Dear Coincidence Supporters - I am very grateful to you for having shown such immediate enthusiasm for The Coincidence of Novembers project. It is very heartening for me to know that there are all kinds of people interested in my father's life and thinking.
I am looking forward to getting on with the editing (and the selection of images) for the book itself. However, I wanted to share the start of a piece that my father wrote in 1996 about my somewhat stern grandfather, Lt Col C. S. Nairne, which he titled 'The Colonel's Tale' and which begins:
'Only cads wear carnations at weddings.' My father’s greeting outside the College Lodge, recorded in my diary for Saturday, 24 June 1946. Back at ‘Univ’ - University College, Oxford - after the end of the 1939-45 war, I was attending the wedding of a Univ friend being married in the University Church - the reception, I imagine, in the College Hall. It was the end of the summer term and my father had called with the family car to take home some of my possessions.
My father did not grow carnations; I do not suppose that he knew much about them. He did not belong to the world of carnations and camellias, champagne and claret. But he would have claimed to know about cads - men, as he saw it, who abandoned their wife for another woman, or who were untrustworthy with money, or who displayed bad taste in what they wore. I can hear my father speaking:
'You have only got to meet chaps like that to know what they are like.'
Early in life he had had experience of such people. When he was in his sixties, he wrote a brief account of his school years, describing his unhappiness as a younger boy at Haileybury. He was shocked by the low standard of honesty and behaviour of his contemporaries:
'It was only years afterwards that I realised that many of my companions were cads. Not all by any means, but there were enough cads at Haileybury in my day to merit the description of "a rough shop’’ - as one of his friends put it some years later.'
Good behaviour, conforming to the accepted conventions of their social class, was of prime importance to my parents - perhaps somewhat to excess. As a regular army officer and the son of an Anglican clergyman, my father was ingrained with a disposition for conformity. Even a period of study at the Slade School of Art and his friendship with artists did little or nothing to diminish it - perhaps the reverse. His influence left me inclined to fuss all my life about whether I was correctly dressed and behaving in the ‘right’ way. Parental influence at work, though the Army left its mark on me too.
It was more or less by default that my father had joined the Army and was commissioned in The Seaforth Highlanders. Unsatisfactory progress as a boy at Haileybury had led to his being moved from the classical to the modern side - a decision he had resented because he had not been consulted. He did not wish to be articled to his uncle’s firm of solicitors, Baker and Nairne, and in his own words 'the fact that I was on the modern side suggested the Army'. As he was thought unlikely to pass into Sandhurst, he sought a commission in the militia, for which no examination was required. Since a qualification for a regular commission was four periods of militia training, he wished to undertake his first training period as soon as possible. At the time of his application, in 1899, the only militia unit whose annual training was still to come was that of The Seaforth Highlanders at Fort George on the Moray Firth near Inverness - arranged for the month of September, since this particularly suited many of the rank and file who were fishermen from the Island of Lewis.
So, assisted by the family connection of his uncle and godfather, Lieut.General Sir Charles Nairne, well-known to the then Commander-in-Chief, Scotland, my father secured a commission in The Seaforth Highlanders. At the age of 19 he spent the first month of his military career under training at Fort George. The militia unit was commanded by Colonel Sir Hector Munro of Foulis, described by my father as 'a charming and gentle county-magnate ... nothing of a soldier but everyone liked him'. The men impressed him more than the officers - the former from the West Coast, many speaking only Gaelic, with 'beautiful manners and soft voices'. the latter given to a scale of drinking which disgusted my father, who had never tasted whisky.
He wrote: 'I think I was always sober. Had I been drunk I might have enjoyed myself more ... I thought - if the Army is all like this I shan’t like it'.
I cannot remember him ever drinking whisky, regarding it, together with brandy, as a resource in the cupboard for moments of acute stress. Not surprisingly, however, Scottish regiments have a special regard for whisky, as the people of Devon and Somerset are likely to have for cider. My mother was shocked by the way in which strong drink could ruin the careers of some young officers. She would do her best to ration sweet eating by my brothers and myself, not because of the risk to health or teeth, but because she believed that an addiction to sweets might lead inexorably to an addiction to drink. When I joined the regiment as a subaltern, also at the age of 19, I found that I was frequently expected to drink whisky on Monday evenings in the Sergeants Mess. My reaction was the same as my father’s had been.
Two months after the militia training war broke out with the Boers in South Africa; the militia units were required for active service, and my father was summoned back to Fort George from his home in Baldock. By early 1900 he had completed what amounted to four months of qualifying training; as a result of the wartime need for more officers, no formal military examination was required and, having received good personal reports, my father was given a regular commission in April 1900. Thus began 25 years as a regular Army officer.
I'll share more in future updates - with many thanks and all best wishes, Sandy