Snobbery With Violence

by Colin Watson

  CHAPTER 5

  The Bulldog Breed

  There emerged from the British Army in 1919, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, a man named Herman Cyril McNeile. In 1920, he published a book under the pseudonym ‘Sapper’, which had been bestowed upon him some years earlier by Northcliffe on his acceptance of a story for the Daily Mail. The book was entitled Bulldog Drummond. It was the prototype of a series that made McNeile one of the most avidly read authors in Britain.

  McNeile himself seems to have had a personality closely akin to that of his hero. It was of the sort that can most kindly be described as ebullient. He had a loud voice and employed it unstintingly in company. His laugh was very loud indeed. He liked to enliven clubs and restaurants with the sight and sound of military good fellowship. The meals that he was able to order with part of his dividends from literary success always included immense quantities of caviare and were followed by equally generous intakes of vintage port. Lieutenant-Colonel ‘Sapper’ McNeile, as his friend and biographer, Gerard Fairlie, would later concede, was ‘not everybody’s cup of tea’.

  And yet Bulldog Drummond – the fictional extension of the man himself – proved as nearly universally popular as any creator of characters could desire. The books sold in huge numbers in their author’s lifetime and even after his death in 1937, when the ‘ghosting’ of additions to the series was undertaken by Fairlie. This success confirmed the truth of Fairlie’s declaration: ‘Once a fan, always a fan.’ One story, The Final Count, which was first published in 1926, went into no fewer than forty editions in the next twenty-five years. Drummond was put upon the stage and featured in films, receiving the accolade of the cinema industry in the form of portrayal by Ronald Colman. (It was Colman, incidentally, to whom the not dissimilar roles of ‘Raffles’ and ‘Beau Geste’ were assigned.)

  Drummond is worth careful examination, for his popularity could only have been won by a character whose qualities made immediate and strong rapport with the ideas of the reading and, subsequently, the cinema-going public.

  In the first place, he satisfied conventional British ideals of physique. He ‘stood just six feet in his socks, and turned the scale at over fourteen stone’. He was ‘hard muscle and bone clean through … a magnificent boxer, a lightning and deadly shot with a revolver, and utterly lovable’. His friends were happily aware of his propensity to ‘burble at them genially, knock them senseless with a blow of greeting on the back, and then resuscitate them with a large tankard of ale’. They also recognized his deservedly good fortune in being ‘married to an adorable wife’.

  Such was Drummond’s strength of personality that those he led into adventure ‘never questioned, never hesitated’. He was invariably contemptuous of odds, which he countered with enormous personal strength and an armoury of assorted weapons that today would be considered distinctly anti-social in character. With the police he had very little patience and he would not hesitate to incapacitate any whose bumbling regard for the proprieties threatened to interfere with his fight for right.

  His flamboyantly aggressive patriotism was matched by his loyalty to his friends. In moments of excitement, he found expression in the vocabulary of the public school First Fifteen changing room, using the word ‘show’ a great deal and occasionally crediting an enemy with taking ‘a darned sporting chance’. Drummond’s warning of the gravity of a situation was likely to be delivered as: ‘You’re up against something pretty warm, old lad … I take off my hat to ’em for their nerve.’ The few occasions on which his loquacity failed included those when death seemed imminent and thoughts flew to loved ones – ‘You might – er – just tell – er – you know, Phyllis and all that …’

  Drummond’s reticence also applied to religion. It was, as doubtless his readers would have agreed, one of those things that one just didn’t talk about. One rather curious feature of his speech, though, was the frequency of his use of the word ‘devil’ and its derivatives. It is true that this was a literary device of the time to signal conflict between tough heroes and unprincipled adversaries, but ‘Sapper’s’ devotion to it was extreme, and perhaps psychologically significant. Another sphere in which Drummond preferred action to words was politics. His rare references to the subject were characteristically forthright. ‘Years ago we had an amusing little show rounding up Communists and other unwashed people of that type. We called ourselves the Black Gang, and it was a great sport while it lasted.’

