The Reluctant Schoolboy
‘Off he went as bold as a lion and did not want me to accompany him . . . He began Latin and looked grave over it; gave a boy a bloody nose in his first scrimmage.’—Ham Russell recalls his son Guy’s first day at school in England.
Guy Russell was born on 23 February 1868, the elder son and second of a family of seven (Mildred, Guy, Gwen, Gertrude, Muriel, Claude, and Evelyn) born to Ham Russell and his wife, Katherine, over the next 10 years. By the time of Guy’s birth, Ham and William had moved from their primitive whare on the banks of the Tutaekuri and were farming the Russell blocks from Redclyffe, an ample two-storey homestead further down the river towards Napier.
As with most of the New Zealand frontier in the 1860s, settlement in Hawke’s Bay was sparse: the roads were unpaved tracks, the rivers mostly unbridged, and social life was limited. The Russell’s nearest neighbours were the Maori at Omaranui pa and a few scattered settlers at Taradale, now a suburb of Napier. Deprived of the companionship of children their own age, the Russell children turned to each other, and it was here that the foundations of Guy’s close and lifelong relationship with his sisters, Milly and Gwen, were laid. It was at Redclyffe, too, that Guy and his grandfather forged the bond that endured until the colonel’s death in 1900—a bond that helped to mould Guy’s character and his career.
Although he was now a resident magistrate in Hawke’s Bay, by 1874 Ham had had his fill of the hardships, isolation and crudities of life in Britain’s most remote colony. That year he took his family back to England. They settled in Sedgley, the home of his widowed and wealthy mother-in-law Eliza Tinsley.
The voyage home, however, was marred by tragedy when their youngest child, Mary, died of dysentery in New York. Guy was then just six, but already the traits that would define the man were beginning to appear. Family members recalled that he played a leading part in the arrangements for the funeral of his infant sister. His father noted that his son did not flinch when asked to go down into a dark cellar in Sedgley; and that he endured a burn to his foot from a firecracker without complaint. After a visit to the Polytechnic in London, Guy showed ‘a good deal of cool courage’ in withstanding an electric shock from one of the exhibits. He had also asked to venture down in a diving bell—presumably in a deep-water tank.
In March 1876, Guy attended his first school, the Miss Hills School at Lynmouth. For the first time he was in the company of boys his own age, and his education out of the hands of governesses. His stay was to be shortlived. In 1877, bored with the staid life of Victorian England and thinking that the future of his family still lay in the Antipodes, Ham Russell brought his wife and children back to New Zealand.
They settled at Moorlands, the home originally built by his father at Flaxmere, where the family enjoyed a social life considerably better than that at Redclyffe three years earlier. There were dinner parties and luncheons, many guests and callers. Ham organised shooting parties, which Guy, now aged nine, was allowed to join.
The return lasted just 16 months. Beset by worries about finance, low returns from farming, and the ‘rascally lawyers and native agents’ who were challenging the title to the Russell lands on behalf of their former Maori owners, Ham sent his family back to England, settling finally at Lausanne in Switzerland. Here, supported by income from the family properties in Hawke’s Bay, Ham lived for most of the next 35 years as a so-called ‘gentleman of leisure’. The task of managing the Russell estates now fell largely on William, who was already heavily involved in colonial politics.
Guy remained in England to complete his education, first as a boarder at Twyford preparatory school, near Winchester—a school described by author Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as ‘a rough, badly managed, bullying place’. From a close-knit, affectionate family and an adventurous open-air life in the colonies, he was now confined within the rigid structures of the British public school system. He hated it. Letters to his parents at this time reveal an unhappy and bewildered 10-year-old boy desperate to be out of boarding school and back home with his family in New Zealand.
‘I would rather than anything be out in New Zealand and riding to the post on a message or to get the letters and it always makes me sad to think of them,’ he wrote to his father. ‘Are all the little birds that I used to try and shoot gone away now. Is the drain running well and I hope that the fat cattle paddock’s fence is getting put up better. I suppose that the hawkes [sic] have stopped trying to kill the lambs.’ To his unbending mother, he wrote: ‘I have not had one happy day since I came here. I so often feel sad.’ By the last term of his incarceration, Guy’s attitude to boarding school life had not changed: ‘[I] will be glad to leave this Black Hole of Calcutta.’
