Under the lamps, in his mind’s eye, I believe there passed a double column of boys in matching grey-and-white uniforms, fifes to their lips or side drums slung around their shoulders. Each wore a pillbox hat secured to the chin with a strap, a sash fitted diagonally across his chest, and a haversack. The slow Scottish air they played was borne across Langham Street on the wind. It was “Cock o’ the North”, a solemn lament or strathspey originally composed for a Laird of the Gordons. The band passed on toward the junction with Great Portland Street until, still marching and playing in formation, it turned up towards Regent’s Park, and were lost to sight, and eventually to sound.
HMF stood at the window listening to its dying strains, then he turned back to the heavily varnished furniture, the glass-fronted bookcase with its volumes of Halsbury’s Laws of England, unopened for years, the hopeless mess of papers on the desk, the muddled files and aroma of stale pipe tobacco.
To me when growing up my father seemed a medley of affability and quaint - and sometimes sinister - eccentricity. He spoke with a moral assurance, a jauntiness and a verbal idiom that, separated as we were by history, I strove in vain to comprehend. I did not grasp – how could I possibly know? – that he was responding to forces, invisible to his sons, stirred by a magnetic field still active in his proud and troubled mind but long since neutralised in the wider social world. Only now can I recreate the ghostly flashes of vision that might have impelled him in his intermittent homilies and unspectacularly resolute protests and actions. For Harry McKenzie Fraser, the Boy’s Brigade had long since marched into the smoke of the Somme, along with recruiting sergeants and the dread of the workhouse, but they were still there, palpable and defiant, in the strut of his walk, the plucky bearing of his frame, the tightening of the muscles around neck and mouth, his bouts of anachronistic personal advice.
In the first decade of the Twentieth Century the Bayswater company of the brigade – the Sixth London – had its headquarters in a Presbyterian church hall in Newton Road off Westbourne Grove, a few convenient streets from the Fraser family flat on the fourth floor of 3, Powis Square in North Kensington. The battalion colours were black and yellow. HMF joined it in February 1907 at the age of twelve, three years after his older brother Claud. The brigade’s Gazette, published from Glasgow, explained the ideals of the movement as “the advancement of Christ’s kingdom among boys, and the promotion of habits of Obedience, Reverence, Discipline, self-respect and all that tends to a true Christian manliness”. And, of course, loyalty - which if anything was to be the Frasers’ pitfall. The movement’s insignia consisted of an anchor framed by the double B of the acronym and an alliterative motto beneath it reading “Sure and Steadfast”. There were bible-classes, church parades, football matches and strenuous sessions in an improvised gym set up in the hall. HMF promptly joined the band.
That December the company bandmaster William Carroll, who attended meetings by bus from his home in Park Place, Greenwich, announced his need for “a strong chap for bass-drummer, and also some young boys to learn the flute.” HMF, sturdy but on the short side, took up the flute. “On Wednesday evenings from 7.15 to 9.15”, as Mr Carroll was soon able to report, “the sound of sweet music pervades the air around headquarters”. For two years HMF attended the rehearsals after school; thereafter he went after work. That August the annual summer camp with its bible-reading classes and healthy outdoor activities was held at Angmering, up river from Arundel Castle in Sussex. On the second afternoon the boys formed a gymnastic display of living letters spelling out the monarch’s name: EDWARDUS SEPTIMUS REX. Afterwards the Union jack was hoisted into the rain-soaked air. The young detachment stood to attention and saluted as their pipers and drummers played “God save our gracious King”
Thus, it seems, did law-abiding Edwardians honour an adulterous King and his rotten imperial order. Later that day the bandsmen sat on the turf in front of the hedgerow around the camp site whilst a group photo was taken: the big bass-drum centre, the flautists squatting in front with their fifes, each sporting his forage cap and distinctive white sash slung slantwise across the torso. The officers, youths in their late teens, stood behind. Within six or seven years many - perhaps most – of them would perish. Now they stare out at me from a yellowed and flaking page with a fine appearance of hope.
