Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkha by Tony Gould

by TCW | Jan 22, 2019 | Book review | 0 comments

Imperial Warriors has recently been re-published by Endeavour Media, who are my publishers. I’m interested in the Gurkhas, so I was happy to pick up a free copy of the book. It was intended as a little light reading in military history but I found myself fascinated by the story it tells and what it says about both the Imperial British past and the modern Army. When I sat down to write a review it ended up rather longer than I had intended – part summary, part critique and part essay. It’s probably rather like the book: worth dipping in and out of and reading the bits that interest you. Hopefully some of it will.

Some history

Tony Gould served with the Gurkhas in Malaya (as it then was) during his National Service. Like many British officers, he fell in love with the Gurkhas and extended his service to stay on and fight with them until his career was cut short by polio. This book starts with a personal account of his time in Malaya, which goes some way to explain his fascination with the Gurkhas before it plunges into a history of Nepal and the tribes that made up the kingdom.

The history is complicated and I must confess that I struggled to follow it. The crucial part, as far as the relationship between Britain and the Gurkhas is concerned, is that border disputes between Nepal and land controlled by the East India Company led to an invasion by the British in 1814. Following a British victory in which the Gurkha troops had distinguished themselves by their bravery the peace treaty allowed the British to recruit volunteers from the Gurkha army into the Indian army. (At the time it was not uncommon for troops in India to transfer their loyalty between rulers.)

By April 1815 a battalion of Gurkha troops was in action on behalf of the British. This battalion eventually became the 1st King George’s Own Gurkha Rifles, the first Gurkha troops formally incorporated into the British forces which they serve to this day.

A little bit of old-fashioned racism

Nepal was a country built on conquest and the conquered people retained their own identities (and their own vassal rulers). The first distinction the British made was between the “real Gorkahs” and the conscripts from the conquered territories. When the British first started to recruit Gurkhas into their service they were explicitly forbidden to recruit “real Gorkhas” on the grounds that people from the conquered tribes were likely to be loyal to their new leaders while the “real Gorkhas” would be less reliable.

This distinction between different Gurkha tribes eventually developed into a classificatory approach to the various tribes of Nepal that many nowadays (the book was first published in 1999) would reject as “race science”. Even Gould complains that the British carried this classification process to an extreme and a reader in 2018 might be uncomfortable with some of it but the differences between the various Gurkha tribes does seem to be important to an understanding of Nepalese history and the relationship between the Gurkhas and British. It can still produce some odd passages though, like these views ascribed to Lieutenant-General Sir George MacMunn:

In sum, the tall and fair-skinned people of the North West were martial; the short and dark South Indians were not. But where does that leave the Gurkhas who were neither tall nor particularly fair?

Gurkhas were covered by an aspect of the martial races theory mentioned by MacMunn – the philosophy of climatic difference, the supposed superiority of temperate zone man over tropical man…

The Gurkha’s Highland credentials, along with his evident military ability, then, gave him his ticket of entry to the exclusive martial races club.

It’s important to make it clear that Gould himself criticises this sort of talk, but there is inevitably a lot of it in the book. On the one hand, I share his admiration for the Gurkhas, but I feel uncomfortable with the idea that these soldiers are especially admirable by virtue of the fact that they are Gurkhas. The notion that ascribing positive characteristics to a particular ethnic group is just as racist as associating negative stereotypes with them can easily become “political correctness gone mad” but the recurring image of plucky little brown men performing extraordinary feats of valour and endurance under the strict but kindly supervision of fine upstanding Brits does begin to jar eventually. The Gurkhas are, indeed, Imperial Warriors and can easily elicit the patronisingly superior attitudes of an imperial age.

