The heart of the Cotswolds isn’t the first place you’d think of when looking for a Guernsey family but in the village of Little Rissington, the name Le Marchant is legendary. Chris Morvan finds out more about the life of Robert, sometime rector of the parish and father of five outstanding military men. PERHAPS it is a shared gene - or just an influence, an attitude passed down through the generations - but something results in certain families producing a succession of outstanding individuals.
A new book by Michael Boyes, Dying for Glory, tells the collected stories of valour and advancement that emerged from the Le Marchants - ‘the adventurous lives of five Cotswold brothers,’ the jacket notes tell us. But our Guernsey noses twitch and investigate to claim them as our own.
They were military men who fought for king and country on land and sea in places as far apart as Afghanistan, South Africa and France. Steven Furniss recently wrote in The Guernsey Press about the sisters in this big family of Robert and Eliza Le Marchant, the rector of the quaint-sounding Little Rissington - she, presumably, a full-time mother of 15 children.
To get to this point in the family history it is useful to put the military aspect into perspective and the man whose name is writ large in British Army circles is Major-General John Gaspard Le Marchant, the founder of the Royal Military Academy known throughout the world as Sandhurst.
Two generations later, the fighting gene appears to have skipped Robert Le Marchant, who chose the opposite path in the church - but his sons couldn’t wait to get out there and do their stuff for the country.
Only one, Gaspard, decided against it, opting instead for a financial career in the City. His male siblings showed little liking for study, which may have been a guilty relief for Robert and Eliza, who struggled to bring up their vast brood on a clergyman’s salary.
The lack of academic prowess meant, though, that the entrance examination for Sandhurst was a bridge too far for the brothers and they entered the army by a less privileged route.
The first was Edward (1853-1899), who joined the Royal South Gloucestershire Militia and then the 41st Foot, bound for India.
Edward was hardly encouraged in his career by his wryly witty sisters, who wrote in the family journal that he had scraped along in India partly on his pay and partly on tips from parents and kind relatives. ‘You have been extravagant and thoughtless,’ they went on. ‘You have often been wanting in moral courage to resist the temptations of the wealthy.’
It should be noted that the family’s poor financial situation was of little help to the girls where finding husbands was concerned, so there was probably a serious, sour undercurrent to their writings.
After several tours of duty, Edward transferred to the 67th Foot and found himself in Burma. As Mr Boyes informs us, ‘During the mid 1870s relations between British Burma and Burmese Mandalay deteriorated, and any incident which threatened to disrupt trade increased the possibility of conflict.’
This was not something the British dreaded, indeed Edward ‘hoped the Burmese king, whom he disparagingly called ﾓthe king of Umbrellasﾔ, would grossly insult the British envoy ﾓso as to enable him to obtain the drubbing he so richly deservesﾔ.’
His brother Evelyn was envious. ‘I see from the papers,’ he wrote from San Francisco, ‘that Edward’s regiment is likely to be involved in the Burmese war - what a lucky chap he is.’Edward wasn’t, in fact, ‘lucky’ at all in that way and was soon back in India, doing little but sweat and swat flies. For amusement there was badminton, cricket and native-bullock racing. He went snipe shooting, ‘wading through paddy fields with mud and water up to his knees’ and, being an expert shot, could bag 30 or 40 brace in a couple of hours.
He was also maturing as a person, studying trigonometry, geometry, algebra and logarithms and was becoming a responsible senior member of the family, full of advice for his brothers and sisters.
There was a certain amount of action to the north in Afghanistan, in which he participated after a brief return to England at the School of Musketry and a short visit to Little Rissington. By the time he returned, he had missed a massacre by mutinous Afghan soldiers and then when Gladstone returned to power and denounced British aggression in Afghanistan, that was another source of action gone.
Now promoted to captain, Edward was sent once again to Burma, but became ill and was shipped home to Little Rissington, taking with him a monkey as a souvenir.
It took more than a year and numerous visits to experts in tropical medicine to restore him to health, but even so he remained in England for 12 years, during which time he married Mary Christie, the daughter of a prosperous man from Glyndebourne, whose ‘marriage settlement’ of £20,000 gave the couple some welcome stability. Edward then took up a post at the School Of Musketry in Dover and after three years rejoined his regiment, first in Ireland and then in India. His career was flourishing and it was as Lt-Colonel Le Marchant that he took his men through the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, where he was shot dead by a ghazi - a Muslim dedicated to killing the enemies of Islam.
Such was the chequered career of largely unfulfilled bloodlust that marked the time on earth of Edward Le Marchant.
