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Any novelist approaching a publisher with an idea for a series of stories centred around a cowardly, bullying racist, who is also a serial philanderer, would nowadays be very quickly shown the door. Yet George MacDonald Fraser achieved celebrity and surprising academic respect for just such a series, which consisted of 12 books published between 1969 and 2005.
The series is based on two literary devices: first, that its chief protagonist, Sir Harry Flashman, is the bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ pious 1857 moral tale Tom Brown’s School Days; second, that the stories are in fact drawn from a set of unpublished papers discovered in a tea chest after lying hidden for 50 years. This allows the author to pose as the ‘editor’, and to insert a multitude of scholarly footnotes. So successful was this device that the first novel, Flashman, was assumed by nearly a third of American reviewers to be an authentic set of military memoirs.
The subsequent novels were equally successful. They are stirring, rip-roaring adventure tales, based on detailed and accurate research on the colonial wars and adventures of the mid- to late 19th century, and they deliver biting satirical attacks on some of the most cherished heroes of this period.
While MacDonald Fraser, in his time, felt under attack from ‘politically correct’ critics, in reality his books have arguably fared better in this respect than those of his contemporary Roald Dahl. Though Harry Flashman uses the overtly racist language of his day, it is clear that he is not a character we are expected to emulate, and it is also apparent that he often has a lot more respect for the British empire’s opponents than for the traders, slavers, preachers, and soldiers of his own race.
The result is that the narrator highlights people who are largely written out of Western histories. Without Flashman and MacDonald Fraser, countless readers would never have heard of Yaqub Bey, Rani Lakshmibai, Queen Ranavalona, Mangas Coloradas, and Duleep Singh.
Flashman has four chief talents: prodigious sexual powers, brilliant horsemanship, an uncanny gift for languages, and a talent for disguise that enables him to merge with people from a multitude of cultures. Thus his first recourse when in danger is to gallop away, but, when that fails, he deploys his other talents to hide in plain sight. This, along with MacDonald Fraser’s extraordinary research, gives us an inside view of indigenous people whose stories were for many decades seldom told in conventional histories.
Avidly read
This is not to say that MacDonald Fraser was anti-imperialist: far from it. He was a man of very traditional views, who not only saw the empire as a force for good but also doggedly fought for it in the jungles of Burma during the Second World War. His personal account of that campaign, 1993’s Quartered Safe Out Here, is commonly described as being, in its own right, one of the finest military memoirs.
But it also contains a lot of bitter commentary on what he saw as the decline of Britain, inextricably linked in his mind to the loss of the colonies, especially India. Yet his scrupulous respect for scholarship is too great to prevent him mercilessly exposing the excesses of empire, such as the appalling slave-ship voyage in Flash for Freedom! (1971) and the outrageous destruction of the Chinese Summer Palace in the Second Opium War in Flashman and the Dragon (1985). Consequently, the books were avidly read both by traditionalists, who enjoyed stirring tales of empire, and by students, who saw them as subversive of colonialism.
The anti-hero Flashman is disarmingly honest about his cowardice – he frequently refers to his bowels ‘dissolving’ in fright, and he makes every effort to avoid combat. Through comical misadventures and misunderstandings he finds himself in the thick of the action, as during the Charge of the Light Brigade, when his alcoholic excesses produce a bout of noisy flatulence that terrifies his horse into a headlong gallop. The result is that Flashman finds himself heaped with honours, titles, and medals, and unwillingly propelled into more and more dangerous missions.
This itself is an ironic commentary on a system that feels the need to label some people as heroes and others as cowards. As an infantry veteran of some of the most bitter close-quarters action of the Second World War, MacDonald Fraser was better qualified than most to have a certain cynical perspective on the whole process.
This cynicism is extended to those who order men into battle. Flashman has the misfortune to be surrounded by people who place him in danger. There are elderly aristocratic incompetents in authority in places like India, Crimea, and Afghanistan. And then he also encounters some of the most eccentric, colourful, and reckless – and equally lethal – adventurers of any historical epoch, such as George Armstrong Custer in Flashman and the Redskins (1982).
In spite of his many vices, Flashman is invariably the unheard voice of reason, who correctly assesses the dangers, and gives due credit to the skill and courage of his adversaries when his own superiors are dismissing them as ignorant savages.
Prescient
Most of the Flashman novels cover what we would now call ‘asymmetrical warfare’. They would be informative reading for any politician or senior commander who is considering pitting conventional armies against irregular forces.
For instance, the first Flashman novel is – by one of those extraordinary quirks of fate that so appealed to the author – the most relevant to our day. The disastrous Western evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021 would have drawn a bitter smile from MacDonald Fraser had he been alive to see it. The first book is set in 1842, and describes the shambolic and tragic evacuation of Kabul, the Afghan capital, by British regular and Indian Army units and their helpless female and child camp followers. In the retreat that followed, a column of 4,500 British and Indian troops and up to 14,000 civilians was progressively eroded by hit-and-run attacks and by bitter winter weather, until just one European, Assistant Surgeon William Brydon, rode to safety at Jalalabad.
Flashman’s commentary on the leadership of the hapless Lord Elphinstone (nicknamed ‘Elphy Bey’), who was in charge of the evacuation, is unflinching and eerily prescient:
Possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason of Elphy Bey and his advisors. If you had taken the greatest military geniuses of the ages, placed them in command of our army, and asked them to ruin it utterly as speedily as possible, they could not – I mean it seriously – have done it as surely and swiftly as he did.
Captured by Afghans, Flashman is a hapless witness of the famous last stand by British troops at Gandamak in January 1842, and of the pitiful fate of the civilian survivors who, huddled in caves, die one by one of starvation and cold. Needless to say, Flashman escapes, and unwittingly becomes a hero by dint of being the only survivor of an outpost at the fort of Jalalabad, with the men who did the real fighting having died while he hid.
The novels are full of high comedy and still stand up well as terrific adventure tales, but these damning last words uttered by Flashman after the Battle of the Alma in 1973’s Flashman at the Charge perhaps best summarise the author’s serious message about those who sentimentalise war:
My stars, wouldn’t I just like to take one of our Ministers, or street-corner orators, or blood-lusting, breakfast-scoffing papas, over such a place as the Alma hills – not to let him see, because he’d just tut-tut and look anguished and have a good pray and not give a damn – but to shoot him in the belly with a soft-nosed bullet and let him die screaming where he belonged. That’s all they deserve.
George MacDonald Fraser
Born: 2 April 1925
Died: 2 January 2008
Nationality: British
The son of a doctor, George MacDonald Fraser was educated in Carlisle and later Glasgow. He was in his mid-20s when the Second World War broke out, and, following time in Burma, served as a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders in the Middle East. His career in journalism began shortly after the war, and he eventually worked his way up to be deputy editor of The Glasgow Herald. He left this job aged 44 to concentrate on writing Flashman, despite having no qualifications as an historian. A prolific author, he also published several volumes of short stories and two memoirs, as well as writing screenplays for several Hollywood films. He had two sons and a daughter with his wife Kathleen, and lived on the Isle of Man until the end of his life.
– Nick Spenceley
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