Flight by Elephant (10 page)

Mackrell said he would leave for the Chaukan the following morning. Millar wanted to accompany him, but Mackrell and Leyden wouldn’t hear of it. Millar was in no condition for a Sunday stroll let alone another visit to the Chaukan Pass. Millar would write, ‘As one of our party was required to show Mackrell the way we had come, my brave little tracker, Goal Miri, volunteered to accompany the rescue party back, despite the fact that his condition was none too good.’ This offer was accepted, and it was agreed Goal Miri would be paid 200 rupees for his trouble. As a measure of this, a tea plantation labourer of the time earned perhaps five rupees a week. Later, Millar, Leyden and Goal Miri went off to slightly more comfortable quarters, while Mackrell wrapped himself in a blanket and slept on the floor of the hut.

It continued to rain all night.

Guy Millar slept well on that night of 4 June, in spite of the roaring rain. After all, he had accomplished his mission. He wrote, ‘I knew that if anyone would succeed, Mackrell would, and my relief at his presence there that night cannot be adequately expressed.’

Who was this man who had inspired such hope?

You might say that, as a grown man, Gyles Mackrell lived a
Boy’s Own
fantasy – compensation, perhaps, for an actual boyhood played out in a very minor key.

He was born on 9 October 1888 in Marylebone, London, second son of Doctor Alfred Sextus Mackrell and his wife, Mary. From 1898 to 1905, he boarded at the school commonly known as Epsom College, which had been opened in 1855 as the Royal Medical Benevolent College. As such it had been in effect an orphanage for the sons of dead doctors, a profession with a lower status then than now.

By the time Mackrell went there, Epsom College was an English public school of the heartier sort, catering especially to the sons of medical men, although it continued to take in orphaned or disadvantaged sons of doctors as well. The boys in this latter category were said to be ‘on the foundation’ – they did not pay fees. Gyles Mackrell was not ‘on the foundation’, and nor was his older brother and only sibling, Ashton Mackrell, who also attended the school, this even though the boys’ father, Alfred, had died in 1891, when Gyles was three. It was more common in those days for a parent to die at an early age, but the acknowledged psychological effect has presumably remained constant: the loss of a guiding authority makes the bereaved child more than averagely determined to impose his own pattern on the world. It would take Gyles Mackrell a while to get round to this, however.

Epsom College preached
mens sana in corpore sano
, and, having medical associations, it was in the vanguard of this movement. It was Victorian Gothic, high-ceilinged, and would have been draughty even if it hadn’t been set high on the South Downs, well away from the possibility of contagion by Epsom itself. The location of the school chapel, 500 yards from the main building, gave the opportunity for a bracing walk every morning at 6.30, after a night in a Spartan dormitory under a single blanket. In 1862, Epsom College had become the first school in Britain to have its own swimming pool – not a heated swimming pool, mind you – and a benefactor of the school in the early 1870s was Dr Erasmus Wilson, who had founded the first Chair of Dermatology at London University, and who popularized the idea of the daily (cold) bath.

Back in the 1870s the school had been not so much hearty as wild. External inspections uncovered bad teaching, poor morale, bullying and theft among the boys, and the nature of the school in Mackrell’s time was determined by the occurrence in 1882 of a mutiny –
The
Mutiny, as the records have it, of 1882. Trouble had been brewing for a while that summer. As an Old Boy, memoirist John Gimlette recalled that the pupils had mounted an expedition to beat up their long-standing class enemies ‘the stable boys in the stables at Burgh Heath near Tattenham Corner … Nearly the whole school set out with cricket stumps and sticks to give them a hiding, consequently nearly everybody was absent from roll call.’ For this, as for most other transgressions, they would be beaten.

