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  Driving through KwaZulu-Natal, we came at last to the Swazi border at Kosi Bay. Now we were in the region where Grandad went maverick.

  In the late nineteenth century the South African President, Paul Kruger, wanted Kosi Bay as a key trading port, but Queen Victoria’s government had other concerns and made a pact with the Zulus which brought the region under imperial jurisdiction. Since the Portuguese in Mozambique were also keen to claim Kosi Bay for themselves, patient diplomacy was needed.

  But patience and diplomacy were not the preserves of Cecil Rhodes, nor of my grandfather Eustace. I mentioned the latter’s colonial wanderings earlier, but the Kosi Bay Limpopo region was nearly his undoing. He had left the Canadian Police in 1888 and made his way to Africa, initially to Egypt with the job of news reporter for the Morning Post. He then joined the staff of General Kitchener, who was busy retaking Sudan after the rebellious Dervishes of the Mahdi had earlier killed General Gordon at Khartoum. Eustace fought with Kitchener’s army at the Battle of Gemaizah, but it would be ten years before the final defeat of the Mahdi’s successor, the Khalifa, at Omdurman and the annexation of all Sudan by Britain. Eustace left Kitchener’s forces in March 1890 and joined the British South Africa Company’s police as a sub-lieutenant in Kimberley. This force had been formed by Cecil Rhodes the previous year to help protect pioneers travelling north into Mashonaland (now part of Zimbabwe). Eustace did well and was soon promoted to full lieutenant with his own police troop.

  Just as the East India Company in India and the Hudson Bay Company in Canada preceded British territorial gains in those countries, so Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company expanded British territory in southern Africa. Hence Rhodesia. Eustace did his bit. The History of the British South Africa Police described Eustace (spelling his surname ‘ffiennes’) as: ‘Not a regular soldier, he was the son of a lord and a member of the London Stock Exchange although he had served, by some unexplained circumstances, in the Canadian militia.’

  Pennyfeather’s Column of Pioneers to Southern Rhodesia, which began in late June 1890, made inevitable a confrontation with Portugal, Britain’s oldest ally, because Portugal had laid claim to the whole area through which the Rhodes pioneers had to travel to reach Rhodesia, and many of his men, including Pennyfeather and, later, Grandfather Eustace, were dead keen to grab territory for the motherland wherever they could. Shortly before Eustace joined the BSAP, an energetic Portuguese soldier, Major Paiva d’Andrada, formed a Rhodes-type commercial company and established a fortress at Massi Kessi, twenty miles from where Eustace’s police were based at Umtali.

  In November 1890 a small armed force under Eustace attacked three hundred Portuguese levies on the ridge above Massi Kessi. Andrada was captured and his fort seized. Andrada was sent back to Portugal where he caused a great stir against British aggression on Portuguese territory. Later, when four separate Portuguese forces arrived to retaliate, including a thousand volunteers with artillery, they found overland travel a much harder foe than the British. It was easy to get lost in the dense tropical vegetation. Rations were meagre. Malaria and dysentery struck men daily. Horses died or contracted tsetse fly-induced sickness. Rivers had to be crossed, swollen and full of crocodiles. Tracks were deep in mud. The heat and humidity were exhausting.

  In March 1891, according to the book Men Who Made Rhodesia, Eustace was stationed at Umtali when he received a messenger. Two of his men were down with fever at an outpost.

  Fiennes at once called for volunteers who were good swimmers, and selected two. The three men then set out on a 23 mile journey over slippery mountain paths at the height of the rainy season when all rivers were in flood. Rain had fallen incessantly for months, and 52 inches had been recorded for the season against a normal 30 inches. When they got to the Revué River they found it to be ‘raging like a miniature sea, mountainous waves roaring like thunder’. In spite of this, Fiennes attempted the crossing alone; he was carried down the stream for half a mile and was once entangled in reeds. Nevertheless he managed to gain the far bank after half an hour in the water.

  At the outpost he found that one man had been dead for a week and Glover, the other, was in a dreadful condition. He began to dig a grave with his own hands. Building a small raft, Fiennes and another man got Glover back over the crocodile river and, in a rough litter, over the mountains to their base. Glover lived until 1950. The account continued: ‘Fiennes’ part in the rescue was one of calculated courage of the highest order; the odds in favour of his crossing the Revué were very slender.’

