Life of Charles Townshend (1861-1914)

For another article about the same person, see Charles Townshend (British Army officer).

Major General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, KCB, DSO (21 February 1861 – 18 May 1924) was a British Imperial soldier who during the First World War led an overreaching military campaign in Mesopotamia, which led to the defeat and destruction of his command. Known as the Siege of Kut, it lasted from December 1915 to April 1916 and was possibly the worst suffered by the Allies during the war.

Early life

Townshend grew up poor in an otherwise prominent family, the son of a railroad clerk, Charles Thornton Townshend (1840–1889), and Louise Graham, a Melbourne native who brought no dowry. He was the great-great-grandson of Field Marshal George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend. His paternal grandfather, Rev. George Osborne Townshend (1801–1876), was the son of politician Lord John Townshend, the second son of the first marquess.

He was very ambitious and nourished high hopes of inheriting the family title and the family estate at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, as his cousin Viscount Raynham, the heir to the title, had no children until later in life. He was educated at Cranleigh School and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. On graduation from Sandhurst, he was granted a commission with the Royal Marine Light Infantry in 1881.

Townshend was a well-known "playboy" officer in his youth, famous for his womanizing, drinking, for playing the banjo while singing very bawdy songs and for spending an excessive amount of his time in the music halls. He was often described by those who knew him as a "ladies man" who was very popular with the opposite sex owing to his dashing personality and good looks. He was also known for his theatrical style, and he liked to associate with actors.

In 1884, Townshend was part of the relief expedition to rescue the besieged army of General Charles Gordon, better known to the British public as "Chinese Gordon", at Khartoum. As a Royal Marine officer, he strictly speaking should not had been part of an Army expedition, but he wrote to Field Marshal Garnet Wolsely asking if he could go, and his request was granted. The way that Gordon had defied the orders of the government to leave Khartoum, knowing full well that the government could not abandon a national hero like himself and would have to send out a relief expedition to save him made a great impression on Townshend. Even through Gordon had flagrantly and repeatedly ignored orders to evacuate Khartoum, the British press had generally portrayed "Chinese Gordon" as a Christian hero and martyr who had died heroically resisting the Islamic army of the Mahdi, and attacked the government of William Gladstone as abject cowards whose efforts to save Gordon were too little, too late. The power of the press and its ability to rouse public opinion in favour of heroic generals besieged by Islamic fanatics was noted by Townshend at the time. In January 1885, he fought at the Battle of Abu Klea, which was his first battle and the first time he killed a man. In 1886, he transferred from the Royal Marines to the British Army, largely because he felt it offered better prospects of promotion. The American historian John Semple Galbraith wrote that "Townshend was an inveterate self-advertiser, constantly and actively promoting his own brilliance in the hope of recognition by a grateful country, preferably in the form of a KCB."

A passionate Francophile who spoke fluent French, Townshend preferred to be addressed as "Alphonse" – something which often annoyed his colleagues, who regarded his "Frenchified" manners as extremely snobbish and off-putting. An intensely ambitious man, he was constantly writing letters to friends, relatives and anyone who might be able to help him achieve a promotion, saying that he desperately needed a promotion and asking them to "pull some strings" to help him. Townshend's biographer, the British historian A.J. Barker noted, "Anybody who could further his career was invariably called up to help, often in the most pleading of terms". Sean McKnight, the Deputy Head of War Studies at Sandhurst, called him "just about the most dramatically ambitious senior officer I think I've ever come across. He's never content, he's always looking for the second or third job down the line, and one of the most irritating facets of him is, even when he's got something he should be very happy with, he's not content". Townshend's endlessly ambitious streak, together with his tendency to view whatever position he held as insufficient for him, and a penchant for writing letters attacking whoever was his commanding officer as incompetent to their commanding officer, made him very unpopular with his other officers, who viewed him variously as a treacherous intriguer forever scheming for a promotion, a pathetic whiner who was never happy with what he had, and a dangerous megalomaniac whose vainglorious quest for yet another promotion led him to take gratuitous risks. The British historian Geoffrey Regan described him as an officer whose high intelligence and abilities were marred by his egomania.

Imperial soldier

He served in the Sudan Expedition of 1884, then on 12 December 1885 he was appointed on probation to the Indian Staff Corps and was permanently appointed on 15 January 1886. He went on to serve on the Hunza Naga expedition in 1891. Townshend was involved in the storming of the Nilt fort held by the Hunza tribesmen, writing in his diary on 20 December 1891:

I write this at Thol. It has been a real day of success. Thirty shots from each corps paraded on the ridge this morning and we fired on the sangars so accurately that they could hardly get a shot back.

