“Sapper” – muscular morality and the Bulldog Breed
“He belonged, in fact, to the Breed; the Breed that has always existed in England, and will always exist to the world’s end. You may meet its members in London and Fiji; in the lands that lie beyond the mountains and at Henley; in the swamps where the stagnant vegetation rots and stinks; in the great deserts where the night air strikes cold. They are always the same, and they are branded with the stamp of the breed. They shake your hand as a man shakes it; they meet your eye as a man meets it. Just now a generation of them lie around Ypres and La Bassée, Neuve Chapelle and Bapaume. The graves are overgrown and the crosses are marked with indelible pencil. Dead, yes; but not the Breed. The Breed never dies.”
That passage describing an early character creation, Derek Vane, occurs in the opening pages of Mufti, a novel by “Sapper”, the nom-de-plume of Colonel H C McNeile, published in 1919. For the modern exegete it is a minefield of potential misunderstanding and anachronistic misinterpretation. Sapper (as he will be referred to for convenience) was the creator of Bulldog Drummond, Jim Maitland, Ronald Standish, Tiny Carteret and other lesser representatives of the Breed. At first sight this extract might be taken for an exaggeratedly rhetorical celebration of English superiority over all other nations, a chauvinist paean to imperial glories. It is not as simple as that.
Yes, of course, it conveys an intense British patriotism to which Sapper adhered all his days. He had a good war: MC, mentioned in despatches twice, a Royal Engineer unusually given command of an infantry battalion, fought in both the First and Second Battles of Ypres (where he was gassed – the likely eventual cause of his death) and the Battle of the Somme. Yet his praise of the Breed is tempered by poignant reference to their untended graves in corners of foreign fields.
When that passage occurs in Mufti it has been preceded by some of the best pen pictures of war: five officers indulging in horseplay over possession of a single deck chair near the front line, a Belgian farmer stoically ploughing his field nearby with – er – Flemish phlegm, a German aircraft being shot down and – most striking of all – a description of a successful British gas attack, of which the central protagonist disapproves, on the German trenches.
It is not Jingoism: war is vile, Belgians display sang-froid like Englishmen, Britain commits dubious acts that could be construed as war crimes, science in the service of war poses a terrible menace to humanity (percipient, from a man who died eight years before Hiroshima). Although the casual reference to Henley suggests the Breed is the preserve of the officer class, Sapper had a keen respect for the working class, having witnessed the heroism of its representatives in the trenches. A Labour trade union leader is a sympathetic character in the novel. Dornford Yates would not have approved. For those who write Sapper off as an author of cheap thrillers, it is worth recording that Mufti, though a critical success, did not do well commercially.
Initially, Sapper wrote short stories during periods of inactivity on the Western Front to relieve his boredom. Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, who regularly published his stories of life at the front, gave him the pen-name “Sapper” since serving officers could not write under their own names, and it remained his literary alias for the rest of his life. In 1920 he published another novel, Bulldog Drummond, and success was instantaneous. The public took readily to the character of Captain Hugh Drummond, “a demobilised officer who found peace dull” and who advertised in search of adventure, which he quickly found along with a wife, the faithful Phyllis.
Usborne, whose judgement was generally good, claimed that Sapper’s female characters were “cardboard”. In this he was over-harsh. There was nothing cardboard about Margaret Trent, the heroine of Mufti, or Irma Peterson, the lethal vamp in the Drummond novels. The obvious explanation is that in Mufti, which was occasionally philosophical in tone, looking for an explanation of how the First World War had ravaged civilization, Sapper had leisure to develop a woman character to an extent that was not possible in the thriller genre.
His books were action-packed, a fast-moving kaleidoscope of fisticuffs, shootings, abductions, imprisonment and routine administration of either sedation or poison by hypodermic syringe – Sapper’s characters had been injected so many times that their arms must have been more perforated than those of a modern junkie. In such circumstances it was hardly possible to develop with Austen-like insight the characters of women, especially since they tended to be bound and gagged for much of the time.
Except the dreaded Irma Peterson, confederate and mistress of the world’s greatest master criminal Carl Peterson and after his death, courtesy of Captain H Drummond, his aspiring avenger in several novels, notably The Female of the Species. Irma is drawn convincingly and chillingly. Vanity is the one chink in her armour: when Carl Peterson is impersonating a clergyman and Irma his daughter, she is described, in a luxury hotel setting, as “displaying considerably more leg than a clergyman’s daughter might have been supposed to possess”.
Humour is a strong strain throughout the Drummond novels and Sapper’s writing, faithfully replicated by Gerard Fairlie in sequels such as Bulldog Drummond Stands Fast in which, even when trussed up as prisoners of the vengeful Irma, Hugh and his companions succeed in provoking her by indulging in humorous badinage. When Irma repeatedly addresses Drummond as “my Hugh”, his spirited wife Phyllis snaps: “A little less of the ‘my’!” Denny, Drummond’s man and formerly his batman, is a veteran of misadventures and definitely one of the Breed.
Of the other Sapper heroes, Jim Maitland is the most formidable: “ ‘He’s long and thin and he wears an eyeglass, and rumour has it that once some man laughed at that eyeglass.’ The tea-planter grinned. ‘Take my advice and don’t – if you meet him. It’s not safe.’ ” Algy Longworth, Drummond’s loyal lieutenant also sported an eyeglass. As quoted by Richard Usborne in his other classic, Wodehouse At Work, the Master himself laid down the law respecting the award of eyeglasses to characters in fiction: “Monocle: This may be worn by (1) good dukes (2) all Englishmen. No bad man may wear a monocle.”
Naturally, the virtue of Sapper’s heroes is controverted today. “A Society of Murderers Run on Sound Conservative Lines: The Life and Times of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond” was the title of a study by academic scholar of postmodernism Hans Bertens (sounds like a Johnny Foreigner to me) published in 1990. Soon, no doubt, we can expect criticism of Sapper’s treatment – or, rather, non-treatment – of “trans” characters. Modern critics who indulge in extravagantly anachronistic moralising should ask themselves how the attitudes of today’s “woke” commentators would have been regarded in 1920.
It might also be helpful to differentiate between the authentic Sapper revealed in Mufti and the professional, formulaic thriller writer who subordinated his more thoughtful personality to that of Hugh Drummond, as an author should.
Sapper’s novels, which were quickly translated into cinema films, earned him a fortune. Ten of them featured Bulldog Drummond and a further seven followed, after his death, from the pen of his friend and designated literary heir Gerard Fairlie. Ian Fleming conceded that James Bond was “Sapper from the waist up and Mickey Spillane below”. To several generations of armchair adventurers, just as iconic as Sherlock Holmes’ address of 221b Baker Street was Hugh Drummond’s residence at 60A Half Moon Street. Perhaps if you stroll in that direction, you might distantly hear the gallant captain shouting boisterously at his man Denny to fetch him “Beer, fool, beer!”