  Eustace then took part in the Battle of Chua Hill when a Portuguese attack was repulsed. Next day the Massi Kessi Fort’s garrison was found to have fled and Fiennes was sent forward with his mounted men along the paths towards Beira to follow up the enemy and keep going east to the sea. At Chimoio, 130 miles from Umtali, he located a manned Portuguese fort, observed it and decided to attack the next day. While preparing the attack he was surprised by a white man whom he nearly shot, believing him to be Portuguese. But this was the British Bishop of Mashonaland who told him not to attack the Portuguese as the arrival of Major Sapte, the military secretary to the British High Commissioner, was imminent. This man duly arrived and ordered Eustace not to attack because peace had been made by the two governments the previous day.

  According to the official History of the British South Africa Police: ‘When Rhodes heard what had happened, and that the swashbuckling attempt to add Portuguese East Africa to his territories had again been abandoned, he said, “Why didn’t Fiennes say Sapte was drunk and put him in irons?”’ On 30 May 1891 Lord Salisbury and the Portuguese government finally signed an agreement, which has lasted until the present day. At the time, Queen Victoria was greatly relieved, being closely related to the Portuguese king. Eustace, unaware of the narrow scrape he had experienced in sparking off a potentially major international embarrassment, was sent back to Umtali.

  That July, Rose Blennerhassett, in charge of a group of nursing sisters posted to the Umtali region, wrote in her book, Adventures in Mashonaland: ‘Foremost amongst our friends was Lieutenant Eustace Fiennes whom we came to regard as a special providence. He saved us as far as possible from difficulties, was kind, courteous and helpful, to say nothing of being a very jolly young fellow and excellent company.’ In December, however, Eustace’s health broke down and he resigned his commission.

  His subsequent attempts to buy stakes in the Kimberley gold mines and to start a farm in Matabeleland came to nothing.

  In 1899 Eustace, back home with his little family, various medals and tales of derring-do, contested North Oxfordshire as the Liberal candidate. He was defeated by 700 votes.

  Since his political aspirations had not initially worked out, Eustace kept his ears attuned to the South African scene. In October that year the Dutch, or Boer, leader in South Africa formally declared war on Britain unless British troops were withdrawn from the twin Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Since one of Britain’s main geopolitical goals was to bring both these gold-rich Boer provinces under direct British rule, war was exactly what Prime Minister Salisbury wanted, especially (PR-wise) if the Boers were seen to make the first aggressive move. Militarily Britain was confident of quickly defeating them. Eustace, along with many other Liberals, did not approve in principle of the idea of fighting the Boers to gain their gold. So he said so in public and was promptly labelled ‘pro-Boer’ by prominent Tories.

  Originally the Cape, already settled by the Dutch, had been occupied by the British to safeguard the route to India. Various plans to incorporate the Boers into a federation were discussed and then, in 1877, imposed on them. But four years later the Boers had rebelled and their two states were given a loose independence. This had worked until both gold and diamonds were discovered on Boer land, and Cecil Rhodes goaded the Boers’ leader, Paul Kruger, into his 1899 declaration of war.

  Eustace discussed joining up for the Boer War with his old friend Winston Churchill, who had a simi
lar background of fighting in various foreign wars, including in the Sudan, and he had also reported on them for the Morning Post.

  Churchill’s family, the Spencers, owned the Blenheim estate close to Broughton, had intermarried with the Fienneses years before and, although Winston was at this stage a Tory, before switching to Liberal and then back again, he thought along similar political lines to Eustace on most things. They would later work well together but, back in 1900, Eustace was attracted by Winston’s war stories, not his politics. The previous year Winston had achieved brief fame through his own Morning Post reports of rescuing an armoured train from the Boers and then, after being captured, effecting a daring escape. So Eustace, like Winston, signed up with the local regiment, the Oxfordshire Imperial Yeomanry, said goodbye to Granny Florrie and was shipped back to sunny South Africa to kill Boers instead of Portuguese.