A dashed good tale

The book suffers, like many military histories, from a superfluity of anecdote, but the anecdotes are so good it is easy to forgive them. Whether it’s the story of Rifleman Lachhiman Gurung, who, in World War II single-handedly defended his position for four hours against repeated Japanese attacks despite having to fire one-handed having lost the use of an arm early in the action, or the career of Brigadier-General W D Villiers-Stuart who commanded 1/5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, the stories are all well-told and the gallantry described is humbling. The anecdotal approach can interrupt the time-line of the book, though. The British Army often seems to exist out of time anyway (a Guards regiment still dresses formally for black-tie dinners every night, apparently unaware that it is 2019) but the approach of this book can lead the reader from the mid-19th to the late-20th century with dizzying and confusing speed. Perhaps this reflects the actual experience of the Gurkhas. On one page they are invading Tibet in 1903 (very much in the 19th century imperialist tradition) and a few pages later they are fighting in the trenches of the First World War. If the abrupt transition is a jolt to the reader, you can only imagine what it must have been like for them. Unprepared, untrained and unequipped for this totally alien form of warfare their experience was horrendous and their reputation for courage and fighting spirit took a serious dent. By 1915, though, they were already getting the hang of this new form of warfare and by May two NCOs had received IDSMs. (It’s significant that their Distinguished Service Medals were prefixed as “Indian” reflecting the modified form of apartheid then common in the Army.)

Between 1914 and 1918 55,000 Nepalese were recruited to the British forces, a level of recruitment that had a significant effect on Nepalese society. More than a tenth (perhaps as many as a fifth) of the 100,000 Gurkhas mobilised during the war were killed, wounded, or missing in action. One commentator wondered if any country directly involved in the war lost such a high proportion of its fighting men.

The move to Indian independence

After the war, the Gurkhas found themselves busy with work which was unpleasant in a different way. The move towards independence in India meant that Gurkhas were used as riot police. They were involved in many disturbing incidents of which the most notable was Amritsar. The Gurkhas were not culpable, for they were acting under orders, but the shooting down of civilians was not something that a professional soldier ever enjoys being involved in.

Indian independence, when it came after World War II (where the Gurkhas distinguished themselves in the Far East) was to bring a crisis for the Gurkhas. The Indian government (many of whose members had previously denounced the Gurkhas as imperial mercenaries) now decided that they would be invaluable addition to the new Indian army. The British conceded the principal that around half of the Gurkhas serving under the British flag should transfer to the Indian Army. The mechanics of the process were not well handled. Gould suggests that Indian agents used underhand means to recruit many Gurkhas who would have preferred to serve in the British Army.

Talks on exactly how the Gurkha forces should be divided ran up against the reality of the timetable of partition and, according to Gould, “administrative convenience triumphed over ‘guiding principle’: choosing British Gurkha regiments on the basis of which battalions were stationed in Burma (and were due to leave the now independent country) was the easy option.” Some of the oldest Gurkha regiments found their allegiance transferred from Britain to India with some of the newest regiments put in their places. To a civilian whether your regiment was founded in 1815 or well into the 20th century might hardly be a relevant factor in deciding on operational deployments, but the Army cares about things like this. The casual casting aside of long established regiments with proud traditions (especially those that included the word “Royal” in their title) caused real distress to soldiers and officers alike. The distress was particularly acute for European officers, many of whom were effectively forced out of the Army as the policy of Indianisation took effect.

The End of Empire

Those Gurkha regiments that had transferred to Britain were, in 1948, designated the Brigade of Gurkhas. Ideally it would have been given time to get used to its new situation, but this was not to be the case. From 1948 to 1966 the Gurkha infantry battalions were almost continually engaged in fighting, first in Malaya and then in Borneo. In those 18 years the Brigade of Gurkhas lost 13 British officers and nearly 200 men. Yet the end of the war was followed immediately by cutbacks which saw many of the men sent back to civilian life in Nepal. Conditions for the returning soldier were unlikely to be good as Lieutenant-Colonel Langlands of 2nd Gurkha Rifles explained.

“For the first few months their children could get dysentry, some dying even before they reached their homes. Their small pension or gratuity would not be sufficient to feed them, so they would have to fight to win their food from the soil, and overcome hail, landslides, floods and fire. A few would invest their gratuity in a share of a taxi or a little shop. There were some who had no land to return to and their future was grim.”

