Biographical Afterword
Francis Yeats-Brown (1886-1944)

Bengal Lancer was published in the summer of 1930 and proved a phenomenal success in both the British Isles and North America. Over 150,000 copies were sold and the London publisher, Victor Gollancz, sold foreign rights to Italy, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Rumania. The film rights were snapped up by Hollywood for fifteen thousand dollars and in January 1935 Paramount released The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which was saluted as one of the great adventure stories of cinema. Francis Yeats-Brown was able to admire the film on its own merits and was amused rather than outraged that it had so little to do with his book. But having read Bengal Lancer, you will understand how difficult it would be to create a film that would in any way be true to the text.

For Bengal Lancer is many things, but above all it is a love affair with the spiritual traditions of India. It is also the autobiography of a carefree young cavalry officer in the British Indian Army and includes an account of his courageous work with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, a prison-escape narrative and a subtle treatise on leadership and what makes a good soldier. It is funny and self-deprecating, so that the reader delights in being in the company of such an unusual man. We do not care that he never found the spiritual master that he yearned for, nor acquired the unattainable woman he desired. It is enough to have spent time in the company of someone who so cared for the Punjabi and Pathan men under his command that he tried to understand their religion, to feel for himself its emotional appeal. It is a rare combination, the soldier and the mystic, the sportsman and the pilgrim. Bengal Lancer feels like one of those books its author was born to write, a one-off touched by magic.

And yet Yeats-Brown’s journalism and politics for much of the rest of the 1930s have led us to look very careful at his biography, to try to understand how someone so open to the culture of India could have been, for a while, so in thrall to the fascist leaders of Europe – Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. Hitler even listed Bengal Lancer among his favourite books. Whilst a passionate immersion in politics is often a characteristic of an Eland author, and while our authors sometimes criticise one another, we are not in the business of providing a platform for any kind of racism.

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The Yeats-Brown family were a cosmopolitan hybrid – part of the English establishment who had nevertheless, for three generations, lived on the coast of Italy. Francis’s great grandfather had made a small fortune in banking, and his grandfather, Timothy (1789–1858), had married Mary Ann, the daughter of another London banker and loan-broker, Benjamin Goldsmid, in 1812. After the early death of Mary Ann, Timothy remarried Steuarta Erskine, the intellectual daughter of the British ambassador to Munich, and in 1828 the couple moved to Italy where Timothy initially represented the family banking interests of Brown, Cobb & Co. From 1840 he also served as the British Consul in Genoa. The Ligurian coast of Italy was a world away from strait-laced Victorian London, and the Yeats-Browns maintained an enviable and arty style of life in the palace they rented on the edge of the city. All sorts of travellers passed through the port of Genoa on their way further east, and many of them were delighted to accept the hospitality of the British Consul. Some of the more famous visitors, such as Dickens, became lifelong friends of the Yeats-Brown family.

Francis’s father, Montagu Yeats-Brown, was born into this idyllic world in 1834 and brought up in an Italian-speaking household though his mother made certain that he would also be fluent in German by hiring a Bavarian nursemaid and spending much of the year with her father at his home in Bavaria. Aged ten he was sent to the German Academy in Brussels, before finishing his education at Marlborough College. The allure of the soft Mediterranean climate saw him return and join the consulate staff at the tender age of 21. When his father died in 1858, Montagu was already Vice-Consul and took over his father’s position. It was a very agreeable life, especially after he bought the ruins of a medieval castle on the coast above Portofino for just £40 in 1867. Isolated on its own olive- and pine-clad peninsular, the ruins were turned into an enchanting summer house, the old battlements enclosing a sheltered garden. The locals believed that the castle walls had been first raised to shelter a garrison of Saracen raiders.

Understandably, Montagu refused all attempts at promotion within the Foreign Office, apart from a stint at the very end of his working life in Boston. Any distressing elements about this foreign posting were no doubt softened by taking his four most trusted Italian servants with him. It was not until 1875 that Montagu married Agnes Bellingham, who was only 19 at the time while her husband was in his early 40s. Agnes and her five sisters were known to be as clever and bright as they were beautiful. They all married and their children formed a clan of cherished cousins that was the bedrock of Francis Yeats-Brown’s life.