  Unfortunately things did not go as planned for the British Army. The superior mobility, field skills and firepower of the Boers led to many embarrassing British defeats and the siege of various garrisons, including Mafeking. Britain’s enemies all over the world sniggered and gloated, though Eustace did well and was twice mentioned in dispatches, adding to his colourful collection of medals. Such had been the humiliating effect on the British public of the previous long history of defeats by the Boers that the May 1900 relief of Mafeking was greeted with nationwide rejoicing. The garrison commander, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, who years later founded the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements, had saved many lives during the siege by boiling whole horse corpses in vats to provide ‘the Colonel’s Soup’.

  At the close of 1900, Kitchener of Khartoum took over in the Cape with a Commonwealth army of half a million troops in order to clean up the remnants of a Boer force that never exceeded 50,000 soldiers. The latter resorted to the guerrilla tactics at which they were adept and to which the terrain was ideally suited. To retaliate, the British invented concentration camps and long lines of blockhouses, 8,000 of them, connected by tangled hedges of barbed wire. Boer farms were burnt and civilians were shut up in the camps where 25,000 died of disease. Finally, in May 1902 Kitchener signed a peace treaty with the Boers, whose two states became British colonies but with internal self-government.

  By the time Ginny and I visited Kosi Bay and the Mozambique border in the 1970s, Britain and Portugal were still the best of friends and were celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of their ‘unbroken Alliance’.

  Having spent my formative years, thanks to the South African adventures of Grandad Eustace, in a land proud of its explorers and white hunters and where I had long daydreamed of King Solomon’s Mines, there lurked in the back of my mind the thought of how nice it would be to find my own lost city somewhere in a Congolese or Brazilian jungle or, better yet, in the great dunes of some far-flung oven-like desert.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Talent for Trouble

  After the four schools I had attended in South Africa, Eton was definitely a cultural shock, but five years as a boarder there left me plenty of time in which to daydream and to further my reading about exotic adventures.

  I excelled at none of the school’s ‘mainline’ sports, such as cricket and football, but I did well, in my own unorthodox manner, at boxing. One Eton Chronicle match report stated:

  The School versus Charterhouse

  Fiennes beat Goodman. He was not quite so wild as usual but persists in using his head. If he can overcome these two faults he will do well as he is very strong and courageous.

  and

  The School versus Bloxham College

  Fiennes beat Fowler. This was a wild brawl and Fiennes must remember to use neither his head nor the inside of his glove for disabling his opponent. This will not only enable him to see, but also to score the odd point or two. This was a close win for Eton.

  I was beaten with a cane five times for breaking rules at Eton and became adept at avoiding many other deserved beatings through a mixture of low cunning and careful planning. This would later hold me in good stead in facing the odds when travelling the great deserts of the world.

  One cardinal crime I committed at Eton was in response to an addiction I picked up during my last two years there, that of stegophily, the official name for the sport of climbing up the outside of buildings, particularly by night, and leaving items on their topmost spire, dome or lightning conductor. My climbing partner, a senior prefect in his House, was caught one night when we were heard affixing a flag to the ‘summit’ of School Hall’s dome. I managed to escape in the ensuing chase, but he was sadly asked to leave at the end of that term.

  Due to over-training for the boxing team when I was sixteen, I began to suffer from shooting cramp-like chest pains and I was diagnosed as suffering from rheumatic fever. My heart, the doctor said, would be in danger of permanent damage unless I took a complete rest for six months. No boxing, no night-climbing and (good news) no school.

  That summer, at home in the record heatwave of 1960, introduced me to the wonderful new world of explosives. I had not done well in school chemistry lessons with Bunsen burners, but my best friend in our Sussex village (later to become a senior officer in the Fire Service) helped me experiment in our garden shed with various easily purloined ‘chemicals’, such as sugar and weedkiller. To ignite the resulting cocktails we used our pocket money to purchase Jetex fuse wire so that we could sprint to cover behind the garden wall after lighting the fuse ends.