  Such were the chief idiosyncracies built by Lieutenant-Colonel McNeile into a hero to whom millions responded sympathetically from 1920 onwards. Bulldog Drummond was a melodramatic creation, workable only within a setting of melodrama. The stories provided for that purpose were models of unselfconscious absurdity. They had been vigorously purged of likelihood and were uncontaminated by the slightest suggestion of subtlety of style. Perhaps the most splendidly ridiculous of the entire canon was The Final Count.

  Robin Gaunt, a scientist, has perfected a poison capable of dealing ‘universal, instantaneous death’. He believes that Britain should be prepared to use it in order to stop other nations going to war. The day before he is due to give a secret demonstration before the Army Council, he disappears. Two of his friends, John Stockton and Toby Sinclair, discover Gaunt’s terrier, ‘a topping little beast’, dead in the scientist’s rooms. A policeman who touches the dog dies at once in a paroxysm and his colleague exclaims: ‘But it’s devil’s work. It ain’t human.’ Sir John Dallas, celebrated toxicologist, suggests the deaths have been caused by a poison known previously to the Borgias and to the Aztecs. Such a substance could be of great military importance.

  At Toby Sinclair’s rooms, Stockton meets Bulldog Drummond. The three friends proceed to lunch at Hatchett’s, in Piccadilly, Drummond giving ‘a grin of pure joy’ and exclaiming: ‘Is it possible, my jovial bucks, that once again we are on the war-path?’ They reassemble in a low pub in the sinister London suburb of Peckham. Stockton is disguised as ‘a mechanic with Communistic tendencies’ and Sinclair as a ‘nasty-looking little Jew’. They overhear an address, go to it, and notice strange noises. Drummond declares: ‘I’m going in, trap or no trap; there’s foul play inside that room.’ They find a rat-faced man hanging, shoot a man who is about to syringe them with Gaunt’s poison, and tangle with a dozen police led by Inspector MacIver, of Scotland Yard. Friendly relations are restored by Drummond’s remark: ‘The fact of the matter, MacIver, is that we’re up against some unscrupulous swine.’

  The rest of the evening is taken up by Drummond’s disposal of two outsize tarantulas, delivered to his Mayfair home in separate boxes addressed to him and his wife, and accompanied by sarcastic notes. He drowns one spider and hits the other between the eyes with a poker while it is scuttling about, ‘hissing loudly’.

  Drummond recruits several more friends. After further violent encounters with Gaunt’s kidnappers, the scene changes to Land’s End, whither the gang has been traced thanks to a chance remark. Drummond and his forces arrive at Penzance in his Hispano-Suiza. Stockton notices odd comings and goings at a deserted tin mine. Drummond distributes ropes, gags, heavily loaded sticks and bottles of chloroform. They converge on the mine, disposing of sentries as they advance. One is ‘put to sleep’, another given ‘a good biff’ and a third ‘dotted one’.

  Confronting the rest of the gang at gun point in their hideout, Drummond says to the man he habitually addresses as ‘fungus face’: ‘Only a keen sense of public duty restrains me from plugging you where you sit, you ineffable swine.’ Less scrupulous, ‘fungus face’ floods the room with the ‘universal death’ liquid. Robin Gaunt, now insane, appears just in time to drain off the poison, before it rises to the level of Drummond’s table-top refuge. An airship has arrived overhead and it is into its tanks that the poison is pumped by Gaunt.

  Search reveals papers written by Gaunt before he lost his reason. They express his fear that his secret would fall into the hands of ‘Russia, ruled by its clique of homicidal, alien Jews’. Also
described is an attack by airship upon a yacht crowded with Society people wearing jewels, their deaths by poison, and the robbery of their corpses by Bolsheviks – ‘the most frightful gang of murderous-looking cut-throats I’ve ever seen (officers seem to have no control)’.

  Drummond realizes that behind the whole affair is Carl Peterson, arch-criminal. It also dawns upon him that the airship is the same as that supposedly owned by a mysterious American millionaire calling himself ‘Wilmot’. He remembers that he has been sent two complimentary tickets for a trip on ‘Wilmot’s’ airship that very night. He drives his friends back to London. Gaunt is disposed of with the remark: ‘Well, since the poor bloke is bug house, I suppose we’ll have to stuff him in a home or something.’