Gould is understandably unimpressed by the behaviour of the Ministry of Defence whose civil servants (and those at the Treasury) he clearly considers responsible.

Paradoxically, though the British could be seen as having behaved very badly the sharp decrease in the number of men recruited to the Brigade of Gurkhas greatly increased competition for these places. The desirability of work with the Gurkhas was increased as Gurkha troops were more often serving in Britain where they were paid additional allowances to bring them into line with the British troops they served alongside.

Gould points out that the increased integration with the British Army meant that “improvements in pay and conditions served only to highlight residual inequalities”. This was the start of a campaign for changes in the pay and residency rights of Gurkhas which stretched well beyond the time this book was first published in 1999. The absence of anything bringing the book up-to-date is a definite weakness. Gould understands, as many commentators failed to, that a significant reason why the British employed Gurkhas since the early 19th century is that they were cheaper than British troops. There is a constant tension between the perfectly proper desire of Gurkhas and their supporters to see them employed on the same terms as British troops and the desire of Nepalese Gurkhas who have yet to join the army to continue to have their Brigade of Gurkhas to employ them.

For Gould the return of Hong Kong to China and with it the move of the Brigade of Gurkhas to Britain marked the end of what he calls “the Gurkha world”. The Gurkhas continue to serve, but it is clear that Gould’s love affair is dying. The Gurkhas he formed such an emotional attachment to were those of the 19th century and the world they lived in still survived in the regiments and customs of the Gurkhas he joined in 1957.

The Ghurkas today

Imperial Warriors is, as the title suggests essentially a history book. The Gurkhas he describes are an almost mythic race. Yet I know an officer who, presented with the job that might well be seen as career ending, was convinced that he still had a future with the Army when he was told that he could serve with Gurkhas. The British Army is built on tradition and regimental ties and as the old county regiments are merged or disbanded the Gurkhas maintain a proud tradition of 200 years of service to the British Crown. Gurkha regiments are remarkably effective infantry and as the Army is increasingly plagued by manpower shortages they are likely to have a role for a long time yet. Issues of pay and the treatment given to them when they retire touch many sensitive nerves: our attitudes to immigration; the economics of maintaining an army the country really can’t afford; and the residual racism of both the Army and the British establishment. Gould is not really interested in these issues. The book ends with him returning to Nepal and elegiac account of the countryside and the men who live there. The book is, indeed, a tribute to a world that has gone. It is, for all its rambling and anecdote, a worthwhile and fascinating read but there is another book to be written about the role of the Gurkhas in the modern army. It may not be as exciting and it will almost certainly be shorter, but it is a tale that deserves to be told.

 

More about Nana Sahib

by TCW | Jan 25, 2019 | Indian history | 0 comments

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nana Sahib, “the demon of Cawnpore”. I suggested there that the rights and wrongs of his behaviour (and that of the British) were not as straightforward as they are often presented. Even so, when Heather Campbell of The Maiden’s Court invited me to write the story from Nana Sahib’s point of view, it was a serious challenge. After all, how do you set about justifying a war crime?

In the end, I was pleased with what I wrote and I thought I’d like to share it here. I know that a lot of people who read this blog are interested in writing and I do recommend things like this as useful exercises. And for those who don’t write, I hope you can just enjoy it as a different way of looking at an infamous bit of Indian history.

Nana Sahib’s story

My father was the Peshwa of the Maratha Empire. He was a mighty lord who rose against the British who had come into his country and despoiled it. He fought valiantly against the invaders, but he was defeated and exiled from his own country to the miserable little village of Bithur, not far from Cawnpore. The British allowed him to retain his title and a small pension and he made his peace with them and lived alongside his enemy until he died in 1851.

I was an adopted son – a common practice in my country when a great lord has no sons of his own – but the British refused to recognise me as Peshwa and no longer paid the pension that they had paid to my father.

