The Last Great Cavalryman

by Richard Mead

  The relative peace which had followed the Easter Rising in 1916 came to an end when two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were shot dead in January 1919, the first incident in what was later termed the Irish War of Independence. Sinn Féin, the main republican party, had gained 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the Parliament at Westminster in the General Election of the previous month, but those elected chose not to take up their seats but instead to form their own parliament, the Dáil Éirann, in Dublin. In the following September the Dáil was declared illegal and violence broke out, small scale at first and largely directed at the RIC. In early 1920 the Government began recruiting unemployed British ex-servicemen as temporary constables to assist the RIC. They became known as ‘Black and Tans’ from their uniforms and took the offensive, causing casualties not only within the Irish Republican Army but also among the civilian population. Violence escalated amid increasing bitterness on both sides.

  It was in this context that the 12th Lancers began their service in Ireland, in which they were to act for the most part in support of the civil authority, escorting convoys, mounting patrols and from time to time carrying out organized ‘drives’ through the countryside to round up suspected IRA activists. Within the confines of The Curragh sport continued as before, with steeplechasing in the winter and polo in the summer. Dick was in the teams which won the Irish Inter-Regimental Cup in July 1920 and just failed to win the Irish Subalterns’ Cup that August. Foxhunting in the Kildare countryside remained possible during the season, and there was ample ‘hunting leave’, during which Dick spent most of his time at Sherborne, hunting with the Blackmore Vale.

  By this time the three oldest McCreery brothers were all based in Ireland, while Jack was still at Eton. Bob had joined the 17th Lancers in France in time to see out the last months of the war and was with his regiment at Gort, where he was the captain of the regimental subalterns’ polo team. Selby had passed through Sandhurst and, unlike Bob, had elected to join Dick in the 12th Lancers, where he was proving to be every bit as good a polo player as his two older brothers. During Dick’s leave in Sherborne, in January 1921, Bob came to stay for a few days on his way to attend a six-month course at the Cavalry School in Netheravon.

  On 1 May 1921 the 12th Lancers began a long drive to round up wanted IRA men, starting at Killeigh, and moving in a circular route so as to arrive back at The Curragh twelve days later. Success was only modest, just a handful of wanted men captured. On 16 May, shortly after their return, Dick received the worst possible news. Bob, who had been recalled from the cavalry course to his regiment due to increasing industrial unrest in Ireland, had been killed by IRA gunmen.

  On the previous day Bob had been playing tennis at Ballyturin House, the home of a local justice of the peace, Mr J. C. Bagot. He and his fellow guests, Captain Fiennes Cornwallis of his own regiment, Captain Blake, the District Inspector of the RIC, his wife and a Mrs Gregory, left the party and approached the main road along the drive. Seeing that the gate was partially closed, they pulled up and Captain Cornwallis got out to open it. As he did so he came under fire from a keeper’s lodge on the other side of the road and was hit almost immediately. The rest of the party left the car and crouched on the ground. Bob was killed even before he could draw his pistol and although Captain Blake attempted to return fire he was shot down, as was his wife. Only Mrs Gregory, who had taken cover on the other side of the car, was unharmed and allowed to leave by the gunmen, running off to give the alarm. One of the Bagot daughters rode for help, but when the police arrived they were themselves ambushed and a constable was killed.

  On the following afternoon Dick and Selby drove in a Rolls Royce armoured car from The Curragh to Galway. They were able to see Bob’s body the next morning and to attend a memorial service at Galway Cathedral, before their brother’s coffin and that of Captain Cornwallis were taken to the station, through streets lined with detachments from those regiments based locally, and from the Royal Navy and the RIC. The 17th Lancers were on parade at the station and the commanding officer and a guard of honour accompanied the coffins, with Dick and Selby, to Kingstown Harbour, where they were put aboard a ship for England. The two brothers arrived at Sherborne with Bob’s coffin at noon on 19 May, to be met by Minnie and their grandmother, and the funeral was held in the packed Abbey an hour later. After the service the coffin was borne to its final resting place through streets in which the shops were closed and curtains drawn as a mark of respect.

  On the same day a memorial service was held at the parish church at Bilton. Walter was too distressed to attend, let alone to travel to Sherborne. He had not long returned from a visit to Algiers which had worn him out and he had taken Bob’s death very badly. Dick and Selby had both received cables from the regiment requiring them to return, but saw him two days later en route to Ireland. They discovered to their embarrassment that Walter had done everything in his power to prevent their going back, sending a rambling telegram to both the War Office and their commanding officer. The War Office responded by granting them two weeks’ leave, but Dick told his father that it would be impossible for them to take it at that time, as they were required for a new anti-IRA drive which was due to begin the following week. In the event they managed two more days with their father before returning to duty.

