Colonel Fred Burnaby became a legend in his own Victorian lifetime which was cut short at the age of 42. He was killed in the Sudan by a spear through the throat on 17 January 1885 while serving as a senior commander in the famous, ultimately abortive expeditionary force sent to rescue General Gordon besieged in Khartoum by fanatical Moslems led by the Osama bin Laden of his day. Deep national grief was expressed in songs and poems, some of which are included in the first of Dr John Hawkins’s fascinating two volumes. The world’s worst ever poet, the notorious William McGonagall, provided a characteristically dreadful contribution: “ Oh! It was an exciting and terrible sight/ To see Colonel Burnaby engaged in the fight/ With sword in hand, fighting with might and main/ Until killed by a spear-thrust in the jugular vein”.
Burnaby could have stepped from the pages of one of G. A . Henty’s once famous tales of swashbuckling and derring-do which all good public schoolboys used to read approvingly. Some have questioned his heroic character and sought to recast him as a model for Flashman, but he was no cad and certainly no coward. A man of immense physical strength, his party tricks are said to have included vaulting over billiard tables and twisting pokers into knots with bare hands. In 1882 a flock of French sheep in Normandy looked up to see him descending from the skies, the first man to cross the Channel by balloon.
He was drawn like a magnet to risk and peril. On hearing the news of Burnaby’s death, the 15th Earl of Derby, who served in both Conservative and Liberal Cabinets, commented in his diary , “ Almost a giant, an athlete from boyhood, his pleasure was in rough and dangerous adventure with no special object except the excitement & perhaps the consequent notoriety...[ He] missed no opportunity that offered of getting himself killed”. Derby added that “ his friends say that he would not have lived long in any case, having developed heart disease by violent exertion—the common end of an athletic life”.
The world’s trouble spots were irresistible to him. First came Spain, torn by civil war. Later he turned up in Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and Central Asia. He was master of seven languages including Russian which proved useful during long solo 1000-mile expeditions on horseback, one of which took him to the borders of Afghanistan. Books based on his remarkable experiences became page-turning bestsellers. Dr Hawkins has performed a great service by bringing Burnaby’s adventures, which so excited his Victorian contemporaries, before a new 21st century readership.
Not content with the fame that his overseas exploits brought him, he also sought a career in politics as a Conservative MP during the years covered by the second of these marvellous volumes. The delighted Tories sent him into battle against the heavily fortified radical stronghold that Joe Chamberlain had created in Birmingham. At the 1880 election, which his party lost badly, Burnaby succeeded in cutting Chamberlain’s majority to under 4,000. The battered radical leader complained that “ nothing can exceed the virulence with which the Tories have attacked me. No slander has been too gross, no calumny too improbable”.
Burnaby found an ideal political partner in Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph, who shared his love of risk-taking. Burnaby’s great friend, the famous Victorian journalist, Sir Henry Lucy, recorded in his memoirs that he first dined with the brilliant, unpredictable Lord Randolph at Burnaby’s house after which the host “ presented me with a costly walking-stick picked up during a recent visit to Spain”. Together the two exuberant and unconventional Tories planned a fresh assault on Birmingham, assisted by a formidable new Tory organisation, the Primrose League, founded by them and others in 1883, which provided them with a private army of dedicated women canvassers, the first ever seen in Britain. A famous political riot in Aston in 1884 saw Burnaby in fine fighting form. But his widely mourned death on the Nile the following year put paid to the alliance of the two rising Tory stars. Churchill fought the 1885 general election in Birmingham alone and without success.
In his valedictory comments on Burnaby Lord Derby noted that he “ was very popular in the army , and will be regretted both there and in the conservative clubs” though he qualified that assessment a few days later having been “ told that he made many enemies”. His friend Sir Henry Lucy wrote: “ He sleeps now, as he always yearned to rest, in a soldier’s grave, dug by chance on the Dark Continent whose innermost recesses he hoped some day to explore”.
Instead of producing a conventional biography, John Hawkins, a successful financial adviser turned dedicated historian, had the happy idea of gathering together Burnaby’s own extensive and vigorous journalism, his speeches and as much of his private correspondence as could be located. He has tracked down an impressive amount of material including a short fragment of a letter from Disraeli who wrote in 1877 to tell Burnaby that “ I am reading your book with much interest , and I think everybody will do the same”. That goes for Dr Hawkins’s two volumes too. They bring us a wonderfully vivid account of an extraordinary Victorian in his own words. The words are redolent of late nineteenth century imperialism that was to provide the foundation for a string of Tory election victories which Burnaby did not live to see. Dr Hawkins guides us expertly along the way with incisive commentary and notes which add greatly to the reader’s enjoyment.
Alistair Lexden, February 2014
Lord Lexden OBE is the Conservative Party’s official historian. His publications include A Gift from the Churchills: The Primrose League 1883-2004, an account of the Conservative Party’s first mass Tory organisation, of which Burnaby was a founder member. Lord Derby’s perceptive comments on Burnaby are taken from The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby(1826-93) between 1878 and 1893 ( Leopard’s Head Press,2003), edited by Professor John Vincent.