Despite the loss of my lands, my title and my pension, I tried to be a good friend to the British. They had ruled in India now for a hundred years and many Indians had accommodated to them. But their rule was becoming more harsh. Where once they had made honourable peace with men like my father, now they seized their lands, ignored their titles, and denied them the respect they were due in their own country. They began to send Christian missionaries who tried to tempt my people from their faith. They told us we must abandon our old customs.

Those Indians who served in their armies (for there is no disgrace in serving the army of any lord once he has proved himself a power in the land) were not accorded the respect they had been. Their officers, who had once loved this country, were replaced by arrogant fools who did not understand our ways. There were rumours that they might be sent overseas, where they would lose their caste. Then there was the terrible business of the new cartridges. The cartridges were greased with the fat of cattle and with the fat of pigs. This was an insult to all the Hindus in the Army and to their brothers who were Moslems.

Finally, the people of India rose up against these injustices. I was not sure what to do. I had been friends with the British and I hoped that things could be settled without violence, but it was soon apparent that there must be a war and that the British would finally be driven from our country. My people looked to me, for they still called me “Peshwa” and acknowledged me as their leader. Now that it had come to war, it was my duty to lead my people against the British in Cawnpore.

The British fought bravely: I will give them that. Hundreds of my troops died as we attacked their fort again and again. In the end, I agreed to lift the siege if they would go. They said they would and asked for boats to sail down the Ganges to rejoin their people. But this had to be a trick. The British were being defeated everywhere. Where could they hope to go? No, once they were on the boats they could set up a fort somewhere else and attack us from there. My generals told me I would be stupid to let this happen.

What was I to do? They had surrendered, but there was nowhere they could go. We had an army in our midst that could turn on us at any time. The British, we Indians had learned over the past hundred years, were liars. They had promised my father he could keep his title and then took it from me because I was adopted: a cheap trick. They had stolen the Kingdom of Oudh on the same pretence – that the new King was adopted, and therefore could not inherit. We could not trust them.

My general, Tatya Tope, told me what to do. He arranged to have artillery hidden across the river from the boats and for his men to conceal themselves along the banks. When the British came to the boats, we opened fire. They still had their muskets. It was war: these things happen. We tried not to kill the women and children, but we took them captive and kept them safe.

Then news came that a British force was on its way to relieve the siege. Everybody was terrified. The British were killing people who they thought might have ever harmed any of their troops and they would kill us all if they heard what had happened by the river. It was essential that any of the British who might speak against my sad, but necessary, actions should be silenced. I had no choice: the women and children would speak against me. They had to die. So many Indians had died under British rule and the British always said that sometimes these things were necessary or that sometimes these things just happened. But would they have happened if the British had not stolen our country? Had we asked these women and children to come and live amongst us, ordering their Indian servants to do this and to do that as if they were slaves? Bringing their foreign ways, their terrible food, their arrogance and their ignorance? They looked down on us as savages and sneered at our ways. Well, they’re not sneering now.

The British beat us in 1857. I was driven into exile and watched as the white men tightened their grip on my country. But I know that our time will come. It is not right that the Indians should live under the rule of the British and one day we will rise up and we will defeat them and I will not be hated by the rulers of India, but loved by them as one of those who showed the way to regaining our own country.

 

Hurlingham House

by TCW | Feb 1, 2019 | Uncategorized | 2 comments

A fairly random blog post this week dating back to last September when I went to see Hurlingham House, famous as the home of international polo. (I know: it makes no sense to me either. But it is.) This was just the last of the grand houses that we visited last year before we decided to hide indoors and wait for Spring.

Hurlingham House sits on the Thames at Fulham. Actually, when the Thames floods, it sits *in* the Thames: several inches of water covered the ground floor when the Thames burst its banks in 1928.

 

The house was originally built in 1760 as a “cottage” for Dr William Cadogan, a doctor whose book, ‘An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children from their Birth to Three Years of Age’ made him the Dr Spock of his day. The doctor died in 1797 and the relatively humble house was refronted in the early 1800s, producing the rather grand river frontage we see today.