His brother Evelyn joined the Navy at the age of 13 and underwent rigorous training at Dartmouth. This was a time of British supremacy at sea that had seen the change from sail to steam and from wooden hulls to iron-clads and later steel-hulled ships.
Evelyn soon grew disillusioned with his chosen career on HMS Hercules, with its limited opportunities for promotion and the attendant increase in salary that would have made life more comfortable.
He was appalled, too, by the coarse language and behaviour of his fellow officers, but matters improved when he was transferred to HMS Research and then HMS Monarch, aboard which he went to Turkey when there was trouble with the Russians.
Evelyn’s reputation for competence as a navigator, along with his reliability, tact and judgement, led to a posting on board HMS Bacchante, on which Prince George (later King George V) and Prince Albert Victor (Eddy) were serving as midshipmen.
The lack of family money behind him, though, meant he had reservations. ‘It will be a great expense to me,’ he wrote, ‘having to get full dress uniform which I could otherwise have done without, also instead of getting 8/6 per day and being in ship with little or no expense and every opportunity of saving, I shall only get 7/6 a day and be in, to say the least of it, an expensive ship and one that has to entertain a great deal.’
Bacchante’s mission was to sail around the world and fly the flag, trading on the presence on board of two of Queen Victoria’s grandsons.
Despite the occasional incident, this was more a prolonged social whirl for Evelyn than a military experience. He met the Khedive (ruler) of Egypt, along with lots of eligible, wealthy women in various countries, half of whom he seemed to fall in love with.While serving off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, and a war with Russia looking imminent, he wrote ‘there may be the chance of some prize money if we can get inside Vladivostock’.
At the age of 46, Evelyn was promoted to captain and took command of HMS Brilliant, following his recent wedding to Edith Crocker. It says much about him that despite his ongoing concerns about money and the opportunities he had with society women around the world, Edith was from a family of modest means.
Several years later, in Canada, Evelyn was at the scene of a catastrophe so dramatic that the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, studied it to predict the devastation his brainchild might have.
The French munitions ship Mont Blanc was laden with 2,925 tons of explosive when it collided with another ship and, after burning for 20 minutes, exploded with such vehemence that 1,000 people were killed and 6,000 injured.
Evelyn, by then an admiral, retired in the 1920s.
The next of the clan by age was Basil, whom his brothers tried to steer into a less demanding and more lucrative career, but who joined the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry - soon to become the Royal Guernsey Militia - and did his basic training. In 1881 he was commissioned into the 76th Regiment of Foot, which became the West Ridings, and was posted to Ireland, then India and on to South Africa, where they entered the bloody conflict with the Boers. Basil was wounded at Hammanskraal and sent home, but before long he was back in India, promoted to Lt-Colonel and married to Helen Carlton Harris, whom he called Carlie.
Their son, Gaspard St John, was born in 1906 but Carlie died shortly afterwards. Basil took the baby to England and left him with Carlie’s sister in London, then returned to India. Three years later, he married again and went on to enjoy a happy old age as a retired colonel, before he passed away in a nursing home in Cheltenham at the age of 97.
Cecil Le Marchant also began in the Royal Guernsey Militia and when he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment, used part of that uniform for rough work when he reached India. From there they moved on to Egypt where, like all the British troops, he had to learn how to deal with camels: ‘cantankerous creatures that would spit vomit, spray faeces, break a man’s leg with a kick and could even turn their head far enough when mounted to bite the rider’s leg.’
He retired at the age of 42, took up poultry farming and when that failed, moved back to the family home at Little Rissington.
Cecil died during the Second World War, attempting to put a blind back up after it had fallen, contravening a blackout. He fell backwards off a stepladder and cracked his head - an inglorious death in a family that had courted more spectacular ways.
And so we come to Louis St Gratien Le Marchant, the youngest son. He joined the army and went to India where, it seems, the men were more at risk of disease than from the enemy, with malaria accounting for many deaths.
Like his eldest brother, Edward, Louis spent some time in Burma, notably as deputy assistant Adjutant-General in Rangoon. During a career of 28 years, he spent 21 abroad and while coming through largely unscathed, was shocked by the death of a close friend who was mauled by a lion.
Eventually, though, his luck ran out and, by then a colonel, he was killed in France by a German sniper.
It may seem odd that a clergyman should have produced five such adventurous sons, but the indomitable family spirit went back to the founder of Sandhurst.
The Le Marchant name is still regarded with affection in the Cotswolds, where most of the family is buried.
* Dying for Glory: The Adventurous Lives of Five Cotswold Brothers, by Michael Boyes, is published by Phillimore at £20. His book, A Victorian Rector and Nine Old Maids, tells the story of the Le Marchant sisters.
Article posted on 1st September, 2007 - 12.00am
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