Commando General

by Richard B Mead

  Chapter 5

  Angie

  The rhythm of Bob’s life returned to normal immediately. The Blues were in London, so acting as Orderly Officer and standing Guard did not preclude a full social programme. As Bob had not taken the full six months leave allowed by the War Office, he was also able to get in his fair share of hunting. The only disruption came when he was operated on for a longstanding sinus problem.

  Bob’s family continued to play a large part in his life, and he paid frequent visits to Wiseton and to the homes of his two sisters. Rosemary and Joyce had both married in 1927, Rosemary to the Hon. Arthur Baillie, who had served in the Life Guards in the Great War, and Joyce to the Hon. Edward Greenall, always known to family and friends as Toby, who had also served briefly in the Life Guards and was on the Reserve of Officers. Greenall came from a well-known brewing family and was a keen huntsman who was to be Joint Master of the Belvoir between 1934 and 1937. Joyce herself had a thirst for excitement, manifested not only in hunting, in which she emulated her mother in her fearlessness, but also in her participation in ladies’ polo. Furthermore, she developed an enthusiasm for flying and acquired her own aeroplane, a De Havilland 60M Moth, in which she took Bob for a ride soon after his return from Africa. Some months later she had a bad accident in the plane, but emerged relatively unscathed.

  Given, or perhaps because of, Bob’s recent experience, there was surprisingly little sailing that summer, other than a weekend on the Norfolk Broads, as different from the South Atlantic as it was possible to be. By contrast, Bob committed a great deal of his time to polo, playing for the Blues in a team which reached the semi-final of the Subaltern’s Cup, which they lost narrowly 5-3 to the Life Guards, and for a number of other teams as well.

  Bob’s military career was also showing signs of progress. In March 1932 he took over the Signals Troop of the regiment and later that year attended a signalling course at Catterick, earning an Instructor’s Certificate. In June 1933 he succeeded ‘Piggy’ Grant-Lawson as Adjutant of the Blues, a significant appointment. He should strictly have attended one other course usually expected of cavalry adjutants, at the Army School of Equitation, but he was already a first-class horseman and this doubtless counted in his favour. It seems likely that by this time he had shown himself to be a more thoughtful soldier than many of his contemporaries, and certainly his reading list of this period provides evidence of both a catholic taste and an enquiring mind. In early 1932 he wrote an essay on ‘Discipline’, which he submitted to his Commanding Officer, who thought it very good and forwarded it to HQ London District, whose comment was ‘most interesting’. In this he drew on his experiences both in the army and at sea, noting that ‘The well disciplined man will, in cases of extreme emergency, danger or fatigue, perform certain automatic actions with surprising reliability’, but also pointing out that ‘Discipline must never be driven to its ultimate conclusion when all initiative is destroyed.’1 This balance would certainly be reflected in his approach to discipline less than a decade later.

  The Commanding Officer of the Royal Horse Guards by now was Lieutenant Colonel D. C. Boles, who had succeeded ‘Fish’ Turnor in June 1930 after the latter’s unexpected death in a road accident. Boles had only transferred from the 17th/21st Lancers to the Blues in 1929, as a brevet lieutenant colonel and second-in-command, due to the lack of majors of sufficient seniority. He came with a record of achievement both at Eton, where he had been President of ‘Pop’ and scored 183 runs at Lord’s against Harrow, a record which still stands, and at polo, in an era in which the 17th Lancers and, after its merger in 1922, the 17th/21st Lancers, had dominated the Inter-Regimental Cup, winning in every year bar one from 1920 to 1930. Boles himself had been selected to play for the British Army against the United States Army in 1925. He was thus most acceptable to his new regiment.

  The Adjutant was the only officer in the regiment, other than the Quartermaster, expected to make a significant day-to-day commitment to his work. The Quartermaster, who was responsible for stores, supplies and transport, was traditionally a lieutenant or captain who had been promoted from the ranks, and although he was a member of the officer’s mess, he would expect no further promotion. The Adjutant, by contrast, was an officer with excellent career prospects, who dealt with all other aspects of organization and administration and was effectively the chief of staff to the Commanding Officer. He was also responsible, together with the Regimental Corporal Major, for general discipline and for the appearance of the regiment at parades and inspections and on formal occasions, which were significantly greater in number for the Household Cavalry than for any other cavalry regiment. His additional duties meant that he received higher pay than others of his rank.