On 4 May 1893, Townshend left to take command of a fort at Gupis, writing to a girlfriend in London:

This is a most awful place. You never saw such a desert. Just see if you can find it on the map. It is north of Gilgit. However, I know you will never find it, and it don’t much matter, but here I am stuck down with a few troops".

In 1894, while commanding the newly built fort at Gupis, he entertained the visiting George Curzon, "through a long evening with French songs to the accompaniment of a banjo." At Fort Gupis, the Francophile Townshend decorated the interior walls of the fort with illustrations advertising the latest plays popular in Paris. In January 1895, he was sent to north of Chitral, a remote town in the extreme north of India almost on the borders with the Russian Empire in what is now Pakistan in an area known as "the Roof of the World" owing to its extreme height.

Townshend made his name in England as a British Imperial hero with the assistance of London's Fleet Street's coverage of his conduct as the besieged garrison commander during the Siege of Chitral Fort on the North West Frontier in 1895, for which he was made Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). The North-West Frontier of India comprised what is now the "badlands" that make up the border between today's Pakistan and Afghanistan, a remote, backward area inhibited by Muslim Pashtun hill tribes that were in a state of more or less permanent low-level warfare with the tribes on the British side of the frontier, constantly revolting against the authority of the Raj under the banner of jihad, while raiders from Afghanistan were crossing over to wage jihad against the British infidels. The British Crown Colony of India comprised all of what have since become India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The British never fully controlled the North-West Frontier, and from 2 March – 20 April 1895 an Indian force under the command of Captain Townshend sent to maintain a friendly ruler in remote Chitral was besieged instead by the local tribesmen. After being defeated by the tribesmen following an attempt to storm the village, despite being outnumbered, Townshend ordered a retreat into the fort, writing:

We had a long way to go; and from all the hamlets as we approached Chitral we were fired into from orchards and houses right and left, front and rear! It was now very dark. I saw there was nothing for it but to double or else none of us would reach the fort alive, and this we did.

During the siege, he decorated his room with the latest Art Nouveau posters from Paris promoting the current plays. On 24 March 1895, Townshend wrote in his diary: "Incessant rain. There is nothing for the horses to eat, so we eat the horses." After a siege of forty-six days by Muslim Hunza tribesmen, the fortress was relieved by Captain Fenton Aylmer, and Townshend returned to Britain a national hero. The fact that he and his four hundred Indian troops were vastly outnumbered by the Hunza tribesmen during the siege further added to his heroic lustre.

Upon his return to London, Townshend had dinner with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, who publicly thanked him as a hero of the recent campaign, an experience that helped to increase the size of his already ample ego. Afterwards, he was personally made a member of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath by Queen Victoria, which was a rare honor for a captain in the Indian Army. His fame allowed him to develop friendships with the two social groups whose approval he most craved-the aristocracy and actors, especially the stars of the West End theatre scene. He visited the family that rented Balls Park from the Townshend family, leading him to write in his diary:

The Phillips were very kind to me, and I spent all Sunday going about the house and grounds. It is most awfully sad to think of it all. A splendid old family like ours, and Lord Townshend cannot now afford to live at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, which is let to Sir Edmund Lacon, or at Balls Park, let to Mr Phillips; and from what I heard from Lord St. Levan the other day, Balls Park will have to be sold and most of the land at Raynham as well. To think of it all, and the last century there was no family more powerful than ours. …I wonder if ever I shall be the means of restoring some of the old prestige to the family.

A keen amateur military historian who took the study of military history very seriously, Townshend had developed a set of ideas about the "principle of economy of force", the "principle of mass" and the "adoption of the Napoleonic principles by Moltke", which he believed would guarantee victory to any general who followed them. A military intellectual and a Francophile, he was one of the few British officers who before 1914 had studied the writings of Ferdinand Foch, regarded at the time as France's premier military intellectual and via Foch, he discovered the writings of General Carl von Clausewitz. The British historian Hew Strachan described him thusly:

Townshend was a cultured man. He married a French wife, he was very fond of all things French, and he saw that as part of his character. And in many ways therefore not a typical Army officer of the day, another reason for his being seen to be slightly out of the mainstream professionally. In fact, he was wasn't a comfortable man from the point of view of others in the Mess.

Many officers found the proudly intellectual, Francophile "Alphonse" Townshend a difficult man to deal with, but the charismatic Townshend was very popular with the soldiers he commanded, both British and Indian. He made himself popular with his men by playing and singing obscene, sexually explicit French songs in both French and English on his banjo.