 

The central room between the two wings is oval in shape, which put me in mind of another building of a similar period. The White House was rebuilt in 1815-17 after the original was burnt down by the British. 

The President’s House by George Munger.

Today’s Oval Office was only built in 1909 but there was an oval room at the centre of the original White House and this was retained when the White House was rebuilt after the fire. Wikipedia assures me that:

An oval interior space was a Baroque concept that was adapted by Neoclassicism. Oval rooms became popular in eighteenth century neoclassical architecture.

Hurlingham House is the only UK example I’ve noticed myself and the parallels with the original design of the White House are interesting. (The South Portico, which emphasises the oval, was not added until 1824.)

Back in Fulham, the estate was leased to a private club in 1869 and it has been the Hurlingham Club ever since. The Hurlingham Club started life as a pigeon shooting club and went on to become the home of polo. (The Hurlingham Polo Association is still the governing body for polo in the UK and many other countries throughout the world.) Nowadays the club offers many sports, from swimming to croquet. The house, though important, is not necessarily the club’s main attraction for many members. Over the years it has been modified, enlarging the space available for dining rooms and bars and removing the bedrooms, which have largely been replaced with offices.

The most significant changes were made in 1906 the north front and much of the interior was remodelled by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Edwin Lutyens’ remodelled north front

 

Treasures of Strawberry Hill

by TCW | Feb 8, 2019 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

In 1747, Horace Walpole, the son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, bought a small house near the Thames in Twickenham which he was to transform into a Gothic castle.

Where the Gothic Castle now stands was originally a small tenement, built in 1698 and let as a lodging house: Cibber once took it, and wrote one of his plays here.

From Walpole’s own ‘Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole’ (1774)

The original house (much embellished with what we might now think of as an excess of post-modern enthusiasm) can be made out on the right of the photo below, with the smaller windows.

Walpole was attracted to the location because of the many grand houses along the river nearby. Neighbours included Henrietta Howard at Marble Hill House, which I’ve written about here before. Alexander Pope, who had died in 1744 had lived less than half a mile away and built his famous grotto in Twickenham.

Walpole was an enthusiast for the revival of interest in Gothicism. His book, The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, is regarded as Britain’s first Gothic novel. He decided to take the undistinguished house and convert it into a Gothic palace. The result was Strawberry Hill House.

Strawberry Hill House. Photo reproduced under Wiki Commons licence

Walpole’s grand design stretched as far as the round tower. The small section that stretches beyond the tower (with an outdoor staircase leading to the first floor) was built later as a ballroom and other rooms were added to the original house. The whole thing, as built by Walpole, combined a Gothic grandeur with a very domestic scale. If you count the windows, you’ll see that it’s not that large. Indeed, it was intended only as a summer villa and was closed up in the winter. Visiting it last weekend on a cold February Saturday, I can confirm that no one would want to stay there in the winter.

In 1923, the building was bought by the Catholic Church, who used it as a teacher training college. Walpole’s original building was used for teaching and as a residence for the monks and, indeed, the grounds and many of the later additions to Walpole’s house are still part of what is now St Mary’s University.

In 2007, the original parts of the House were leased to a Trust to restore it and open it to the public. They have done a splendid job and visitors can now enjoy the wonderful Gothic fake in all its 18th century glory. You enter through a dark, mysterious entrance hall through rooms lit by skylights and stained-glass windows, until you arrived in the great State Rooms, full of light and gilding, the journey from darkness to light being, in Walpole’s view, part of the Gothic experience. The photo below shows the Gallery. Fifty-six feet long, thirteen wide and seventeen high, this is the most splendid room in the house. The gold leaf used on the ceiling was the most expensive single element of the restoration. As with all the other detail in the house, the Gothic elements have been shamelessly stolen from elsewhere. In this case, the ceiling is a copy of that in one of the side aisles of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey. Although visually convincing, it is not really a fan vault, since it does not support the roof, being made of papier mache.