  The brothers had been exceptionally close, with a little over two years separating the three of them. They had grown up together, played together, ridden together and gone to school together. They had all chosen the same profession and enjoyed the same interests. They had survived the trauma of their parents’ separation and the most devastating war ever known. It was thus inevitable that Bob’s death would be felt very deeply by the other two, but it almost certainly drew them together. Dick and Selby, though separated in due course by geography, remained closely attached for the rest of their lives and invariably looked out for each other’s interests. Selby did question, not long after Bob’s death, whether it was a mistake for the brothers to be in the same regiment and contemplated transferring to the 15th Hussars. Dick was strongly against the move, as was Minnie, and after initially putting off any decision for six months Selby eventually decided to stay put.3

  In the meantime life went on as before, which meant the brothers’ immediate participation in another ‘drive’, this time covering a huge amount of ground which might have been useful in terms of showing the flag, but did not result in any captures. Immediately it was over they left for England to take the rest of their compassionate leave, with Dick in particular physically and emotionally exhausted. Afterwards he and Selby were both back in England again, for the second most important Army polo competition, the Subaltern’s Cup, which they lost narrowly in the final to the 1st Life Guards. Polo dominated that summer, as indeed it did every summer in peacetime, with success by the Subalterns at the Curragh tournament when they beat their own regiment’s Seniors in the final.

  Dick and Selby were also at Bilton for the polo tournament there, but it ended badly, with them falling out with their father – at the end of September 1921 he wrote, saying that he had finished with them. This was the precursor of some very strange behaviour by Walter which caused great concern in the family over the next year. In March 1922 Dick was called up to London to see his father, who was staying in Dukes’ Hotel. Dick wrote in his diary that his father was ‘certainly mad at present. He wouldn’t come to Bilton with me, he is selling pictures and going to live in Hills’ cottage.’ Walter’s physical health was not much better than his mental, but he relented about returning to Bilton Park, so Dick went down to stay there later in the month, finding him in a very poor state. The servants were all threatening to leave and Walter had banned his longstanding housekeeper, Emma Jakeman, from sleeping in the house, forcing her to lodge in the village.

  A month later Walter left England, initially for Pau in France, going on subsequently to Algiers, where he was joined by Jakeman, leaving Dick to pay the large bill incurred for nursing him at Bilton. Walter then se
nt Jakeman back to let the house. Dick was drafted in after receiving a letter from her saying that his father was penniless in Algiers and he had to drop what he was doing and arrange funds for him. Walter arrived back in early July, somewhat improved mentally and physically and on much better terms with his sons, but by October he was distinctly poorly again and left for Algiers with Jakeman and all his dogs, intending to settle there permanently and, indeed, to become a French citizen.

  On 3 November, while Dick was on a course at the Cavalry School at Weedon, Jakeman cabled him to say that Walter was very unwell with ‘congestion of the brain’. Three days later he received another telegram, this time from a Doctor Attaix in Clermont Ferrand, to the effect that his father was now in a nursing home there and dangerously ill. Dick set off immediately for London, obtaining a passport there through the good offices of a friend at the Foreign Office, and was on the mailboat that night. By the afternoon of the next day he was in Clermont Ferrand, where his father recognized him, but was unable to speak. On the following day, 8 November, he became progressively weaker and died that evening. With Jakeman’s help, Dick arranged for the body to be taken back to England. He then returned there himself via Paris, where he met Selby and his Uncle Richard, who had declined to come down to help him and whom he described as ‘an impossible man’. The funeral was held at Bilton on 13 November.

  In his will Walter left everything to his sons, after providing for an annuity for Jakeman. His assets were considerable, amounting to over $700,000 in the United States alone, the majority of the amount being the appraised value of his shares in the McCreery Estate Company. Bilton Park was sold some years later.4 Extraordinarily, it transpired that Minnie was owed no less than $42,500, due to non-payment of her alimony of $500 per month: she subsequently received payments amounting to $19,250 from Walter’s executors and the trustees of his residual estate, but under the terms of the 1914 memorandum she had no right to the balance.5 Fortunately Minnie was in any event very comfortably off, while Dick was now able to receive directly his share of the income from the McCreery Estate Company and Walter’s other assets.

  In the winter of 1921/22, three events happened, one personal, one sporting and one professional, each of which were to make a marked impression on Dick’s life. The first was a decision by his maternal grandmother to sell Greenhill House and to build a new house out in the country. A number of sites were inspected and the one preferred by his grandmother and mother and by Dick himself was in the Somerset countryside at Stowell Hill, near Templecombe, a favourite place for a family picnic. Construction took a long time and cost much more than expected, but at last in October 1923 the two women moved into what was a very fine Arts and Crafts-style house, built of stone and with stunning views to the south, a large garden and a small attached farm. This would be a much loved family home for the rest of Dick’s life, occupied by his mother alone after his grandmother’s death and then by Dick and his family following his retirement.

  The second event was the purchase by Selby on Dick’s behalf, at a horse sale at Mullacash, of a 6-year-old bay mare, barely 15.3 hands high, called Annie Darling. She was to be Dick’s favourite horse of the very many he owned in his life, going on to become a brood mare after a successful racing career and producing a number of excellent foals. Ridden by Selby, she won the lightweight race in the Blackmore Vale Hunt point-to-point in the spring of 1922 and raced with success at other relatively minor meetings, but she seemed to be capable of much greater things. Dick decided to enter her for the Grand Military Gold Cup at Sandown Park, to be held on 16 March 1923.