Soon afterwards, ‘A French boy was sent down for setting the gorse on fire, and then Lloyd, the captain of the school, was caught with a betting book and, to our great indignation and astonishment, expelled.’ Lloyd was supposed to go back home to the Isle of Wight, but he did not, and we can imagine the masters swallowing hard as he loomed up the next morning on the back playground. Lloyd was popular. He’d been the captain of the First XI and the First XV, and an elite bodyguard made up of members of those teams formed around him. There would be no roll calls and no classes that day. The shout went up, ‘To the Downs!’ They would go and beat up the stable boys at Tattenham Corner! … But no, they’d already done that, so they went to the dining hall instead, where, coming upon a school waiter known as ‘Red Herring’, they pushed him down the serving lift. ‘But he was not much hurt,’ according to Gimlette. The headmaster, Dr West, ‘supported by two sergeants’, entered the dining hall. ‘Boys,’ he cried, ‘desist!’ – at which every loose object in the place was picked up and hurled at him. Dr West cancelled term prematurely, and all the boys were sent home. The school had suffered a sort of nervous breakdown. The Reverend Dr West was replaced by The Reverend W. Cecil Wood; better qualified teachers were appointed, and, after the school had been repaired, it was refurbished. Muscular Christianity was determinedly brought about. Games were made compulsory, the chapel was extended; discipline was tightened up. According to Alan Scadding, historian of the school, Epsom College was ‘not a happy school in the 1890s’, but it was a more efficient one.

A word that comes up in connection with Gyles Mackrell, as he seemed to others in his later years, is ‘shy’ and – perhaps made reticent by the death of his father – he obviously did not put himself forward as a schoolboy. A browse through the school magazines of the time reveals that he was not in any First XV or First XI, or indeed any Second XV or Second XI. Neither his batting average nor his bowling analysis is deemed worthy of mention. He is not listed as winner of the Carr Divinity Prize, the Sherry Divinity Prize, the Engledue Latin Verse Prize, or even the Wilson Prize for Carpentry … or any prize at all – ‘And there were a lot of prizes at the school,’ says Alan Scadding. ‘They were an attempt to encourage the boys after the mutiny.’ Fittingly enough, given the amount of time he would spend in the jungle, Mackrell did join the Natural History Society, but even here he was low-key.

He did not participate in what appears to have been the main activity of the Natural History Society: measuring the amount of rain falling on Epsom. He did not log the number of times he saw or heard a song thrush. Mackrell may or may not have been one of the boys sitting close to the camera when a photograph was taken of the Society on a picnic on the Downs. More likely, his would be one of the indistinct faces at the far end of the long tablecloth stretched over the grass, on which a few bits of cake are sparsely dotted.

But in July 1901, he did briefly approach centre stage. A report of the recent doings of the Natural History Society states, ‘On a field trip to Oakshott, Mackrell took
Acidalia trigeminata
, an insect new to our lists.’ It is otherwise known as the Treble Brown Spot Moth, and in his beautiful book of 1869,
Illustrated Natural History of British Moths
, Edward Newman writes, ‘The moth appears on the wing in July, and has occurred in Devonshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Berkshire, Suffolk, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire.’ It was pretty rare. Most natural history societies – and there were a lot in Edwardian Britain – would have thought it worth recording.

Epsom College was a cockpit of empire builders; most English public schools of the time could be so described. This was the heyday of the New Imperialism, a systematic promotion of empire in the face of international competition; the magnanimous shouldering of ‘the white man’s burden’. The Boys’ Empire League, founded in 1900, set out its stall as follows: ‘Every member promises to treat all foreigners with Christian Courtesy and, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, to try to do nothing that would lower his country in their eyes.’

A photograph of the school library at Epsom College shows a chilly looking room, rather sparsely furnished with books themselves, but with crossed rifles on the wall along with what look like African tribal shields. In 1899, Lord Rosebery, that great Imperial advocate, became President of the School. On Wednesday 22 November of that year, the Debating Society held a literary evening: ‘Before a poor audience, the following read selections from Rudyard Kipling’s works: A. H. Platt:
Gunga Din
, from
Barrack Room Ballads
; G. Neligan:
Fuzzy-Wuzzy
, from
Barrack Room Ballads
.’ The latter begins, ‘We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,/An’ some of ’em was brave and some was not:/The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;/But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.’

Gyles Mackrell was ‘on the classical side’, which is perhaps why his war diary of the monsoon season of 1942 is so casually elegant. His rankings show him in the middle of the forms in his early years, but sinking. In the lower fourth, he was fifth from bottom out of twenty-two. In the lower fifth, he ended by striking, for once, a resounding note: plum bottom out of twenty. By now, he would have been considering his future. What with being bottom of the class, university was out. He would have been reading in the school magazine of the choices made by Old Boys. Many trained as doctors, mainly at London University, but there was another persistent theme: ‘The Reverend Canon F. E. Carter, of Canterbury, has been appointed to the Deanery of Grahamstown.’ ‘Captain C. S. Spong, Royal Army Medical Corps, and G. D. Hunter, have been awarded the Distinguished Service Order’ in recognition of their services during the Sudan Expedition. ‘R. M. Carter has passed into the Indian Medical Service.’ And then there was his own brother, who, being perhaps even more unacademic than Gyles (Scadding suspects so, having trawled the records of both), was listed in 1901 as follows: ‘A. Mackrell has been appointed to the Indian Staff Corps and has left England for his station in India.’