The Gallery

The use of other materials to give the effect of stone is common throughout the building. Many of the apparently stone walls and ceilings are brick and wood panelling, carefully painted to give the appearance of stone. Similarly, some of the fireplaces, which may look like stone or marble, are painted wood. A good example is the chimney piece in the Library. Again, the details are copied from genuinely Gothic elements: in this case the chimney piece is based on the tomb of John of Eltham Earl of Cornwall in Westminster Abbey while the stone work is copied from the tomb of Thomas Duke of Clarence at Canterbury.

The Library

The building itself, though, was only part of Walpole’s grand design. It was to house a collection of paintings, ceramics, antiques and curiosities on a Gothic theme. Walpole inherited money from his father, Britain’s longest serving prime minister, and was also granted some governments sinecures which made him seriously rich. He spent much of his money on his astonishing collection, with paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Rubens, van Dyck, and Holbein. He had over 1,500 pieces of ceramics, Fine furniture, and curiosities such as a lock of Mary Tudor’s hair and Cardinal Wolsey’s hat.

Walpole was proud of his collection but he accepted that it would not long outlast him and he very carefully documented it so that there would be a record of what he had achieved. He wrote:

It would be a strange fascination … to expect that a paper fabric and an assemblage of curious trifles, made by an insignificant man, should at last or be treated with more penetration and respect than the trophies of a palace … [T]he following account of pictures and rarities is given with a view to their future dispersion.

The collection passed down eventually to George Waldegrave, the 7th Earl Waldegrave, who appears to have led a somewhat dissolute life (he served prison time for assaulting a local policeman) and eventually had to sell the collection, probably to pay off gambling debts. Walpole’s famous collection was dispersed in a 24 day sale in 1842.

Walpole’s detailed catalogue meant that in 2018 it became possible to locate many of the items from the collection which were loaned to Strawberry Hill to enable them to mount an exhibition giving some idea of what the house would have looked like with the artefacts it was designed to house.

Sadly, it was a condition of some of the loans that they can’t be photographed, so I have no photos from my visit. (The pictures of the house are from an earlier trip.) If you want to see them, I recommend you look at the web-site set up by Yale University (who own much of Walpole’s collection): http://images.library.yale.edu/strawberryhill/

Seeing Walpole’s beautiful building with even a fraction of the treasures it was built to house is a wonderful experience. The exhibition only runs to 24 February and I do recommend that if you have the chance you go and visit it.

Practical stuff for visitors

Nearest station: Strawberry Hill (from Waterloo). The house is a five to ten minute walk from the station: follow the sign at the end of each platform.
Entrance is by timed ticket and it does get busy (though never uncomfortably crowded). Details and tickets are online at https://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/losttreasures/

 

The Castle of Otranto

by TCW | Feb 12, 2019 | Book review | 0 comments

My visit to Strawberry Hill made me re-read The Castle of Otranto, Walpole’s novel which is supposed to have started a fashion for Gothic novels that has never really gone away.

Published in 1764, it’s a curiosity piece rather than a book you would read for its literary merit. Seriously, it doesn’t have any literary merit but it does have a giant ghost that can smash down castle walls with his fists; an evil usurper; not one, but two, beautiful princesses; a peasant boy who turns out to be a prince (identifiable by a birthmark, obviously) … Honestly, if Walpole missed out a single Gothic trope, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Despite the packed plot line, it’s quite a short book and if you want to read the great-grandfather of all Gothic novels it’s an hour or two not entirely wasted.

The Castle of Otranto from an illustration in the original book. Rather larger than Strawberry Hill

For me, part of the fun came from the fact that the architecture of Strawberry Hill House is supposed to have inspired the book. (Walpole called Strawberry Hill “my own little Otranto”.) Sadly, Strawberry Hill lacks an underground passage to a nearby church although Walpole’s neighbour, Pope, did build an underground passage from his house to the famous grotto and this might have inspired Walpole’s imagination. Much of the rest of the story’s setting also has only tenuous links with Strawberry Hill House, but there is indeed a staircase with some assorted pieces of armour. Originally there was a lot more than we see today. Walpole claimed, rather improbably, that the armour had all been taken by one of his ancestors in the Holy Wars (though the descriptions of Indian weaponry make this unlikely). In any case, the armour inspired the story of the giant armoured knight who brings the Castle of Otranto to its doom and which we first meet in one of the rooms leading off the “armoury” gallery. Two servants bring the news to Manfred, the usurper Prince of Otranto.