He was attached to the British Egyptian army and, as commanding officer of the 12th Sudanese Battalion, he fought in the Sudan at the Battle of Atbara and the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. In January 1896, he received a letter from Herbert Kitchener, who wrote that he wanted him to serve under his command in Egypt, which served as a measure of Townshend's fame that a general would ask a mere captain not even under his command to take charge of one of his battalions. During battles with the Islamic fundamentalist Ansar of the Sudan from 1896 to 1899, culminating in Omdurman, he was promoted by Kitchener to major and was mentioned in dispatches for outstanding bravery for the fourth and fifth time. Commanding the 12th Sudanese Battalion revealed the paradoxical attitudes held by him to non-white peoples, contrasting his care for his men and great pride in their achievements yet assuming the automatic superiority of the British over anyone not white, and he did not hesitate to blame failures of his men on their skin color. On 7 March 1896, he described the men of the 12th Sudanese Battalion as: "I am very pleased with the physique of the men. They are fine strapping blacks, mostly tall. I felt quite small inspecting them. … I felt I had a stroke of luck in getting command of this regiment." On 5 June 1896, he first encountered the Ansar, whom the British incorrectly called the "Dervishes" at the Battle of Ferkeh. Kitchener defeated the Ansar and Townshend wrote about the battle in his diary:

Suddenly Burn-Murdoch sent his galloper to me to say that numbers of Dervishes were about to break out on our right, where the guns had gone, and ordered me to proceed there and head them back. I took two companies with me at the double… When we topped the rise I deployed on the move, moving on in line, and could then see the Dervishes in white groups coming out of a nullah in the rocks in front, but evidently wavering. I poured a hot fire into them, and they fled right and left. The show was over...The Sirdar [Kitchener] rode up about 9 a.m. He was very pleased and chatted for some time. … Our casualties amounted to 100 killed and wounded, and the Dervishes to about 1,200. Making a rough calculation, there were about 2,500 Dervishes in Firkhet, and we were at least 9,000 men with good guns and ammunition and Maxims.

Besides battling the Ansar, Townshend spent his time perfecting his French, reading books of military history and French novels, learning Arabic and training his Sudanese soldiers when not entertaining them with his banjo.

The years from 1896 to 1898 were some of the a busy time for Townshend, as he spent half of his time fighting the Ansar in the Sudan and the other half romancing the French aristocrat Alice Cahan d'Anvers whom he first met in Luxor when visiting Egyptian ruins on 19 February 1897, and whom he followed back to Cairo. On 22 June 1897, Townshend wrote in his diary in his post in the Sudan:

The letter of the Comtesse D’Anvers is the sweetest I have ever had in my life. She writes as a mother to me. Never have I been touched like this. She and her daughter Alice are the best friends I have, and I look forward only to the time when I can get home and see them again.

On 10 September 1897, Townshend wrote in his diary:

This evening I gave an entertainment for the Battalion. This is a big sort of show called by the Sudanese a “Darluka.” Much “boosa” or Sudanese beer is given out, and everyone turned up at the 12th Sudanese quarters at 6.30. Colonel Lewis and I paid them a visit after mess. All the tribes danced to the music of tom-toms and the accompaniment of singing in perfect time....In the end they all got very drunk [men and women] and abandoned themselves to fiercer orgies. I was discreet and left the scene early. … Poor devils, why should they not amuse themselves in their own fashion? and, after all, as Sir Richard Burton said, morality is largely a question of geography.

Thoughts of Cahen D'Anvers only took up part of his time as Townshend often found engaged in fierce fighting with the Ansar as he wrote about the Battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898 that:

Alternately firing and rushing forward, I rapidly approached the Dervish position. The men were dropping fairly fast. … I led each rush myself, sounding the “cease fire” on my whistle, which the men obeyed very well. Then I dashed through the ranks, leading the Battalion about thirty yards ahead, the men following excellently. … A lot of men were firing as I called on the 12th to charge, waving them on. They broke into a rush with cheers we swept into the zareeba. How I wasn’t hit I don’t know.

Kitchener was determined to have a railroad rather the boats on the Nile supply his army as he advanced into the Sudan, and assigned its construction to a Canadian railroad builder, Sir Percy Girouard. As Girouard built the railroad from Cairo to supply Kitchener's army as it advanced on Khartoum, Townshend often had time for leave. On 8 May 1898 during a visit to Paris, Townshend wrote about his latest encounter with Cahen D'Anvers:

At last we were together. I had long loved Alice Cahen D’Anvers and she loves me. Before luncheon, while we stood looking at the log fire in the library, I told her that whether I left the Sudan directly after Khartoum depended on her. If she would marry me I would leave it directly after we had taken Khartoum. Then she said: “If it depends on me you will not stay in the Sudan very long.” I drew her to me and kissed her, putting my arms around her dear neck. It was worth waiting for, and all I had suffered last year, to be rewarded like this.

