How many Penguins have I read? A shedfull.
When Prime Minister John Major asked General Sir Mike Jackson how many unexploded mines there were in Yugoslavia that’s the answer he got. The PM JM wanted a number, so an obliging Sapper made something up that was duly entered in Major’s notebook. To digress, Mike Jackson has popped up as an expert historian providing commentary on the really excellent BBC documentary, Rise of the Nazis. Most of my reading has been through Allied eyes but not all: Why Didn’t the Germans Win the War? World War Two Through German Eyes is not a good book; it migrated from Number 56 to Oxfam. The BBC tells the story with commentary from historians in the UK and Germany. The latter are particularly well informed and it makes for compelling viewing without being condescending or simplifying more than necessary. It is what a university tutorial should be but seldom was at Durham.
How many Shelf Lives books have I read? Three of their catalogue of six, Prime Minister, all written by Tony Scotland: Joyride, Gimcrack, and now Bazouker. The Bashi-Bazouks (literally crazy-heads) were irregular, unpaid soldiers in the service of the Ottoman Empire. Not the sort of chaps to take much notice of the Geneva Convention had it existed in the mid 19th century but just the ticket to be British Foreign Legionnaires in the Crimean War. Officially called the British Osmanli Cavalry but known as Beatson’s Horse they were recruited by Major-General William Beatson, “a rebel and a firebrand” Tony Scotland says, to besiege Sebastopol. British officers joining this unit invariably had blotted their copy books and Beatson’s Horse proved a hindrance in a war in which British incompetence was already inculcated.
Every family has its black sheep (The Ghastly Affair) and Bazouker is a biography of Captain Lennox Berkeley, 7th Earl of Berkeley, the Bazouker of the title. He let the side down, as school masters are fond of saying, and it makes for a better book than one about a Berkeley full of righteous rectitude.
“Perhaps no Berkeley has been less distinguished and yet more colourful – and has so nearly drowned – than Captain George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, de jure 7th Earl of Berkeley, who never took his seat in the House of Lords, never occupied Berkeley Castle and is absent from all the standard reference books. Wife-stealer, serial gambler and undischarged bankrupt, he was a musician (who played several instruments, and entertained some of the celebrities of the Belle Époque), and an accomplished linguist with Radical sympathies. He was also a military adventurer – as flamboyant, and flawed, as Flashman. So comprehensive were his misdeeds, so far short of his glorious hopes were his achievements, and so complete the disgrace he brought on his family, that none of his papers, letters or family photographs have been allowed to survive.” (Bazouker, Tony Scotland)
He didn’t quite manage to sink the family. His grandson is the composer, Sir Lennox Berkeley (1903 – 1989), and his great-grandson Michael, Lord Berkeley, presents Private Passions on BBC Radio 3.