  After satisfying weeks of explosives around the house, a thirty-foot-high mushroom-shaped cloud which followed the shattering of the ‘bomb’s’ container, my mother’s best brass flower vase, finally decided her. She banned all future bomb-making. If only I had obeyed her ban, my life would have taken a very different course.

  After the six months’ ‘rest’, I shed the chest pains, grew six inches and moved into the light heavyweight boxing grouping. I went to hospital for three days with double vision, my two front teeth were chipped, my nose was broken and both thumbs swelled up due to oft-repeated hooks with the forbidden insides of my gloves.

  During my final Eton year, and in order to increase my pocket money, I joined forces with Jeremy Deedes, whose father edited the Daily Telegraph, and with Chris Cazenove, who was later to become a Hollywood-based film star. We organized a method of avoiding detection by patrolling school masters whose duties included apprehending any Etonian caught in forbidden parts of Windsor. By changing in a back street from our easily spotted Eton tailcoats into working men’s boiler suits and cloth caps, we would buy Black Russian and Abdulla cigarettes plus mini-bottles of cherry brandy, which we then sold at a profit to senior boys back at school.

  Aged seventeen I won my school Boxing Cap and was told by our boxing coach that I would be School Boxing Captain if I stayed on for another year. But my mother, on the advice of my House Master, sent me to a language crammer in Brighton for specialist training in order to ensure that I passed the vital A-Level exams needed to enter Sandhurst and obtain a Regular Commission in the army. I chose languages because there was no chance at all of my obtaining A-Levels at any other subject. I had been taught French by David Cornwell (who later wrote spy novels under the name of John le Carré).

  My chief ambition, out of several, was still to emulate my father and become commanding officer of the Royal Scots Greys cavalry regiment, the position that he had held when he was killed in Italy in the war.

  Aged eighteen, my long-time calf-love for Ginny was thwarted by her father’s belief that I was too wild for his daughter, and he issued me with a court ‘banning order’. This served only to encourage a growing love affair over our teenage years.

  Meanwhile, my time at the Brighton language school coincided with the height (literally) of the miniskirt fashion era, so that I found concentration in the mixed-sex language classes to be impossible and I failed my A-Levels twice.

  Additionally, my previous fascination with explosives was rekindled by a nocturnal raid by fellow students on a local girls’
boarding school, after which I was prosecuted in court for ‘malicious damage caused by a smoke bomb’. This was reported in the national newspapers and further set Ginny’s father against me. By then I was the proud possessor of a Vespa scooter on which I would scoot from Brighton by night to visit Ginny in the fourth floor attic room of her boarding school in nearby Eastbourne.

  Once it had become clear that I would never gain an A-Level, it was decided that I should try for a Short Service Commission at Mons Cadet School, a poor alternative to Sandhurst, but better than nothing.

  At Mons I met a fellow building-climber and, under his guidance one night scaled the west wing wall of Heathfield Girls’ School, where we were unfortunately caught by the police. My friend, who had hit out when apprehended, was removed from Mons, whereas I, who had avoided physical contact with our captors, was merely awarded a ‘Restriction of Privileges’ for fifty-six days, which involved two hours in uniform and standing to attention every evening outside the Guard Room when all other cadets had local leave.

  My platoon sergeant-major informed me, in what I thought was a tone of slight respect, that I had chalked up the record number of RPs since Mons was first formed.

  In the spring of 1962 I was passed out by Her Majesty as a second lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys. With a friend who passed into the regiment from Mons at the same time, I planned to spend the month’s leave, before joining the Scots Greys in Germany, crossing the Anatolian Desert in Turkey by camel.

  Unfortunately, the Ministry of Defence heard of our intentions and, due to the ‘political climate in Anatolia’, forbade us to go.

  We quickly switched from Anatolia to the Pyrenees and from camels to a mule and cart – a first taste of expeditioning. This was followed by courses in tank maintenance and gunnery, learning how to destroy Soviet tanks a mile away. That Christmas there was a spectacular blizzard and more snow was recorded throughout England than in any year since 1881. In the New Year, my tank training complete, I said goodbye to my family and to Ginny and joined the regiment in Germany to help defend Western Europe against the fairly likely event of invasion by the massed armoured regiments of the Warsaw Pact.