Shortly afterwards, he returned to the Sudan to resume his battles with the Ansar. Regarding Kitchener, he wrote:

I have the greatest admiration of the Sirdar as an organiser, the first of his day, at any rate as regards Egypt. He has repainted the map from Halfa to Khartoum, and has thrown open wide the gate to the mysteries of Central Africa and the Lakes. … With all this, I do not think he is the man to lead an army in the field; he is not a leader of men, like Sir Redvers Buller, for instance.

At the Battle of Omdurman, Townshend wrote:

The masses of the enemy began rushing and cheering, the Emirs leading them with flags just as one sees with the Pathans on the North-West Frontier of India. I now began to think that it would not do to wait until this mass got much closer, so I sang out for sights to be put at 600 yards, and then opened with heavy independent fire, and in a short while our line was all smoke and a ceaseless rattle of Martini rifles. The enemy came on till they reached 400 yards, and they seemed to enter a rain of bullets. Struck by a leaden tempest, they bundled over in heaps, and soon they stood huddled over in groups under the retaining power of the Martini Henry. I saw a brave man leading them with a large flag ( I have his flag), I have never seen a braver. Alone he came on and on, until about 150 yards from us, and then he and his flag fell like a piece of crumpled white paper on the ground, and lay motionless.

After the annihilating defeat of the Ansar, as Townshend looked over the battlefield full of thousands and thousands of dead Ansar, he wrote in his diary, "I think Gordon has been avenged now". Townshend's "playboy" life-style finally came to an end when he married at the age of thirty-seven, which was late by the standards of the time. After Omdurman, he went to France and on 22 November 1898 married Alice Cahen D'Anvers in a Church of England ceremony at Chậteau de Champs, despite the fact she was Jewish. Cahen d'Anvers was the daughter of the French aristocrats ennobled under Napoleon III, the Comte Louis Cahen d'Anvers and the Comtesse Cahen d'Anvers, who owned a beautiful estate, the Château de Champs, which was located in the French countryside close to Paris, where Townshend often stayed. Townshend regarded the Château de Champs as the best substitute for Raynham Hall, which he hoped to inherit one day provided that he won enough military glory for the marquess to leave him Raynham Hall in his will. When his duty was not him taking all over the Empire, he preferred to live at the Château de Champs, a place he deeply loved. The Townshends had only one child, a daughter named Audrey.

At this time, Townshend began to overplay his hand and alienated his superiors. When Winston Churchill-who had gotten to know him well in the Sudan-asked him to read over an early draft of his 1899 book The River War, Townshend in his notes attacked allies such as Sir Herbert Kitchener, Sir Archibald Hunter and Hector MacDonald, aka "Fighting Mac", as all having "got a reputation – perhaps greater than they can uphold." After Omdurman, Townshend resigned from the Egyptian Army to take up a staff position in the Punjab, but then refused the job, as he wanted a command in South Africa, writing to both Redvers Buller and Sir Evelyn Wood, asking to be sent to South Africa, where relations with the Transvaal were declining and war was thought likely. After learning that neither Buller and Wood were able or willing to do so, Townshend arrived in India to take the staff command in the Punjab, only to learn the position had already been filled, as he had refused it. He then went to meet the Viceroy Lord Curzon, who then gave him the staff job after all. Shortly afterwards, the 5th Marquis died and Townshend asked for leave to go to England to settle the Townshend family affairs, which greatly annoyed Curzon as this prolonged absence left the staff job in the Punjab empty again.

The Second Boer War began in October 1899, and Townshend left England to go to South Africa, which was a violation of the rules, as he held a commission the Indian Army at the time and should have returned to India. Even through he was not supposed to be in South Africa at all, he was able to secure himself a command in the war. Townshend left Southampton on board the SS Armenian in early February 1900, and it was announced a couple of days later that he had been "selected for employment on special service in South Africa". He was appointed Assistant Adjutant General on the staff of the Military Governor for the Orange Free State in 1900 and then transferred to the Royal Fusiliers later that year.

After lobbying the War Office for a promotion and a command in the British Army, he was given a staff job in the Bedfordshire Regiment, which led to him to write that the Bedfordshire regiment was not prestigious enough for him, and what he wanted was a position in the Irish Guards. After much lobbying on his part, the War Office gave him a posting with the Royal Fusiliers instead.