Guy gradually overcame his homesickness—if not his dislike of boarding school—and his intelligence and capacity for leadership began to surface. He passed out top of the fifth form at Twyford, and in his last year there was head of house. Guy’s grandfather, whose home at Winchester was his out-of-school base, had by now formed a high opinion of his grandson’s intellectual capabilities and felt that he was fitted for a career other than the traditional ones of army officer or farmer. He favoured a scientific career after taking a degree at Oxford or at the higher levels of the British civil service. Ham, equally ambitious for his son, thought a career in law the better option; alternatively a study of ‘agricultural theory’ and then practical experience running the family farms back in New Zealand.
Both were to be disappointed. In 1882, Guy went on to Harrow, one of England’s élite public schools. Founded in 1572, Harrow had already produced many eminent men, including Captain James Cook’s botanist, Sir Joseph Banks; the Romantic poet Lord Byron; novelists Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy; playwright Richard Sheridan; prominent reformer Lord Shaftesbury; and Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, founder of the modern police force and the British Conservative Party.
Guy Russell was now part of a world of rigid tradition that included the wearing of morning suits, straw boaters and top hats, and a curriculum focused on English history, French, the Classics (Greek and Latin), and mathematics. Social life was bounded by ‘houses’, each of which competed fiercely against all the others for sporting trophies. None of it made any noticeable difference to his attitude to boarding school life. ‘I get to dislike this place more and more,’ he wrote to his father. ‘I believe I have heard you say that Uncle Arthur disliked it. I certainly detest it.’
Not surprisingly, Guy performed poorly at Harrow—to the chagrin of his father, who wanted him to be the school’s leading boy and to excel academically. School reports refer to him being slovenly and neglectful, inconsistent in performance, surly in demeanour and self-centred in his approach to his duties. His form master’s report in May 1885, two months before he left Harrow, commented: ‘A poor creature, I am sorry to think. Won’t do his best or anywhere near it.’ Guy’s housemaster, J.A. Cruickshank, with whom he clashed often, described him as ‘a nice manly boy’ but inclined to be rebellious and too easily led. Guy’s comment on Cruickshank after one of their frequent rows: ‘He’s a mean beast at best.’
In later years, Guy would admit to a dislike of schoolmasters—probably, he admitted, because he recognised some of the same critical, controlling instincts in himself. His apathy and poor academic performance he would blame on chronic indigestion, a condition that continued to blight his life until the age of 21, when he ‘pretty well overcame it’.
Guy’s experience of Harrow, however, was not entirely negative. He enjoyed football and cricket, although he didn’t claim to be outstanding at either. Significantly, he took a keen interest in the school cadet corps; and he read constantly, mostly novels, to the displeasure of his masters, who regarded this sort of activity ‘as sinful in one so young’ and positively ‘criminal’ if done in class. When he left Harrow he took 100 books with him, many of which had been confiscated by his form masters.
Now in his mid-teens, Guy relished the term holidays at his Uncle George’s farm in Wales and at his father’s new home at Lausanne. There he played tennis and went fishing, boating, horse riding, and climbing in the Swiss Alps with his father, Ham, who was a keen mountaineer, and occasionally with his sisters. Among these expeditions was a father-and-son ascent of the Matterhorn (4478 m), one of the highest and deadliest peaks in the Alps, and a severe test of skill and nerve for any but the most experienced mountaineers. With his father’s enncouragement, Guy was beginning to indulge his penchant for extreme risk-taking.
Along with this physical activity, Guy had an active social life of amateur theatricals, parties and dancing, which he enjoyed to the full but only increased his dislike of boarding school. In the words of family biographer, Colonel Reg Gambrill: ‘The very thought of school was anathema to him, yet he had a brilliant mind and a very strong sense of filial duty to his parents. These two factors seemed eternally at war within him.’6
Guy Russell emerges from his school days as an intellectually able but uncommitted student—as was his near contemporary, Winston Churchill. Churchill entered Harrow three years after Russell, but there is no evidence that they were aware of each other. The similarities of character and experience, however, were marked. Both hated their prep schools and neither did well academically at Harrow, although both read voraciously and at a level beyond their years. Both were confirmed individualists and uncomfortable with the constraints and disciplines of boarding school life.
In one of history’s smaller ironies, Churchill would go on to head the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty and devise the strategy that became the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915. Russell would emerge as one of the few effective commanders in that campaign, lead the rearguard that saw nearly 50,000 Australians and New Zealanders evacuated safely from its beaches, and blame his fellow Harrovian for what he considered an avoidable military disaster.