  There were seven runners in the 3-mile race, of whom the favourite was Clashing Arms, a very strong horse but with a reputation as a hard puller, ridden by Captain R. G. C. Vivian of the Life Guards. By the beginning of the second circuit, Clashing Arms and Annie Darling were a long way ahead of the field and galloping neck and neck, but Vivian was clearly experiencing great difficulty in keeping control of his mount. He himself was tiring rapidly and the horse was not jumping well, eventually swerving violently four fences from the finish and unseating his rider. The only other contender was now Broken Wand, ridden by Colonel Paynter, which made up some ground coming up the hill towards the last fence – but having jumped it successfully Paynter fell off on the flat, leaving Dick the clear winner.

  It is impossible to overstate the cachet attaching to the winner of the Grand Military Gold Cup in military circles and especially amongst cavalry regiments – if Dick was not well known before his success, he was now recognized as one of the best riders of his generation in the country. The post-race celebrations involved a lot of champagne, as did the arrival of the cup itself two weeks later at the regiment.

  By that time the regiment had returned to England, but before it did Dick had had news of the third important event, which was to shape his professional life for the next few years. In September 1921 Lieutenant Colonel Fane, after a long period in command, had been succeeded by Bill Truman, who was greatly admired by Dick. Truman was a man ahead of his time. With the cavalry finding it difficult to participate in any of the battles on the Western Front, he had managed to get himself posted first to a battalion of the Black Watch and then to the newly formed Royal Tank Corps, in which he commanded a battalion with great distinction. He was not only committed to new ideas about mobile warfare, but thought that every commanding officer should have his own light aeroplane for reconnaissance, so that he could ‘see over the hill’. These quite revolutionary notions were to be a considerable influence on Dick’s own thinking, although it would be many years before he could put them into practice.

  The regard was mutual. Dick himself wrote later: ‘One day I was riding over the open heath when [Truman] came up to me and told me that he had selected me to be the next adjutant; I could have been knocked off my horse with a feather, I had never thought of such an appointment for a moment, and I had done none of the courses which were necessary before one could be appointed.’6 Unfortunately, Truman had been severely wounded in the Great War and his health never really recovered, so he was forced to retire soon after the 12th Lancers moved to Tidworth to join 2 Cavalry Brigade in March 1922. With no officers of sufficient seniority in the regiment, he was succeeded by Lieutenant Colonel O. W. Brinton from the 21st Lancers, who nevertheless honoured Truman’s decision.

  Andrew Buchanan McCreery, Dick’s grandfather.

  Isabelle (‘Belle’) McCreery, Dick’s grandmother.

  John Loudon McAdam, the great road-builder and Dick’s great, great, great grandfather.

  Walter McCreery, Dick’s father.

  Emilia (‘Minnie’) McCreery, Dick’s mother, shortly after her wedding.

  Dick with his nanny/governess, Catherine Stay (‘Da’).

  Dick, Bob and Selby as children.

  Dick at Eton.

  Walter driving his three sons and his chauffeur Henri in the Lozier.

  The newly commissioned Dick at Bilton with his youngest brother Jack.

  Dick at the head of a troop of the 12th Lancers.

  The officers of the 12th Lancers on Telegraph Hill on 9 April 1917, two days before Dick was wounded. They include (from left) Dick (2), Alex McBean (3), Bruce Ogilvy (4), Cuthbert Rawnsley (6) and Frank Spicer (11).

  The Greenhill House nursing staff during the Great War. Seated (from left) are Dick’s grandmother, Frances McAdam (3), Minnie (5) and Da (6).

  Dick mounted shortly after the Great War.

  Dick’s brother Bob, drawn not long before his untimely death at the hands of the IRA.

  Minnie in the Great War.

  The officers of the 12th Lancers at The Curragh in 1921. In the top row Dick is on the far left. Selby, wearing a black armband for Bob, is 2 from right. Front row (from left): Lt Col Fane (3), Frank Spiecer (5) and Cuthbert Ransley (6).

  Stowell Hill, built for Dick’s grandmother in 1922 – 3 and his own home from 1945 onwards.

  Dick on his all-time favourite horse, Annie Darling, winne
r of the Grand Military Gold Cup in 1923.

  Dick and Selby (back to camera), on the British Army polo team, meeting King George V and Queen Mary on the occasion of one of two matches against the US Army in June 1925.

  Lettice shortly before the wedding.

  Dick and Lettice at the Sparkford Vale Harriers point-to-point in March 1928, just before their wedding.

  Lettice, Michael and Bob standing on the right with her two sisters, Helen and Lucia, in the centre and Helen’s husband, George Gosling, second from left.

  Dick and Lettice clowning around at Brownhill.

  Dick and Lettice at Brownhill with Mike Houston.

  Dick in civilian dress in the mid-1930s.