“My Lord,” said Jaquez, “when Diego and I came into the gallery … We found nobody. … When we came to the door of the great chamber … We found it shut.” “And could not you open it?” said Manfred. “Oh yes, my lord; would to heaven we had not,” replied he. … “Trifle not,” said Manfred, shuddering, “but tell me what you saw in the great chamber, on opening the door.”… “It is a giant, I believe; he is all clad in armour, for I saw his foot and part of his leg …”

Sadly, the great chamber is a library – albeit quite a big and beautiful one – and the “gallery” is really no more than a landing, but Walpole deliberately arranged for the light to be gloomy just there so with a bit of effort of the imagination you can transport yourself from Twickenham to Italy and the cursed Castle of Otranto.

Further Reading

If you are interested in some of the themes underlying the book and the building, you might like to look at Reeve’s 2013 article on “Gothic Architecture, Sexuality, and License at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.” (The Art Bulletin, 95(3), 411-439.) There’s a lot of dubious pretension in the paper, which is not an easy read, but it does argue that both the book and the building were ways in which Walpole explored his sexuality. There is, indeed, quite a strong Freudian subtext in the book, which I have not explored in this blog post. The pictures of the Castle of Otranto and the staircase at Strawberry Hill are both taken from Reeve’s paper (worth a look for the illustrations alone). Reeve credits them as public domain artwork, photographed by the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.

 

Field Trip

by TCW | Mar 8, 2019 | Uncategorized | 9 comments

I’m writing a book set in the Peninsular War and featuring the battle of Talavera, but I have never been to Spain. (Barcelona doesn’t count.) Last week I put that right with a whistle-stop tour of some key Napoleonic War sites in Spain and Portugal. We took a look at quite a lot of medieval stuff too, just because it was fabulous.

Day 1: Toledo

Arrived Madrid to discover that the hire car we booked had been upgraded to something bigger. This was (as you will soon discover) not necessarily a good thing.

Drove to Toledo. It’s not that far and it turns out that Spanish motorways are uncrowded and easy to drive on. It’s only when we turned off for Toledo that things began to get sticky.

Our hotel was on the very edge of the old centre of town, just after a very sharp turn-off. We missed it and by the time we realised our mistake a few seconds later, we were unable to turn back. Instead we had to drive right through Toledo and swing round for a second attempt.

The good news is that old Toledo is very beautiful. It’s a medieval town and the basic buildings seem unchanged. In England we often talk about towns having “their ancient street plan” but I doubt many Saxons would relate to the Saxon street plan of Richmond (where I live) for example. Over the centuries building lines have been pushed back and roads widened to accommodate motor vehicles. By contrast, the roads in Toledo have been left pretty much as they were around 1500. One of them is shown in the photo below – and, yes, this is a regular road as used by cars.

Our car was considerably less shiny and scratch-free by the time we had circled round for our second attempt at the hotel, though I had managed to avoid hitting any of the people who (quite rightly) see the streets as being for pedestrians first and cars second.

Our second venture into the town was on foot and we wandered aimlessly about enjoying the sense of having moved back through 600 years – or rather more when we stumbled across the remains of the Roman water supply in the basement of a trendy clothes shop. It’s an amazing place, but eventually we gave up on the random wandering and went into Toledo Cathedral.

Nothing I can say about this place can begin to do it justice. It’s huge. The passage from the North to the South doors used to be used as a city street and is considerably wider than many of them. It’s impossible to appreciate the scale of the place because it is broken up with so many internal structures. The Sanctuary (with the high altar) is a church within the church, boxed off from the rest. Ditto the choir, with its dozens of bas relief carvings, not of religious scenes but of military victories over the Moors. To give an idea of size: the pillars around the choir are probably the remains of the mosque that was originally on this site. The choir, I would remind you, is a tiny boxed-off part of the nave.