Here was a route indicated to a perhaps under-confident young man. ‘Going out east’ was a standard option for ‘younger sons’, and
both
the Mackrells were younger sons in that they would have to earn their keep. If you proposed going to India without the top-drawer academic ability required by the Indian Civil Service, then the army was the easiest way, not least because half the British population of India was in the army. There was another option for the less bookish sort of boy: tea growing in Assam. According to Alan Scadding, ‘a number of boys at the school had done very well at that’.

In the event, Gyles Mackrell would do both, as we shall see, and as a result he would step right into the pages of the adventure books in the school library. The reserved and undistinguished schoolboy would find in India a playground far more suited to his nature than the sports fields of Epsom College.

We last saw Sir John Rowland on 17 May. He was being rained upon and besieged by insects in the jungle village he identified as Hpaungmaka. He had just dispatched Millar and Leyden. Shortly afterwards, he also sent some of the porters retained by himself and Rossiter back to Hkam Ho for more rice. The porters returned with the rice on 21 May, but while away they had decided to threaten a strike, since Sir John was keeping three days’ wages in hand. Sir John had an argument with them about this, which he lost. ‘Eventually agreed to pay them daily which is a bad arrangement – however there was no alternative.’

On 22 May, the railway and Rossiter parties set off at a slow pace, together with about thirty porters: enough men carrying enough rice for what Sir John envisaged as a 300-mile trek. ‘During the day’s march,’ he wrote, ‘we followed the Paungma River which we had to cross thirty-six times for some extraordinary reason.’ (The reason would be that the river meandered.) All the time they were climbing towards the Chaukan Pass, and all the time it was pouring with rain. Conversation did not take the form of pleasant chit-chat: Sir John wrote: ‘True, as a leader, I almost – and indeed did – hammer some people and lashed everyone with my tongue when they were for giving up and so drove them along …’

On 24 May, the parties had reached a river called the Nam Yak. It was raining and the river was in heavy flood. Eric Ivan Milne, the forty-three-year-old official of Burma State Railways, was running a temperature. They camped on the ‘wrong’ side of the river, the east side. They had yet to cross it. Their camp involved some tents, some strung tarpaulins and some bamboo and palm-leaf bashas. They lit a fire, and flew a bed sheet from a tall bamboo, in the hope of attracting aeroplanes.

Here, at noon on the 24th, the railway and Rossiter parties were joined by a third lot: seven amiable jungle wallahs-cum-soldiers who had been rapidly co-opted into the effort against the Japanese.

At the time of the invasion, any young British male in Burma became an army officer more or less overnight, the default options being either the above-mentioned Burma Rifles or in the paramilitary Burma Frontier Force. This body (British officers, largely Gurkha soldiery) had been created to do for Burma what the Assam Rifles did for Assam – keep the minorities in line – but it became a more generalized defensive force on the eve of the invasion, before disintegrating under the pressure of events. All of the following four men were in either of these two forces, and their
de facto
leader was the oldest of their number, a thirty-nine-year-old Scotsman called Ritchie Gardiner.

Ritchie Gardiner – and you don’t end up being called Ritchie unless you’re a likeable man – had taken a degree in mining at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow. A requirement of the course was that students spend a year working in a coal mine, and the experience helped develop in Gardiner a social conscience and an interest in politics. In Burma, he rose to become a ‘senior forest man’ with the timber merchants MacGregor’s. As such, he was based in Rangoon, but spent eight months of the year ‘on tour’ in the jungles, which he somehow managed to combine with having a seat on Rangoon City Council. As a responsible and respected citizen of Rangoon, Gardiner had been one of those entrusted with the task of wrecking the city in the face of the Japanese advance – the ‘last ditchers’. Job done, he escaped Burma in a boat from Rangoon, but he then
came back
‘to see if he could be any use’ against the Japanese. He would keep a diary of his second attempt to escape the country.