At first HMF enjoyed the use of a company fife, but within a few years had acquired an instrument of his own from a stall in the Portobello Road. It was an antiquated French traverse flute carved from ebony with gleaming chrome keys but botched finger holes. Sometime in the nineteenth century its enthusiastic though maladroit owner-player had crudely hacked at these apertures in an attempt to improve the finger-holds. The thing never played properly as a result, and the grown man – as once the tender recruit – made ungainly guttural noises with his throat as he attempted to coax the notes of Handel’s “Largo”, a brigade favourite, from its polished though ruined shaft. This recital was, he announced, “a tootle on the flootle”. The tune is from Xerses, Handel’s heroic opera of 1737, but to his dying day my father pronounced the word as “lager”, like the beer. The closest I can approach to my father nowadays, physically speaking, is to raise this clumsy heirloom to my lips and inhale the rich musk of ancient tobacco still pervading its wood, as once it did the bole and briar of his blackened rosewood pipes: an aroma from some medium-price range – no cheap shag or else luxurious cut – in which he took pleasure, and which every week of my childhood drifted through his West End office and our rented suburban home. The second closest is to stare – incredulously but reverently – into the mirror.
The Boy’s Brigade was a product of the 1880s, like that other salve for the needy, The Salvation Army. By the 1960s, well into the next century, I shunned it, since like the Boy Scouts, who seemed to me identical, it appeared conformist and even a little dull. What I like others of my generation failed to realise was that in its time it had been – for youths of a certain social background – a valuable form of protest, a revolutionary attempt at empowerment. William Alexander Smith, the relentless and stalwart founder, was a Sabbath School teacher in the Glasgow slums, and a Lieutenant-Colonel in the First Lanark Rifle Volunteers. In 1883, twelve years before HMF’s birth, he had taken a sharp look at the poverty and social demoralisation of the Gorbals. His reaction was to apply military discipline to the Sunday schools. By 1887 the movement had spread to London, from where it was propagated through nation and empire. It never to lost the breath - and the urgency - of the slums.
For several decades this courageous movement retained a tincture of its Caledonian roots. For HMF when joining would have been a natural way of expressing his residual Scottishness. Despite my earlier confusion, it was in several respects most unlike the Scouts Movement founded twenty years later by the upper-crust Baden-Powell. The Scouts were middle-class and English; they even had branches in the more exclusive private schools. They favoured a Rocky Mountain iconography and arcane allusions to the works of Rudyard Kipling. The Brigade, which flourished best in elementary and grammar schools, had from the outset been working-class - or at the highest, lower-middle-class – non-conformist, and rootedly Scots.
The Scouts represented a decent alternative to bourgeois boredom and lethargy, their religion a sentimental Broad Church Anglicanism. The Brigade by contrast offered a turning aside from the nastier facts of urban squalor, violence and despair. Its appropriate and simple faith was Presbyterian, evangelical, rousing and stark. Hence my father’s taste for hymns like “Onward, Christian Soldiers” which to the end of his days he sang aloud each morning whilst shaving in cold water. Hence too his politics, a stoical Toryism compact with resentment, humour and guile.
The Brigade had, after all, been a survival mechanism, whose ethos was late Victorian and muscular. One joined for one’s betterment, so backsliding was a bugbear, but it was also an economic and spiritual threat. In official publications Jesus was not simply “The Way, The Truth and the Life”, but The Way Out from degradation and failure. The Gazette portrayed him as a social worker and keen amateur sportsman. Christ gave his followers self-respect and made them strong. It went without saying that He was a decent sort of a cove, and every boy’s best pal. Brigade members were his chums and disciples, sworn to serve Him and bonded together by discipline and virtue as their contemporaries all too often were by crime. The movement thus not merely saved, but physically rescued, you. God the Father was King, and the British monarch was His deputy on earth. It must at times have been difficult to distinguish between these two male dignitaries. In serving both, you helped yourself. Fraternity and mutual support was important, and moral example a sub-erotic electricity through dangerous air. Reading the exhortations in The Gazette I hear my middle-aged parent orating:
Are your pals true sportsmen, every Jack one of them, true to the core? Chaps who live pure and speak true? Fellows with whom you feel the nobler boy?