The only thing I can think of that gives any idea of the almost unimaginable size of the place is the painting of St Christopher depicted as a giant on one of the walls. To get an idea of scale look at the regular sized door on the bottom left of the picture.

So vast is the cathedral and so full of chapels, offices, cloisters and assorted other stuff to see that I was exploring for over two hours and still left much unseen. With paintings by El Greco and Raphael and other great artists dotted about I must have missed a lot but my mind was completely blown by what I did see.

A ceiling in the Chapter House

I staggered out as the place was closing for the night. A visit to the castle (much knocked about in the Civil War and unsympathetically restored) let me watch the sun sinking over the town from the café. (Free to enter, decent food and probably the best use of your time in the castle area.)

 

     

 

Day 2: Trujillo

Left Toledo by a relatively wide road that was less exciting, but rather safer, than the roads we explored the day before and set off towards Talavera. We decided to skip the motorway this time and take the old road. Arrow straight, it was clearly a very old road indeed – clear evidence that the Romans had been here before the Moors.

Visiting the battlefield at Talavera was the ostensible purpose of the whole trip, so it’s embarrassing to say that we never found it. I had a map from 1809 and maps (and satellite images) from today, but I couldn’t marry the two together. I had rather expected road signs and maybe a museum, but I got the distinct impression that Spain was in no hurry to celebrate Talavera. There is a street named after General Cuesta who, nominally at least, won the battle for Spain, but it’s a small, short one and easily missed.

There is an old town, but the area we saw was modern and unexciting, distinguished mainly by the tiles that covered everything you could tile. People in Talavera are proud of their tiles and show it.

We set off to drive to a ridge that looked to be in about the right position, but we’ll never know if we got the right place. It didn’t matter that much. The battlefield has been mucked about with a lot because there is a road built through it and other developments, so I was more interested to get a feel of the place. What was amazing was how the miles of Spanish plain suddenly turned into really quite steep lines of hills. The idea of trying to attack up slopes like that was quite terrifying. The time we spent driving to and from Talavera also gave the notion of the scale of these campaigns and the days that must have been spent marching across dusty, unshaded plain. We were there in February, albeit an unusually hot February, and we had air conditioning in the car and we still found ourselves uncomfortably hot and thirsty at times. It’s no wonder that throughout the Peninsular War there were always more than 10% of Wellington’s troops in hospital, even when no fighting was going on.

My wife had come along to see Spain and had no interest in spending hours driving round looking for a battlefield that, in the end, was going to look much like any other bit of the country, so we gave up pretty quickly and headed on toward Trujillo. Tammy had read all about it and couldn’t wait to get there.

We did make one detour to see the castle at Oropesa. It was clearly visible from the road and looked too good to pass up. We couldn’t go in (I don’t think there was anything to see inside anyway) but we enjoyed walking round it and the view was fantastic.

 

It was also our first sight of storks in Spain. Warmer winters and the availability of food from landfill sites means that storks no longer migrate down into North Africa and the ones we saw were already busy with their nests.

Trujillo is fantastic. We learned from our mistake at Toledo and as soon as the satnav tried to take us the wrong direction up a one-way street into the old town we parked up on a wider road and walked the rest. We were booked into the Eurostars Palacio Santa Marta, which is an actual 16th century palace.

It’s a nice modern hotel, but I really wouldn’t have cared if it hadn’t been. Imagine sleeping here. Actually, I don’t have to.

The advantage of a 16th century palace in a medieval town is that it is certain to be well-located. In this case it was two minutes’ walk (if that) from the grand Plaza Mayor which my guidebook describes as “one of Spain’s most spectacular plazas”.

Trujillo has a castle and beautiful churches but mostly it just has miles of winding streets crammed inside a largely complete town wall. Historically important as many of the buildings are it is, first and foremost, very, very beautiful.