  The airship of ‘Wilmot’, who is really Peterson, is crowded with fashionably dressed guests, including at least one duchess. At dinner, Peterson asks ‘the distinguished officer on my right’ to propose the Loyal Toast in ‘an old Chinese wine the secret of which is known only to a certain sect of monks’. Captain Drummond (for it is he) calls: ‘The King!’ Then he smells his glass. ‘For God’s sake don’t drink! It’s death!’

  To Peterson, he cries: ‘Drink, you foul brute: drink!’ Peterson knocks the glass from his hand, spilling its contents upon his own wrist. Before he dies, the expression on his face reveals him for what he is. ‘And of that revelation no man can write …’

  Questioned by an earnest investigator of popular reading habits, such as Mrs Q. D. Leavis, the average Bulldog Drummond enthusiast would probably have asserted that he enjoyed the stories simply ‘as good yarns’ without for a moment giving them credence. They were, after all, in the tradition of all wildly extravagant tales designed to pass an idle hour and ‘take people out of themselves’. The impossible was more fun than the all-too-probable.

  This would have been true as far as it went. ‘Sapper’ was fulfilling a function defined by that writer in the Quarterly sixty years before who had declared that ‘keepers of bookstalls, as well as of refreshment rooms, find an advantage in offering their customers something hot and strong, something that may catch the eye of the hurried passenger, and promise temporary excitement to relieve the dullness of a journey’. But not everything ‘hot and strong’ becomes an addictive taste. Reams of picaresque nonsense, more or less similar to the ‘Raffles’ and Drummond novels, were produced every month without promoting enough response to justify a second printing. What did they lack that gave something else, no better and no worse in terms of plot, subject and style, a runaway success?

  Robert Standish wrote of E. Phillips Oppenheim: ‘If he had his finger on the common pulse, it was because he had his finger on his own.’ Again, ‘There was in him, as there has been in almost every man or woman who has found a place in tens of millions of human hearts, a wide streak of mediocrity.’ Those two statements could well be amalgamated to form a general First Law of bestsellers. ‘Sapper’ confirmed it to the letter.

  Throughout his work there is discernible an inborn appreciation of what would excite his readers without disturbing them; what they were likely to admire or despise (as distinct from loving and hating, with which popular fiction has nothing to do); and what would make them feel flattered, but not patronized. There can be little doubt that such understanding was instinctive and not the product of a calculating intelligence. The public is remarkably sensitive to ‘tongue in cheek’ attitudes; it recognizes and rejects every attempt to write down by an author who does not himself share the popular ideas he pretends to approve.

  If ‘Sapper’ had set about investing the character of Bulldog Drummond with qualities other than those he genuinely considered admirable, the books would never have succeeded. Whether his notions were sensible or silly, beneficent or vicious, has much less to do with the success that did come his way than the fact that they were sincerely held. C. Day Lewis called ‘Sapper’s’ hero ‘that unspeakable public school bully’. He was expressing the aversion that the arrogant, small-minded and aggressive Drummond was bound to arouse in anyone of a thoughtful and tolerant disposition and egalitarian leanings. But fantasy heroes usually are bullies. They must win, and since their opponents seem to enjoy a monopoly of cunning, sheer physical advantage has to be invoked.

  Much play of this is made in the Bulldog Drummond saga. Some of the scenes are strongly reminiscent of rugby football scrums and the author’s enjoyment of the portrayal of zestful mayhem communicates itself strongly. Drummond himself is the embodiment of ‘hard muscle and bone’ superiority. His consistently successful encounters clearly imply that the simple answer to evil is ‘a good biff’.

