The Last Englishman

299 Pages·1968·16.344 MB·English

by  Alfred Daniel Wintle

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The Last Englishman
an autobiography of
Lieut.-Col. Alfred Daniel Wintle M.C.
(1st the Royal Dragoons)
Fr
London
MICHAEL JOSEPH
First published in Great Britain by
MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
26 Bloomsbury Street
London, W.C.1
1968
© 1968 by Dora Wintle/ Alastair Revie
7181 0600 8
Printed in Great Britain by
Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece
The author
Between pages 48 and 49
1 The author aged eight
2 On holiday in England
3 2nd Lieut. A. D. Wintle, RA
4 Wintle with nurses at Oxford 1917
5 March Past of The 18th Royal Hussars
6 1st The Royal Dragoons in India 1930
7 ‘The author as Major Wetham-Botham
8 Captain A. D. Wintle, MC
9 The author as Dr Wellington Entwhistle
10 At the Ecole de Guerre
Between pages 112 and 113
11 Charge Sheet
12 Wintle being marched to his court martial
13 At a British Embassy reception, Paris 1933
14 Captain Kerby, MP
15 Presentation of a new Guidon to The Royal Dragoons
16 Wintle as Monsieur Charles Fauré
Between pages 176 and 177
17 Coldharbour, Wintle’s home
18 A film show in the garden
19% The author displaced by his dogs
20 The author and his wife
21 The snuff addict
22 Wintle with logs to be sawn
23 Serving Nye with a writ
24 The author and his sister Marjorie
Between pages 240 and 241
25 Celebrating the author’s release from ‘the nick’
26 With Eamonn Andrews on This is your Life
27 Celebrating with ex-trooper Mays
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the following for permission to
reproduce photographs in which they hold the copy-
right: Associated Newspapers Limited 25, 27; The
Associated Press Limited 13; The British Broad-
casting Corporation 26; Central Press Photos Limited
24; The Ministry of Defence 11; Sunday Express 23;
D. C. Thomson & Co. Limited frontispiece, 20, 21,
22; Thomson Newspapers Limited 12, 16.
One
I have fought against injustices, pomposities and hypocrisies all
my life with my eye-glass untarnished. I have also fought against
clots. No doubt I shall die of one in the end.
But let me begin at the beginning.
I was born at the age of nought on 30th September, 1897. The
reasons for the ‘nought’ will become apparent in due course. The
place selected for this ridiculous but common enough event was
Marioupol, South Russia. My mother was present and correct at
the time, having wisely chosen to become a Wintle by marriage.
Her name had been Emma Teresa King. My father was John
Edward Wintle. He had been a diplomat in Russia for some time
and was temporarily stationed at Marioupol.
It seems to me important to state at the earliest possible
moment that both my parents were entirely English. I passion-
ately believe in England and the English way of life. Indeed, I get
on my knees every night and thank God for making me English.
It is, after all, the greatest honour He has to bestow. He might
have made me a chimpanzee or a flea, a Frenchman or a German.
Instead, in His infinite mercy and compassion, He fashioned me
as an Englishman and a mounted Englishman forby. It is a great
responsibility, as well as the highest conceivable honour, and I
am ever conscious of it.
Anyway, at the age of three months my entirely English parents
took me from Russia to Rumania and I was brought up at Braila
until I was three-and-a-half years old. My memories of those
years are, of necessity, limited, but I can still bring to mind a
Rumanian nursery rhyme which I must have learned from Anna,
a Hungarian servant we employed there. I can also remember
playing trains in Rumanian and imitating the local porters:
‘Plecho treno puétro Buzue, Ploesti, Predeal, Bucharest i Vienna.’
I recall, too—although it may be that I was told the details
later in my childhood—that we were all greatly interested in the
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local cooking and particularly in a peculiar soup which was very
thick and contained fruit, flour and nuts. But I associate the good
Anna’s cooking mainly with Homeric meals consisting less of
particular dishes than of an aura of excellence and fullness. It
was a time, I believe, when Rumanian chickens cost about two-
pence, eggs were a penny a dozen and everything was on a Mrs
Beeton scale.
One Christmas, my parents decided to have as near an approach
to an English festive dinner as possible and Anna was given her
instructions accordingly.
The biggest and fattest turkey in all Rumania was bought,
probably breaking into the value of quite a couple of shillings,
and Anna was told exactly how to make the stuffing, the Christmas
pudding, etc.
At last the great day arrived and, with some Rumanian
friends who had been invited to sample an English Christmas
feast, we sat down at table. Anna had excelled herself. She
produced, to start with, one of her own special soups and every-
one agreed that it was better than ever before. The roast turkey
was a truly noble bird whose life had not been lived in vain . . .
and so on until the great moment when the Christmas pudding
was due. My mother was ready with a bottle of brandy to pour
over it and my father had a box of matches in his hand. The rest
of us looked on expectantly.
‘Bring in the Christmas pudding,” ordered my mother. There
was a pause until Anna appeared, looking very flustered. “There
is nothing more,’ she said. ‘What about the mixture I asked you
