A certain type of Englishman

AT 3pm on 17 June 1875, Colonel Valentine Baker, then the assistant quartermaster-general of the British Army, boarded the firstclass compartment of a train at Liphook, Hants, en route to a dinner in London with the commander-in-chief, the Duke of Cambridge. By the time he got out at Waterloo a scandal had taken place that was to ruin his career.

Train compartments in those days had no connecting corridors, and the only other occupant of the compartment was Miss Rebecca Kate Dickinson, "an unaccompanied woman of good appearance" who had boarded at Midhurst and was on her way to Switzerland. It was a warm day and the windows were open and two respectable young men were in the next compartment.

After several stops there was an uninterrupted half-hour run from Woking to Waterloo, but at 4.45pm a bricklayer employed by the railway company saw a young woman half-hanging out of a firstclass compartment as the train passed Walton station at 40mph. The train was brought to an emergency halt outside Esher where Miss Dickinson told the driver and guard that the colonel had "insulted her" and "would not leave her alone".

The next day Baker was arrested for indecent assault and two sensational trials followed. His contention that he had saved the woman's life after she had hysterically overreacted to a harmless gesture was rather undermined by testimony that his flies had been undone and that he had told a police sergeant at Waterloo: "I'm sorry I did it." Nor was his refusal to say anything in his own defence, supposedly lest as a gentleman he impugned the honour of a lady by calling her a liar, helpful to his cause.

Baker's sentence of a pounds 500 fine and a year's imprisonment was followed by his being cashiered from the army. He was forced to join the Turkish army, where he served with distinction, and he wound up commanding the Egyptian police force.

He is not really the sort of man who was representative of the Victorian empirebuilders, but the author has chosen him, along with his brother Sir Samuel Baker, the explorer and big-game hunter, as well as Gordon of Khartoum, to exemplify those "imperialist romantics" who supposedly exhibited a spirit of overexuberant overconfidence in the British Empire at its high noon. He even dates that moment of high noon, rather originally, to the day that British troops wore red tunics for the last time in action, on the Nile steamer Bordein as it made its way to Khartoum past where Gordon's severed head "was jammed into the fork of a tree on the right bank of the river".

Also dragooned into Thompson's thesis are a rather fraudulent David Livingstone, Sir Richard Burton, "the very very model of a modern majorgeneral", Sir Garnet Wolseley and the wonderful Captain Frederick Burnaby, who before a Dervish spear felled him at the battle of Abu Klea in 1885 was said to be able to pick up a small pony under each arm. His favourite party trick was to vault a billiard table virtually from a standing start.

In fact these men, only some of whom knew each other, cannot really be seen as representative of anything much besides themselves, and certainly not of imperial hubris. This book, which despite the absence of footnotes is admirable enough at shedding light on some little-known characters and episodes, therefore lacks a convincing theme.

The truly heroic figure is the 17-year-old Hungarian blonde who Sir Samuel Baker bought in a Balkan sex-slave market for pounds 5 in 1859, took to Alexandria, bestowed the name Florence upon and eventually married, to the shock of the rest of his family. The cool, brave and shrewd Lady Baker travelled the world with her husband, although she was not received at court. The day after her husband died in Devon in 1893 a 50-gallon butt of claret was delivered from his wine merchants in London. Florence gave it to the butler and told him to entertain his friends.

What a girl.

Copyright 2002
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