  Whilst the regiment was on duty in London, the Adjutant also held a ceremonial appointment in the Royal Household, that of Silver Stick Adjutantin-Waiting, supporting the Commanding Officer, who acted as Silver Stick-in-Waiting. This required Bob to ride in the procession for the annual Trooping the Colour and to attend levées and investitures at Buckingham Palace. There were also other formal occasions, the most notable of which during Bob’s tenure was the funeral of King George V on 28 January 1936 at which he walked behind the Dominion High Commissioners, together with his equivalent in the Foot Guards, the Adjutant-in-Brigade-Waiting, and the Crown Equerry. During the preceding week Bob, with three other officers from the Blues, had taken his turn to stand guard in full dress uniform around the late King’s coffin at the lyingin-state in Westminster Hall.

  Bob was still a lieutenant when he began his new job, but passed his exams for captain and was promoted on 2 June 1934. At about the same time Boles was succeeded as CO by Lieutenant Colonel F. B. de Klee, who was the last serving officer to have been in the regiment at the outbreak of the Great War.

  With his considerable additional responsibilities, Bob’s social and sporting activities were necessarily somewhat curtailed. However, in the winter of 1933/34 he fell head over heels in love, and most of his energy outside the regiment was now to be devoted to securing the hand in marriage of the party in question. This was not the first time that he had been smitten, but his previous experiences had not followed a conventional path and matrimony had certainly not been seriously considered by either party.

  Shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Bob had been at Aintree for the Grand National, where he met Katie Crichton, ‘who was perfectly charming’.2 He saw her again the following day, when he sat in Lord Sefton’s box with her, and again the day after that. Quite how the relationship developed is not clear, but by the summer of 1926, when Bob was in his Intermediate Term at Sandhurst, he was seeing her on most of his visits to London, but almost always in the company of others. In the summer vacation, as he was about to go to Wiseton and she was off elsewhere, he wrote in his diary: ‘Fear that I will not see her again for ages’.

  Katie Crichton was born Katherine Trefusis in June 1881 and was thus forty-five when Bob met her at Aintree. She married the Hon. Arthur Crichton, the third son of the 4th Earl of Erne, in the year before Bob was born and they had two children, Michael, who was the same age as Bob and a contemporary at Eton, and Jean, who was born in 1911. Her nephew by marriage was Bob’s close friend John Crichton, who succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Erne in 1914. She and Arthur lived in London at 8 Southwick Crescent,3 but she spent much time with her sister Margaret, who lived with her husband, Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Brassey, at Dauntsey Park in Wiltshire.

  No diary exists from July 1926 to 6 October 1927, by which time Bob and Katie were carrying on a full-blown affair. She was still living with her husband, but it is clear that they led significantly separate lives, as they were almost never mentioned in each other’s company in the society columns of the period. Although Arthur had served in the Gordon Highlanders in both the Boer War and the Great War, he was no professional soldier. He had gained a degree at Oxford and then gone into the City, where he had a distinguished career in the insurance and investment trust i
ndustries. He almost certainly had little time for society gatherings and was frequently away on business, on at least one occasion in America, whilst his wife was a prominent hostess. It is even possible that he condoned what was going on, sometimes under his own roof, as a harmless dalliance.

  To Bob, however, it was anything but that. His affair with Katie was made much easier by the fact that she was completely persona grata with his own family, staying at Wiseton on a number of occasions, lunching or dining regularly at 47 Charles Street and even joining the family party in Paris on the occasion of the wedding of Bob’s half-brother, Lord Francis Hill. The opportunities for intimacy were necessarily somewhat constrained, but he and Katie took them when they could.