  Violence was not, in the 1920s, the psychological abstraction that has so deeply concerned social diagnosticians since the end of the second world war. Although millions had been slaughtered and more millions maimed, the survivors of the 1914–18 war saw no relationship between the ferocity on the battlefield and cruel behaviour elsewhere. Perhaps because the conflict had been mainly one of attrition, a static killing match geographically confined, civilians regarded its horrors as a special case – deplorable, certainly, but quite separate from domestic ills. Thus, the upsurge of pacifism that reached its peak in the Peace Pledge of the 1930s was essentially an anti-militarist reaction which had much narrower implication than the attempts by young people thirty years later to repudiate force as such and even to contract out of a society committed to the use of force.

  Drummond’s preference for the upper-cut as an effective and proper argument was by no means inconsistent with contemporary relief at the return of peace. The ‘Hun’ had been fairly beaten, if not by precisely the same mode of assault, at least in the same spirit. The feeling of a great number of ordinary people was that subsequent tiresome complications at home and abroad could have been avoided by the delivery of a few extra ‘biffs’ for good measure. Could the odious Peterson, archetypal scheming foreigner, have been given his quittance by the deliberations of the old men of Versailles? Of course not. Disposal of Peterson and lite afflictions called for a strong arm propelled by simple resolution.

  ‘Sapper’ reminds his readers from time to time of Drummond’s military antecedents by having other characters address him as ‘Captain’. The choice of rank is interesting. It is high enough to suggest experience and prowess, without implying advanced years or too marked a social eminence. ‘Captain’ connotes good fellowship; it has something of dash about it. Generals scarcely ever appear in popular fiction: they sound old and forbidding. Colonels crop up frequently but they seem reserved for chief constableships or country character roles in detective novels. A major is only recruited when a dipsomaniac of private means is required by the plot. In Captain Drummond, however, we have a man with exactly the right status to appeal to a generation with a constitutional respect for titles and with minds in which the word ‘ex-Service’ had attained special emotional lustre to compensate for the drab realities of demobilization.

  Emphasis is laid upon the fact that none of Drummond’s companions ever questions the Tightness of his decisions or fails to carry out his orders. There is no argument, no ‘argy-bargy’ of the kind that so unhappily complicates the business of getting things done in real life. Action throughout the novels flows straight from situation to situation and it gets all the right results in the end, despite the evasions and counter-attacks of the enemy. Not only is this satisfying in terms of the story, but it is pleasingly suggestive of the possibility of events in the actual world being amenable to a strong man’s dealing. One of Britain’s special misfortunes in the interwar years was to suffer a series of governments uniformly dim of intellect, unsure of purpose and inept in action. It was tempting in the atmosphere of frustration thus created to wonder whether dictatorial methods might not be preferable to the long-windedness and muddle of democratic administration. On the face of it, Bulldog cut a better figure than a MacDonald or a Baldwin, while Tiger Standish, Nayland Smith, Sanders (on home leave from The River) and the rest of popular ficti
on’s go-getters each served in his way to underline the ineffectualness of Government as it actually existed.

  Relevant, perhaps, to this aspect of leisure reading is the currency in the mid-1930s of the highly romantic notion that T. E. Lawrence of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ fame, ought to be sent as plenipotentiary envoy to Hitler’s Reich. There was considerable confidence in his ability (at a single bound, no doubt) to settle the hash of the troublesome little German so far as Britain’s interests were concerned. Before the theory could be put to the test, Lawrence’s fatal motor-cycle accident supervened. An earlier and more mundane example of myth being harnessed to politics was the adoption of Edgar Wallace as one of the candidates for a parliamentary election. If his subsequent appearance at the bottom of the poll proved anything, it was that public readiness to identify an author with his creations is not to be relied upon.

  The only national political development that could be suspected of indebtedness to Bulldog Drummond was the rise, after 1931, of the British Union of Fascists. The connection, though, was not one of cause and effect. Popular fiction is not evangelistic; it implants no new ideas. Fascism sprang, in Britain as elsewhere, from frustration caused by economic chaos and political ineptitude. That same frustration had made readers’ minds receptive to tales of improbable heroics, but acknowledgement of a common source is not the same thing as saying Mosley’s fascism derived from McNeile’s fiction. They simply possessed a certain family resemblance.