Francis was born into this cosmopolitan household on 15th August 1886, the youngest of three boys. His childhood memories are idyllic. He was pampered by Italian maids and the family was used to the most excellent food and long summers in their own castle, now shaded by a mature garden overlooking the sea. As we have heard, Montagu accepted the only other posting of his career in 1893, in Boston. When the family returned in 1896, ten-year-old Francis was packed off to be educated in England while his parents retired back to Italy.

The life of a traditional English boarding school (Sunnymede followed by Harrow) came as a brutal shock. Francis later remembered always feeling hungry and failing at all sports. When he left school, he was a timid seventeen-year-old, lacking in self-confidence with no friendships apart from those he had discovered for himself within books. His one acknowledged ability had been in writing and as a storyteller he would regale the boys in his dormitory with night-time thrillers, his principal tool for surviving the hell of his schooldays. It was this skill that Francis was reminded of when he dictated the first draft of Bengal Lancer in 1929. But it wasn’t a skill which his father could admire, and Francis’s professed desire to be a journalist met with short shrift. It feels as if Francis’s relationship with his father was critically damaged by these seven miserable years of English schooling.

When he left school in the summer of 1903, instead of coming home to Italy Francis was sent to stay with a household of cousins in Germany. It turned out to be the making of him, for these German cousins gave him a terrific welcome, taught him how to ride, how to shoot, and how to drink Rhine wine with wild strawberries. They also taught him how to dance and took him out to listen to music at night seated at the tables of outdoor restaurants. Francis fell in love with everything German, most especially these kind-hearted cousins who also introduced him to some young gentlemen cadets at the Uhlan barracks in Coblenz. These cavalry officers had good manners and clearly impressed Francis, who decided to join the army when he returned to England.

In July 1904 Francis entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, which completed his outward transformation into a confident young man. Eighteen months later he took ship for India wearing the uniform of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps. He was initially stationed at Bareilly (roughly halfway between Delhi and Lucknow) and acquired the characters we meet early on in the pages of Bengal Lancer, his bulldogs ¬– Brownstone and Daisy – and his ponies, Punch and Judy. On 31st December 1906, Yeats-Brown was transferred to the 17th Bengal Lancers and, with his early multilingualism, progressively taught himself to speak Urdu, then Pathan and Punjabi. His sparse frame, which had kept him off the rugby fields of Harrow, now became an advantage, as he could ride fine Arab horses as a lightweight. He became an excellent polo player, with a five-goal handicap. His company commander, Major Metcalfe, considered him ‘the least conceited man I ever met. Very shy and retiring.’ It was also noted that he tended to duck invitations to attend shooting parties but used his leave to travel incognito in the North-West Frontier and to live as a Hindu in Benares. This wasn’t held against him, for imaginative use of leave and skill in languages was one of the accepted ways of becoming noticed, and of being asked to become a Political Officer.

In May 1909 Francis finally returned home to the Yeats-Brown castellated summer house outside Portofino. The ugly duckling of the family was now a swan, who could look his elder brothers in the eye and was even able to confess the extent of his debts (good polo ponies have never been cheap) to his father. That summer Francis also became a friend of the writer E. F. Benson (a comic genius of the first water) who taught Francis the essentials of the craft: to observe carefully, to listen to how conversation flows, to write quickly (but edit slowly) and to alter your style, so that descriptions, dreams, thoughts and conversations each have their own mood, as if perceived through different eyes. Francis returned to Portofino again in 1911 but otherwise his life was entirely committed to India, as described so evocatively and sympathetically in Bengal Lancer. His leave in 1914 proved to be the most hedonistic year of his life, for he had at last mastered his shyness and was able to attend a full London summer season, complete with trips to the opera, Ascot races and the British-American centenary ball. He tried to bolt from a house party in Epsom (after hearing that the ex-King of Spain and the Prince of Wales were to be among the guests) but was prevented by his host, who was determined that Francis should talk to these grandees about the spiritual traditions of India. Francis was persuaded to demonstrate some yoga positions and unexpectedly became the star of the house party. He also had the first sexually fulfilling love affair of his life, with a confident, independent woman living in central London, whom he called Eve.

