and boys, in general subjects, the papers varying with the age of the competitors. One year my brother Arthur{5} gained much the highest percentage of marks ever won in this series of competitions, extending, I should say, over some ten years, and I was first three times running up to 1861, when I retired. I still possess Napier’s History of the Peninsular War, the prize of the threefold victory.

In January, 1858, I went to Eton and became an inmate of the house kept by Mr. William Evans, the school drawing master, a water-colour artist of some distinction. In former days a good many houses had been run by dames, so called independent of sex. But after my time they began to die out, the widely known Jane Evans, William’s daughter, being the last.

It may be noted that if there were two brothers together at Eton, they were styled Major and Minor; if three, Major, Minor, and Minimus; if four, Maximus, Major, Minor, and Minimus; if five or more, Maximus to Quintus, Sextus, and so on. My brother Arthur, fifth in a brotherhood of eight, started as Minimus, the youngest of three, and rose to be Maximus, the eldest of four.

I cannot help thinking that we small boys were a hardy lot. The Eton jacket is a very inadequate protection against cold, yet we were never allowed to wear great coats, and I still recollect the icy conditions under which we awaited five o’clock school in winter.

Fremantle, the youngest of a distinguished family, was a new boy with me. He became Newcastle Scholar and had a very distinguished University career, took orders and would undoubtedly have risen high in the Church, but died in his early prime. In addition to these distinctions he was quite good at cricket, football, and especially at fives, the best combination in one boy of work and play in my time.

Johnson, in later years Cory, was my tutor, a very remarkable man, far in advance of his time as an instructor of youth. Though a very fine classical scholar, he by no means confined himself to that branch of learning, but led us into many other fields of thought, history, military and political, poetry and so on. But there were drawbacks; favouritism was rife in his circle of pupils—his favourites were hardly ever punished or called up in pupil room, a state of things which, being perhaps of a rebellious temperament, I resented and so came frequently into collision with him. I have all through my life been rather unmethodical, and forgetful of appointments, and I was flogged three or four times for missing private business, a movable feast which took place at varying hours, and in no single case was it wilful on my part though he chose to assume it was. His reports home on me for some time were distinctly unfavourable, and I believe he tried to get me withdrawn from the school. However, after some two or three years of friction, times began to mend, and there are some not unkindly references to me by him in Ionicus—a book of Lord Esher’s recollections. We parted on good terms, he telling me that I might have been a good scholar if I had tried, which pronouncement I have looked back upon with compunction all my life.

I had been doing Remove work at Geddington for a year, and was quite up to it at Eton, except in those wretched Latin verses, which consequently led to my failure to pass the entrance examination, and I only got into Upper Fourth. This was really not a bad performance for a boy of little over twelve, but I found the work in that division quite child’s play, and without any special effort I passed second in Collections at the end of the half.

Just after I entered the school the marriage of our Princess Royal to the Crown Prince of Prussia took place at Windsor, which gave the boys an opportunity of displaying their loyalty. We took the horses out of the shafts, and a team of twenty or thirty big boys dragged the carriage up to the Castle. The officer-in-waiting, then unknown to fame, was Moltke, the great strategist and Chief of the Prussian General Staff a few years later.

I soon fell a victim to the seductions of the summer half, and for two years or more did very little serious work, though I managed to keep a respectable place in Divisional Trials. However, in Upper Division Trials,—in those days the last ordeal that had to be faced in one’s upward progress—I did work pretty hard and gained a dozen places, passing tenth in a division of fifty, and would have been higher if it had not been for my family weakness in mathematics. But undoubtedly my best performance in the scholastic world was being second in the Newcastle-under-Lyme, a competition confined to Johnson’s, and two or three other pupil rooms, mainly in classics, but including a paper on an historical subject which was not revealed to us beforehand. This was the reign of Louis XIV, in which I was easily first. History, then and now, has been my favourite study,