  This state of affairs continued until December 1928, when Bob recorded that ‘Katie and I had a long, serious and dreadful talk’.4 Thereafter the relationship changed. The couple do not appear to have continued as lovers, but a strong friendship remained, with the later introduction of a third party, Katie’s daughter Jean, who was by then seventeen and about to come out into society. Katie and Jean used to go out together with Bob and were often joined by a fourth, usually either Bob’s brother Peter, or Antony Head. They were often away from London, visiting cathedrals all over the country or sailing together. In February 1931 Bob, Katie, Jean and Peter spent a week in the Netherlands, seeing the sights in Delft, Leiden, the Hague and Amsterdam, and similar gatherings resumed after Bob’s return from his sea voyage.

  In the summer of 1929, in the light of the changed relationship with Katie, Bob began an affair with a woman known in his diary only as Doris. He saw her quite frequently during that autumn, but a ‘fateful weekend’ in Paris was the beginning of the end of their affair, which petered out early in the next year. Since then he had had no regular girlfriend, although he certainly became closer to Jean Crichton. If there was more to this, it came to nothing, as Jean married Eion Merry, a fellow officer of Bob’s in the Blues, in May 1933.

  Bob’s life then changed. At a meet during the 1933/34 hunting season, he was introduced to Angela Dudley Ward. She did not ride, but he was nevertheless strongly attracted to her and by April 1934 was making it quite clear that he wanted to take their relationship further, possibly even to make it permanent.

  Angie, as she was known to all, was born on 25 May 1916, the daughter of William Dudley Ward and his wife, Freda. Ward was the great-grandson of the 10th Lord Ward and his mother was the daughter of the 1st Viscount Esher. He was an outstanding oarsman at Eton and Cambridge and had also succeeded as a yachtsman, notably as a member of the British 8-metre crew which won the bronze medal in the 1908 Olympic Games. He was elected to the House of Commons as the Liberal member for Southampton in 1906, serving as a senior whip under Herbert Asquith and later under David Lloyd George, who was Angie’s godfather.

  Freda Dudley Ward was the daughter of Colonel Charles Birkin and his American wife Claire, and the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Birkin, who had made his fortune in the Nottingham lace industry. She was famous for having become the mistress of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, in 1918. Their affair lasted five years, but she remained his close confidante until 1934, when the relationship was abruptly broken off by the Prince following his new attachment to Wallis Simpson. Freda and Ward had long lived separate lives, but it was only in 1931 that that they were divorced. This was handled in a civilized way and, although they lived apart (indeed, Ward moved later to Canada) he and Freda continued to see each other and even on occasion to go on holiday together.

  The Wards had two daughters, Penelope, born in 1914, and Angie. If Angie was unquestionably attractive, her sister, always called Pempie, was a real beauty, appearing in a number of films in the 1930s and ’40s. The two sisters were always close to each other and to their mother.

  Bob’s pursuit of Angie was by no means smooth. She did not entirely approve of his profession and was, moreover, nine years younger, on one occasion taunting him as a ‘cradle-snatcher’. He countered the accusation by telling her that she was a spoilt little girl and accusing her of being cold and beautiful, for which he subsequently had to apologize. Not long after they met, she went to the United States to visit her mother’s relatives, and Bob’s mood was not improved by her aunt, Vera Seely, telling him that she thought Angie was having far too good a time there and might not return.

  Bob had already agreed to accompany Katie Crichton on a cruise in the Mediterranean in August 1934, sailing in a Yugoslav ship, the SS Kraljica Maria, from Venice to the Greek Islands and Constantinople. He wrote to Angie to say that he would have loved the trip if he had not been missing her so badly and that he was proving poor company for Katie. He spent as much time as he could on the bridge so that he could avoid the other passengers, although he did concede that there were some who were not too bad. Not long after his return he was away again, for a week’s shooting on Islay, during which a distinct chill entered the relationship, one letter being addressed to ‘Dear Angela’ and signed ‘Yours sincerely, Robert Laycock’;5 but within days of his return he received ‘the sweetest and most divine letter’6 from her and all was well again. He finally proposed to her at Doncaster Racecourse, and they announced their engagement on 17 November 1934.