War erupted before Francis could return to his regiment in India. In September 1914 he served with the 5th Royal Irish Lancers and took part in the battle at Aisne and then the first battle at Ypres. His parents had a house in the Hampshire village of Twyford, which was their English bolt hole when not working in Genoa. It was in this comparatively modest environment that he finally made peace with his old father, whilst on leave, and in the process also felt himself to be part of England. Then he was ordered East. The journey down the Red Sea was spent in the fascinating company of Mark Sykes, one of the talented young men then directing British policy in the Middle East. The campaign in Mesopotamia that Francis Yeats-Brown served in was deliberately being pushed forward to offset the failure of the Gallipoli landings. As we now know, it led to an even more spectacular military defeat, with the surrender of the British army at Kut. In Bengal Lancer Francis devoted just twenty-five pages to his long period of captivity in Turkey. This was a wise editorial decision for his first book, Caught by the Turks, was entirely devoted to this period of his life and was not a success. He subsequently returned to describe these years of imprisonment in his third book, Golden Horn, whose sales were also disappointing. The problem was that this period of his life, although packed full of real adventures and a hair-raising series of escapes, could never be convincingly told in a light-hearted manner. Francis had suffered physical and mental wounds in the prison camp, from which he would never be entirely free. After the war, there was an attempt to get the commandant of the Afyion-Karahisar prison camp tried for war crimes, but it was thought that it would be too traumatic an experience for the young men he had raped to testify in a court room. To what extent Francis directly experienced abuse, or was affected by the sufferings of his comrades, we will never now know. No doubt the spartan boarding school experiences of his English childhood (about which he never wrote) did not make this second involuntary experience of captivity any easier. He was a convalescent after the war, complaining of back pains and wounds from an axe, but by the summer of 1920 the army doctors had somehow got him back on his feet. He was sent back to India, to the barracks at Rawalpindi outside Peshawar, where Major Francis Yeats-Brown supported the work of the Political Officer, John Coatman. It was a fascinating but also difficult period, for British rule was being challenged all over the globe, with blood on the streets in Cairo, bombed-out villages in central Iraq and civil war in Ireland. And calls for independence in India had just been galvanised by the British army massacre of protesting civilians in Amritsar. It was hard for British forces to know if the rising of the Mahsuds of Waziristan or the three Hazara martyrs was just another incident of North-West Frontier dissidence, or the beginnings of a new national uprising.

But instead of further immersing himself in the complex tribal politics of the region, which was probably what he desired, Francis was cherry-picked for a very different mission. He was appointed the official interpreter for a four-month fact-finding tour of India by the US journalist, Lowell Thomas. It was an inspired choice. Lowell Thomas was clever, influential and energetic and would not have tolerated any interference (official or otherwise) in his itinerary. Though a relentless, hard-driven operator, he was continuously astonished by Francis Yeats-Brown’s knowledge, energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of India. Lowell Thomas travelogues – image-led lecture shows – had already single-handedly made T. E. Lawrence world famous. By the time he produced The Land of the Black Pagoda about India, film technology had superseded this medium, but his acknowledgement of the assistance of Francis Yeats-Brown was heartfelt and genuine. ‘I, metaphorically speaking, sat at the feet of a Guru, a Yogi. Incongruous as it may seem, my Guru was neither Hindu, Muslim nor Buddhist monk. He was not even an Oriental, at any rate by place or birth or ancestry. He was an Englishman and a professional soldier.’

At Lucknow in 1922, the 17th Bengal Lancers were amalgamated with another regiment, which Francis took as a sign that it was time to leave the army. His seniors not only accepted this decision but gave him the last two years of his service as furlough on full salary. Francis Yeats-Brown ‘took leave of mother India, as her servant, on Sunday morning, 6th August, sailing down the Hooghly from Calcutta.’ He changed steamers at Rangoon, then at Singapore, then took a boat to Shanghai and on across the Pacific to Vancouver.