to make?’ my mother queried, detailing the ingredients. ‘You've
had that, madam,’ said the good Anna indignantly. And so we
had, without knowing it, for Anna had recognised the recipe as
being not dissimilar to, if rather more elaborate than, that of
one of her soups and had served it up as such. Thus was an
honest English family deprived of its humble Christmas pud-
ding.
As I wrote the above, I suddenly remembered my first Christ-
mas. Not really my first, because for that one I would have been
about three months old. What I mean is the first Christmas I can
remember remembering. . . .
I recall looking forward to that Christmas as something extra-
ordinary . . . something which was coming and, when it did come,
everything would be all right. Everything would be different. It
8
would be a day of days, worth waiting for and absolutely marvel-
lous. Even the sky would look different—all Christmassy. The
seasonal pleasures would last at least a week.
I must say, in the event, Christmas was a disappointment to
me. The word ‘Halleluja—ho’r the like—failed to light up the
heavens in letters of holly leaves and mistletoe. My father was
only a little less strict than usual. And the pleasures, such as they
were, lasted only a few hours instead of days.
So it was, that at the end of my first remembered Christmas, I
suddenly realised after teatime that this day would end with my
going to bed, prosaically, like every other day.
When the time came, I went sadly upstairs and, half-way up—
on a piece of the ceiling which I could just reach and where
nobody could see it who didn’t know it was there—I wrote in
pencil the words: ‘Good-bye Christmas.’
For days afterwards I used to go and look at it to recapture just
for a moment the spirit of Christmas as I had imagined it.
It remained there for years.
From the union of my parents (both, alas, now dead) came two
brothers and three sisters. Of the boys, Frederick George survives.
He was a soldier. He went to the Royal Military Academy and is
now retired as a Colonel of Royal Artillery. Henry Francis did not
survive. He died at Netley in 1931, a lieutenant in the Royal Corps
of Signals. He was much loved and is much missed. The two
elder girls, Ethel and Dorothy, are alive and in Paris. My youngest
sister, Marjorie Caroline, was born near Dunkirk. Should you
require confirmation of her survival I commend you to Mr
Frederick Harry Nye, of Brighton, who, I am told, was a solicitor
of sorts.
My father was a strict disciplinarian. I am a man of action, I
suppose, because he was a man of action. He believed—and I
support his belief—that a swift clout on the ear is better than
any amount of sweet talk or child psychology. He had a stoutish
walking stick. As a result of having to dodge that stick frequently
and of having to listen to his strongly-couched views on mankind
I quickly developed two hobbies. These could be classified as
‘walking stick a¥oidance’ and ‘profound distrust for all adults’.
From those hobbies my personality matured and ripened and in
my early boyhood I became firmly convinced that I must regard
9
all others as bloody fools; that the only person upon whom I could
sensibly rely was myself.
Despite scholarly leanings my first and enduring ambition was
to be a soldier. Not that the two things were incompatible. In
those days all the best soldiers were ‘educated’. Therefore I made
a point of being thoroughly educated—otherwise, who knows, I
might have ended up a dismounted civilian.
When very young I read deeply in English and French classics.
I also read lighter works.
I have said that I was born at the age of nothing. These were
carefully chosen words. Had I started my autobiography when I
was four I might have varied that phrase. I had been reading, a
bit beyond my age, a number of Victorian children’s stories,
which invariably started off: ‘Mrs Robinson had a dear little
baby, eighteen months old’; or ‘Mrs Caffozleum had a dear little
baby girl six months old’; or even ‘Mrs Hudibras had a sweet
little baby boy just eleven months old.’ It will not have escaped
attention that in those days it was always married ladies who had
the babies which was perhaps as well. But the thing that fasci-
nated me was the age of these dear little creatures. I supposed
that the doctor, or even the family solicitor, came to look at the
baby and said: ‘That baby is seven-and-a-half months old,” and
so it would be. It seemed pretty hard, on a dear little baby boy of
two years, that, when he should die at the age of fifty, he would
really have lived for only forty-eight years.
So I asked my father how old I was when I was born. He
reached for his stick tentatively and roared: ‘Why, you idiot, you
were nought, of course.’
‘Well,” I muttered, as I skipped out of range, ‘that’s a bit of
luck, anyway. I shan’t have been cheated out of a minute when I
die’
Another strange conceit I had for a time, as a young child, was
that all animals said ‘Buffon’ when they opened their mouths to
express themselves. It came about this way. One of my favourite
books, in my pre-school days, was a French illustrated volume
called Le Buffon des Petits Enfants. (Buffon was a famous French
naturalist—1707-1788—and this was a children’s story book of
animals, mainly in quotations from his major works.) Each chap-
ter was devoted to a different animal, and I read and re-read these
stories, imagining myself to be the animal in question. I knew the
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