  The wedding took place at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 24 January 1935. The best man was Antony Head and the eight pages were dressed in copies of Life Guards uniforms of a century earlier. Warrant officers, NCOs and troopers of the Blues formed a guard of honour, their swords raised in an arch as the bride and groom emerged after the ceremony, and a bouquet from the regiment was presented to Angie by a squadron corporal major. The reception was held in Lady Cunard’s house at 7 Grosvenor Square, following which Bob and Angie left for their honeymoon on Cyprus.

  That July Bob was able to return the compliment to Antony Head by acting as best man at his wedding to Lady Dorothea Ashley-Cooper. Head had been appointed Adjutant of the Life Guards a week after Bob’s wedding, which was highly convenient as the two men had to liaise on all manner of business, including the annual exchange of barracks between Windsor and Hyde Park and the activities of the Composite Regiment. The Laycocks and the Heads became very close friends, often sailing together. They never purchased a boat, but chartered them, very often vessels of quite substantial size, for longer or shorter periods as appropriate.

  At the time of Bob and Angie’s wedding the Blues were at Windsor, so the couple bought a house in Ascot called Heron’s Brook. The regiment returned to London later that year, with Bob’s term as Adjutant expiring in the following summer, giving him more time to devote to his family, which grew with the birth on 2 September 1936 of Edwina Ottillie Jane Laycock, always called Tilly, in the very nursing home in which Bob had had the operation on his sinuses. Bob was now second-in-command of a squadron, in which capacity he sometimes commanded a Captain’s Escort on state occasions. The most notable of these came in May 1937, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, with the young princesses, drove in a carriage through Eton and Windsor a few days after their Coronation, in which Bob had acted as one of the marshals of the procession.

  At that time Bob had not long returned from an anti-gas course at Winterbourne Gummer. One day in the early spring of 1937 he happened to walk into the Orderly Room to find his successor as Adjutant, Jackie Ward, seriously worried about getting on the wrong side of one of the officers by nominating him to this rather obscure course, on which a place had been allocated to the regiment by the War Office. Bob, however, had always been interested in chemistry and it suited his book to be away for a few weeks because, as he wrote later:

  An Adjutant, if he has been efficient, has almost certainly made himself fairly unpleasant from time to time, not so much with the N.C.O.s and other ranks, but with his own brother officers both junior and, as the Colonel’s mouthpiece, to a certain extent to the Squadron Leaders and their seconds-in-command who are, of course, his seniors.7

  He found when he arrived at the course that he was re
garded with some suspicion as a member of the Household Brigade. Bob, however, had never been a snob and possessed an extraordinary ability to make friends with all sorts and conditions of men, as had been demonstrated aboard the Herzogin Cecilie, so he got on well with his fellow students. His interest in chemistry allowed him to grasp the subject matter better than most and, in spite of the fact that the instructors kept gassing the students, on one occasion knocking Bob out cold for two hours, he enjoyed it very much. At its conclusion, to the surprise of many, he was one of only two to be graded ‘Distinguished’ and was awarded an Instructor’s Certificate.

  Angie took the opportunity of Bob’s three-week absence to sail to New York, leaving the six-month old Tilly in the care of a nanny at Heron’s Brook, where Bob visited her at weekends.

  One officer on the course, Major George Pennycook, was considerably senior to his fellow students, which puzzled Bob and the others. At the dinner to mark the end of the course, Pennycook asked if Bob was genuinely interested in chemical warfare and, on receiving a reply in the affirmative, enquired how he might respond if he was invited to become an instructor at a new gas school being set up by the War Office in Chatham. Bob replied that he would be flattered but surprised. Some months later, he heard that the school was indeed being established to provide advanced instruction and he asked Bertie de Klee if he might attend a course there. De Klee was happy to recommend him, only to receive a reply from the War Office that Bob was not sufficiently well qualified. To the surprise of both men, a further communication was then received to ask if he was available, not as a student, but as an instructor. De Klee replied that if Bob was not sufficiently qualified to be a student, he could hardly be qualified as an instructor. The War Office responded rather tartly that they would be the best judge of that! It subsequently turned out that Pennycook had attended the course at Winterbourne Gummer in preparation for his imminent appointment as the Chief Instructor there and that he had strongly recommended Bob.