For the next eight years he tried his hand at many things in Canada, the United States and Britain: manager of a polo club, sports correspondent, freelance journalist and touring lecturer. He also took the opportunity to improve his physical mastery of yoga under the charismatic but controversial teacher, P. A. Bernard, at the Clarkstown Country Club. None of these projects, bar the yoga, prospered and to make matters more complex he impulsively fell in love with one of his Anglo-Irish cousins and married her in April 1923. Things went wrong between the couple on their honeymoon, and a few years later a botched medical operation left his wife a paralysed invalid. In 1925, Francis signed on as one of 50,000 contract harvesters working their way across the prairie farms of Canada from August to October. It was gruelling work and for the first time he felt his age and physically tested, but the article he wrote about it was well received. It also led to a permanent job on The Spectator (1926-31), then edited by his cousin, John Evelyn Wrench. Francis’s salary allowed him to rent a flat in Robert Street, in the Adelphi quarter of London just above the river Thames. In this lively period Francis interviewed Mussolini, chronicled the work of the League of Nations and toured the Weimar Republic of Germany (in 1927), which he adored for its can-do youthful energy. He also agonised about his failed marriage and sought distractions.

In April 1929 he paid a ‘young stenographer with a blonde Eton crop: a discouraging, disinterested party who kept glancing at her wrist-watch’ to take down a dictated story about his life in India. He was consciously tapping into his golden days, both of innocence and of energy, but also saturated with his fascination for India. With words on the page, he took himself off to Italy that summer to ‘cut the thing to pieces’ and completely rewrote it. His friend, E. F. Benson, tried to interest his own publisher in the book but there were two rejection letters to be digested before Victor Gollancz (one of the leading left-wing publishers of the day) snapped up Bengal Lancer.

The rest is publishing history. Francis enjoyed the process of being lionised, though he noted how famous writers tended to slip into performance mode, and that it was only with his close friends such as E. F. Benson and T. E. Lawrence that his conversation remained real. He could not, however, resist accepting invitations to dine with Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, John Masefield and the dozens of other famous names that litter his diary after the publication of Bengal Lancer. What undoubtedly gave him the greatest pleasure however was being allowed to talk to Gandhi on a long, dawn walk through the deserted streets of London.

In the summer of 1932 Francis was invited to join a tour of the Soviet Union, which he described as ‘the most interesting trip I have ever done.’ He was already known to be a supporter of Mussolini, so the decision to include him amongst this party of a dozen journalists was curious. But they were allowed extraordinary access, in part because the Soviet Union at this period was justifiably proud of the achievements of their first Five Year Plan. Yet Francis observed terrible hunger and squalor on the collective farms and considered that ‘famine conditions were prevalent everywhere except Moscow and Leningrad.’ But despite his existing prejudices he was impressed and wrote, ‘Rather than no change, I could accept Communism. It is better to be without bread than hope.’ He also noted that ‘the girls of New Russia seem to me to hold the thread of destiny in their hands more firmly than the boys … standing on their own feet, sleeping in their own beds.’ But in his eyes, the destruction of organised religion, the merciless collectivization of all individual farms and the propaganda war waged against the bourgeois family was too great a price. Later he would try and define himself in greater detail, ‘I am one-tenth Socialist and the rest of me believes in land-tenure, family life and a state religion. To me the land is holy. I never owned a foot of it or anything I could call a home, but I believe in these things.’