His time with the Royal Fusiliers was not a happy one as Townshend constantly fought with his commanding officer, and he wrote a long series of letters to the War Office asking them for a promotion and a transfer to a more prestigious regiment, who replied that he had already received enough. Reflecting his unhappiness with the Royal Fusiliers, Townshend received leave to make a lengthy visit to Canada in 1902.

He was supposed to be researching possible invasion routes by which the United States might invade Canada, which led him to travel the length and breath of Canada, but most of his time was spent in the province of Quebec researching the role of his famous ancestor, George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend, in fighting the French in the Seven Years' War for a biography he was writing.

In 1903, Townshend was sent to Burma. After arriving in Rangoon on 6 April 1903, Townshend wrote:

We were at anchor in the stream at Rangoon at 9 a.m., and after two hours of monkey tricks and chinoiserie about plague inspections by the port doctor, the steamer was allowed to go in alongside the quay. … Alice of course dragged me out to see the great Pagoda of Shive Dagon and other pagodas; and the Burmese, Chinese, Indian and Portuguese bazaars and quarters of the city. I like the look of the Burmans, pretty well-built girls, many of them decidedly handsome and beautifully made, with glossy black hair.

In 1904, Townshend returned to India, where he annoyed Kitchener by repeated requests that he be given command of a regiment. Promoted to colonel in 1904, he became military attaché in Paris in 1905 and then transferred to the King's Shropshire Light Infantry in 1906. He went on to be Assistant Adjutant General for 9th Division in India in 1907 and commander of the Orange River Colony District in South Africa in 1908. As the commanding officer in the Orange River Colony, Townshend lived in Bloemfontein, where his wife caused a sensation by bringing French glamour and style to a place where the Afrikaans women dressed in a plain, modest style as befitting good Calvinists. Townshend's task in Blomfontein was much political as military as the British planned to unite the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Natal and the Cape Colony into a new dominion to be called South Africa, and he had to help ensure that the defeated Boars were to accept being part of the British Empire. Promoted to brigadier general in 1909, and major-general in 1911, Townshend was appointed General Officer Commanding the East Anglian Division in 1911, Commander of Jhanzi Brigade in India in 1913, and Commander of the Rawalpindi Brigade in India later that year.

On 4 May 1911 during a visit to Paris, Townshend met Foch, who was quite critical of British policy towards Europe, warning that Germany was out to dominate the world and was Britain prepared to take a stand or not? Townshend wrote in his diary:

General Foch asked me if I knew how many army corps the Germans will put into line....Did England contemplate the annexation of Belgium and the sea-board with equanimity? It was a case where England, France and Belgium must fight together for existence. He said, “we do not want to conquer: we want to live and it is time everyone understood this”.

Townshend's habit of ceaselessly lobbying his superiors for a promotion and his frequent transfers from various units as he sought to climb the career ladder tried the patience of many, and ironically actually hindered his career, as he earned the reputation of being something of a whiner and someone who never stayed in a regiment for very long. In 1914, he asked to be given a command on the Western Front and was refused.

After the First World War began, the Germans tried very hard to stir up a revolt in India. In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war, and the Sultan-Caliph issued a declaration of jihad urging upon Muslims everywhere to fight against Britain, France and Russia. In this context, the Raj was greatly concerned about the prospect of a mutiny by the Indian soldiers and the tribes on the North-west Frontier might all rise up. Townshend as a man who had proven he could command Indians successfully and as someone who knew the North-West Frontier well was being kept in India in case of trouble, much to his own fury as he desperately wanted to go join the British Expeditionary Force.

Further reading

• Barker, Col. A. J. (1967). Townshend of Kut: A Biography of Major-General Sir Charles Townshend KCB DSO. Cassell.
• Barker, Col. A. J. (2009). The First Iraq War, 1914–1918: Britain's Mesopotamian Campaign. Enigma Books. ISBN 978-1-929631-86-5.
• Braddon, Russell (1970). The Siege. Viking Adult. ISBN 0-670-64386-6.
• Dixon, Norman (1976). On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. London: Random House.
• Nash, N.S. (2010). Chitral Charlie: The Rise and Fall of Major-General Charles Townshend. Pen & Sword Military.
• Townshend K.C.B., D.S.O, Major General Sir Charles (1920). My Campaign in Mesopotamia. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd.
• Townshend, Charles (2011). Desert Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq 1914–1921. Faber & Faber. ISBN 0571237215.