If they are such, thank God for them, but keep your weather eye open, for you may not always have that chum, with whom you feel the nobler chap. Who will it be then? Possibly a chap who will play the very devil with you before you hardly know him. As one of my best friends said to me the other day, so I say to you now: “It is better to turn on one’s heels, and run as if the devil was after you than to get into the clutches of anyone who may drag you down”.
In just such a style HMF was forever exhorting his sons, raised in quite different social circumstances, to avoid suspect companions. As he often succinctly put it, quoting the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Hitch your wagon to a star”. He once severed me from a friend, simply because the charming fellow went to a Secondary Modern School. He might “drag me down”.
To me this prohibition seemed like snobbery; but the reflex ran much deeper than that. The very Autumn in which my father had joined the Brigade, the West London company’s own monthly magazine serialised a story entitled “Real Chums”, intended to encourage recruitment. It makes cringe-making reading now. Two twelve-year-old boys have been playing Hide-and -seek illegally at night on the roof of their grammar school. One lad is named Green and known as “Jimmy”, the other is Arthur, cherished by protective friends as “Dolly”. Jimmy is caught, but Dolly owns up anyway. Afterwards they stand together in the moonlit schoolyard:
The two boys had long been on intimate terms with one another, and Arthur looked upon the somewhat older companion as a leader. Now by common impulse they faced each other and grasped hands. They gazed steadily at one another for a few seconds to read each other’s thoughts.
“You are a brick, Green,” said Arthur. “May we be real chums, like David and Jonathan, you know?”
The answer was a tightening of the grasp, which spoke more emphatically than words. Boys are not as a rule sentimental, but there was something more than mere sentiment in the hearts of these school fellows.
“Goodnight, Dolly”
“Goodnight, Jimmy”
The following week, fired by Green’s moral example, Arthur joins the Brigade. Both are inspired by the qualities of the school chaplain the Revd. Hartely West, “the beau-ideal of muscular Christianity”. Together they outface the school bully Brown, a morose, cut-price Flashman, and bring him over to decency, probity and Christ. Inevitably he too joins the BB. Primed, we might say, for the slaughter.
Then like HMF they all go off to summer camp, where feats are endured, athletic contests assayed and medals won. On the last day the company commander would present the medals and finish by making a speech declaring “Let this medal remind you of the reward which the Great King will bestow upon his faithful soldiers at the Grand Review.”
It proved apt preparation. Six years later there was a mass transfer of brigade members to the Western front. According to the regularly updated lists in the magazine forty-five went from the Sixth London: two named officers and forty-three from the ranks. Amongst the unnamed were Claud, who joined the Kensington Regiment at twenty-one, and HMF who enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery aged nineteen, travelling across to Belgium with a team of horses and an early iron clad. At first The Gazette published detailed inventories of the casualties. Then they abruptly stopped.
The brigade alumnus par excellence of the Great War was to be William Walker, a sixteen-year-old Scottish bandsman who joined the Royal Navy in 1916. Walker was appointed bugler aboard the HMS Colligne. When his ship engaged in the Battle of Jutland on May 31 that year, it was his task to sound the “commence” from the bridge. According to despatches he then “bravely stood by his captain amidst the fury of the battle” for several hours. Later in the day a shell struck him in the chest. With an ounce of common sense he would have gone below and sought medical help. But Walker had not been formally relieved of his duty. Moreover, he must have been familiar from some elementary school anthology with a celebrated poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835):
The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but him had fled.
The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
Shone round him o’er the dead.
Yet beautiful and bright he stood
As born to rule the storm,
A creature of heroic blood
A proud and childlike form.
So, like Mrs Hemans’ much-admired Casablanca - a French admiral’s son at the Battle of the Nile - Walker stood his ground. Growing paler by the minute, but still uncomplaining, he bled softly into the wooden boards of the deck until sunset, then fainted and was taken below. On dry land Walker was transferred to military hospital where three ribs were removed. Afterwards he received a courtesy call from George V, the Great King himself.
The earthly monarch asked young Walker how he was faring. “Very well,” the lad answered cheerfully, though “a bit like Charlie Chaplin about the knees”.