Like most of the thinkers of his generation (be they of the left or the right), Yeats-Brown was appalled that the vast sacrifices of the First World War had led to no tangible improvement for the working-class. In 1927 he wrote a series of articles about the Britain’s slums – in London, south Wales and the north of England. He saw the Great Depression of 1929-39 and the Gold Standard crisis (1925-31) as further signs that the ‘strangely stifled existence we lead in England’ was ripe for change. Francis was never good at public speaking, which may have personally disposed him against the workings of a liberal democracy. Over the next six years he used his position to write essays, articles and books about the workings of the new ‘corporate society’. He was on a mission to explain how Fascist Italy looked after its ‘responsible workers’ in a more effective and efficient way than any parliamentary democracy. He always felt happier in Italy and Germany than in England, and now he had a political cause that allied itself to his own emotional disposition. The promise of full employment, of nations on the march to some better future, the public cult of health and fitness, plus peace in Europe, all appealed to him. In retrospect, we can now see that Fascist autocracies are innately evil and always require a scapegoat to hold together their curious blend of mild socialism and fervent, militarised nationalism. Other writers in the era, such as Robert Byron, were also fascinated by this new phenomenon, but quickly identified that it was evil to the core. Francis failed to do this, partly because of his genuine, lifelong affection for, and involvement with, both Italy and Germany. And because the idea of war felt almost fratricidal to him, he was blind to the Fascist threat to peace.

Yeats-Brown was a danger to humanity in these years, since his personal decency helped camouflage the ambitions of the Fascist demagogues that he interviewed and popularised. Yet he was never a total fool. He called for Hitler to ‘adopt a more moderate policy towards the Jews’ and in the end deplored Oswald Mosley, as ‘too vain to ever be any good and not human enough.’ Yet in June 1934 he was one of the thousands who attended Mosley’s British Union of Fascist rally at Olympia stadium. Two years later, in 1936, he was among the honoured foreign guests of the German government for the Nuremberg rallies, whilst also declaring ‘I am not a Nazi.’ It was a shameful period of his life.

It wasn’t until the Munich crisis of 1938 that Francis Yeats-Brown realised that he had been deluded. ‘Hitler’s perfidy had proved himself to be fanatical and unscrupulous’, he wrote, but it was much too late. This coming to his senses may have been the fruit of his second marriage in the summer of 1938 to Olga Phillips, the 52-year-old Russian widow of an RAF officer, who at last gave him the loving companionship that he had hitherto pursued but failed to find. Despite his fame (much boosted by the success of the Hollywood movie) and his strident political writings, Francis remained a shy man. He had an attack of nerves on the first night of Lives of a Bengal Lancer and failed to attend the grand opening performance.

When war with Germany was declared in 1939, Francis knew that in the eyes of many of his countrymen ‘I am considered almost a traitor.’ But his wife Olga had come to England as a White Russian emigrée and knew all about knuckling down and getting on with a new life. They brought a house named Kenya outside Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire and set about making a self-sufficient smallholding for themselves, joining in the campaign for self-sufficiency, digging for victory. He brushed aside concerns about his old rank and insisted as serving as a private in the local Home Guard. It was the simplest and possibly the most contented time of his life.

In 1943 he was given an opportunity to redeem himself. He accepted instantly, ‘glad to be of service when I can be useful’, and was made temporary Lt-Colonel for a six-month tour of Indian military bases. Martial India was finished in 1944 and published in 1945. It is a review of the Indian army which fought as Britain’s ally throughout the Second World War and could be catalogued as fluent propaganda. Of greater interest is Indian Pageant a slim green volume that had been published in 1942. It is a narrative history looking at the relationship between Britain and the peoples of India with a very long perspective. It does not apologise but nor does it gloss over the many conflicts and policy errors of the Empire during the previous two hundred years. Informed by an urgent concern for what would inevitably be an independent India, Yeats-Brown suggested that the army of India should be a neutral force, serving equally the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations and the independent-minded principalities. His idea for a buffer state between Hindustan and Pakistan, centred on the principalities of Rajasthan, might never have been possible, but it was at least a thoughtful suggestion and full of prescient concern for the fate of the peoples of India. It is worthy of the man who wrote Bengal Lancer.

Having completed these last two missions, Francis Yeats-Brown died unexpectedly early in December 1944. His old friend and Fleet Street colleague, John Evelyn Wrench, wrote a biography, Francis Yeats-Brown 1886-1944, which was published in 1948. Yeats-Brown was undoubtedly an exceptional man, who searched all his life for the truth, practicing periods of abstinence and fasting alongside his passionate immersion in the discipline of yoga. Despite his British DNA, in many ways Francis was a genuine European, aspiring for a classless society that rewarded all its people, more fully at home in Italy, Germany and India than in his British homeland.

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