Bearskins
Tom Hartman
Pillars of Monarchy: Royal Guards 1400-1984 Philip Mansel (Quartet £18.50) This is 'not a work of military history' says the author in his introduction, by Which he means that he does not deal with the martial achievements of the various Royal Guards under examination, except in so far as they helped to terminate or prolong the rule of the monarch they were supposed to be guarding. The distinction, however, seems almost too fine to be Worth making, for the book is concerned exclusively with soldiers and, as a work of history, it reveals a depth of research that can seldom, if ever, have been matched in a book of this length. The text runs to 167 quarto pages, perhaps a quarter of which are taken up by illustrations. There then follow 15 pages of references and 15 of bibliography. At roughly 48 books per page, we have the names of perhaps 720 books consulted, as Well as the mass of documents and memor- anda referred to in the references which do not appear in the bibliography. One work Which is not included in the list is A. G. Ma edonell's excellent work Napoleon and
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Marshals, at the end of which can be found the following Bibliographical Note: annprofoundly suspicious of almost all D■bhographies. Nothing is easier than to hire someone to visit the British Museum and make a most impressive list of author- ities, which will persuade the non- susPecting reader that the author is a Monument of erudition and laboriousness.' This is not to suggest for one moment that 14r Mansel has not read every single book that he lists, but rather that perhaps the Monument to his erudition is a trifle out of Proportion. The book attempts to cover all the Royal Guards of all the monarchies of Europe and the Middle East from 1400 to the Present day. Given such a wide canvas, it is Perhaps less surprising that so many sources had to be consulted. It is not in the least surprising that the result is sometimes hard to digest when so many facts have to be Crammed into so little space. Sentences such as 'By September, there were 6837 French, 1232 Italian, 1165 Belgian, 524 Dutch, and 302 German Gardes d'Hon- neue do not trip easily off the tongue. Nevertheless, on the whole the author has risen splendidly to the challenge he has set hi Itself and the book is a mine of fascinat- ng information. It is not easy to see where, if at all, the author draws a distinction between soldiers specially employed in guarding the person of the monarch and
fighting soldiers upon whom the monarch had bestowed his patronage. Sometimes the numbers mentioned make it seem unlikely that many of them can have had very close contact with their ruler, but that is a small complaint to make of an other- wise excellently balanced book.
He gives many examples of the loyalty of Royal Guards to their monarch, to which I will add the following very small footnote to history. In December, 1936, just after the abdication of King Edward VIII, the Captain of the King's Company, that is to say the Officer Commanding the senior company of the First Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, was one Major Tony Magnay, known to his friends as 'Mad Melton' Magnay, since they maintained that his brain had been affected by fre- quent falls out hunting in Leicestershire. The Duke of Windsor, as he had now become, having crossed the Channel in the destroyer Fury, had reached Schloss En- zesfeld, the home of Baron Eugene de Rothschild near Vienna, when Major Mag- nay summoned Captain Napoleon Brinck- man, the Second Captain, to the Company Bunk (as the Company Office is known in the Brigade) at Wellington Barracks. 'I want you to hire enough buses to take the King's Company to Vienna,' he said, 'we are following our King into exile.' Fortu- nately, Captain Brinckman decided not to act upon Major Magnay's instructions, but it is interesting to reflect upon what would have happened if 90 or 100 Guardsmen had arrived in Vienna to add to the burdens of the already sadly overtaxed Major Met- calfe.
The book is somewhat lacking in humour, which is perhaps as it should be when dealing with the solemn pageantry of Royal Guards. Not that it is always as solemn as the monarch might expect. When the Guard is changed at Bucking- ham Palace, a ritual is observed, called the Ceremony of the Keys, whereat the Com- mander of the Old Guard hands over some keys to the Commander of the New Guard. On one occasion, the Commander of the Old Guard was Lord Edward Hay, and of the New Guard a Greek of distinguished family whose name was so long and com- plicated that no one could pronounce it and he was simply known as `Dildo'. Lord Edward decided that, under the circumst- ances, it would be more appropriate to hand over a French letter instead of the keys. This so surprised the unfortunate Greek that he dropped the offending ob- ject on the ground. When he stooped to pick it up, his bearskin fell off, he tripped over his sword and joined the French letter and the bearskin on the ground. All this took place some time in the Thirties on the forecourt at Buckingham Palace with the tourists pressed against the railings, pre- sumably much enjoying the performance.
In these unhappy times, when Bernard Levin is obliged to take even the OUP to task for sloppy proofreading, it is nice to be able to say that this book is refreshingly free from typographical errors, though the name of Jock Lewis of the SAS is spelt wrong. The author has not, however, been well served by his designer. The pictures to several captions have been muddled up, which is admitted on an erratum slip, but references in the text to various pictures seem also to have gone awry. The caption to one illustration says ' . . . like the toast to Queen Victoria in illustration 62'. The only reference to drink in the caption to illustration 62 reads: 'The drunken officers and weeping prostitutes confirm the asso- ciation of the guard with drink and sex.' She would not have been amused.
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