His birthday letter is tender and warm but he complains that his daughter underrates herself; she should be more self-reliant

My great-grandfather was a man of gargantuan ego with a physique to match. The wearing of a beard denotes achievement (mid-Victorians, like the ageing Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Brahms, Friedrich Engels, and Johann Strauss championed them); Crabbe was no slouch in that department.

During the Sudan Campaign of 1885 and in South Africa he’s photographed with generous facial hair. At that time, a beard was associated with the heroic, with men who were independent and resourceful.

Beards went with the image of manliness, a cult which some claim grew to such fever pitch that it precipitated Europe into the bloodbath of the 19141918 war.

In addition to his ventures to the Dark Continent, Crabbe lost no time in expending both his bullets and seed.

His wife, Emily Jameson, was from an Anglo-Irish whiskey distilling family. They were married in Ireland on May 25 1876; she was 18 years old and EMSC six years her senior.

Their first child, Colville, was born two years later in 1878. Twin daughters, Daisy and Violet, followed in 1879. Gladys was born a year later. Lewis arrived in 1882, then Ivan in 1884. Wounded There was a three year break when Crabbe went off to the Sudan; in 1887 Iris appeared while Emily was still in her twenties. Their last was Tempest, an afterthought who appeared 10 years later when his mother was 39.

EMSC’s letters to Daisy show strong feelings for those he left behind. Writing after he was wounded in the thigh and wrist at the battle of Belmont after the battalion’s arrival in South Africa, Crabbe admits “it is weary work for you all at home.”

For his wife “it is as bad as 1885” but for Daisy and her siblings “it is a first experience and I well know how hard you find it but you must try and cheer up and remember that everything is for the best and we can only play our part to the best of our ability and trust.”

While Crabbe senses their anguish (presumably they received a telegram after he was wounded), he makes little of what his wife and three eldest daughters, had to undergo. But at that period martial masculinity, and the practice of extolling qualities associated with the masculine, were predominant.

Attributes of courage, stoicism and self-sacrifice were applauded. Women’s voices were silenced and their deepest feelings and opinions, of their menfolk going to war, were ignored.

The silence, or at best the voicing of a stereotype, hindered the development of a more thoughtful response to women’s needs in relation to armed conflict.

I doubt if Crabbe ever considered how hard it was for his wife and daughters to maintain their vigil while he was away.

Although she was successful in suppressing her emotions, Daisy’s body was unable to lie. Plagued by eczema, unsightly eruptions on her face, hands, and chest, it is unlikely that she saw her skin disease as a manifestation of the weeping soul, like some people did.

Crabbe asks several times during the campaign about his daughter’s ailment, the first time when he stopped at Gibraltar. He compares her battle with eczema to his struggle against the Boer.

Duties

At Modder River he wishes upon her its disappearance “not as the Boers do now to the next kopje but thoroughly routed as we hope they will be in the near future.” In sum, this uber-masculine figure is ham-fisted and ineffectual in his distant affection.

In some letters he encourages Daisy not “to fuss or worry” but to take life easily and be “absolutely idle and become no more Martha but Venus instead.” In others, he bullies her into responsibility for her younger siblings.

“Mind you try and keep Xmas going all right for the children,” he chides. Daisy’s duties were to help Iris with her reading, teach local boys their three Rs, and organize village amateur dramatics or “tableaux,” as EMSC calls them.

Crabbe was anxious that his letters for the twins’ 21st birthday (February 15, 1900) arrive on time. Writing on January 25, he expressed a fear also that the celebration will “lack a little in joy and excitement with which we all like to surround it at home.”

His birthday letter is tender and warm but he complains that his daughter underrates herself; she should be more self-reliant and develop a “contented mind in a sound body.” He adds poignantly that he hopes to spend many more birthdays with her (in effect he only celebrated three more before his death in March 1905).

He concludes with “ever my darling Daisy” and hopes her self-denial will be rewarded.

This wish suggests that his daughter is expected to give generously to the family and deny her own needs. Perhaps, after giving birth to so many children in quick succession, Emily was unwell and relied on her older daughters to care for the younger children.

I’m fortunate also to have access to images of both Eyre John and his son, Eyre Macdonell. The only picture of the former is the 1845 regimental portrait of the colonel mounted on his bay horse.

To paint a man on a horse is to create an impression of authority, even invincibility. If a man wished gravitas, he only needed a mount. As Alexander the Great averred, a horse gives a man wings.

Attributes

For centuries, the horse was seen as an emblem of power. George III had ‘Adonis’; the Duke of Wellington fought at Waterloo on ‘Copenhagen,’ his mount; Napoleon rode to Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Russia, and Waterloo on his white stallion, ‘Marengo.’

In the famous equestrian portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David, the horse with rolling eyes and flared nostrils, is conveying the Frenchman across the Alps. Although Cunliffe paints Eyre John’s unnamed steed with its head held high, he has applied an Anglo-Saxon sobriety to the composition, with none of the drama of David’s portrait.

A painted portrait is different to a photograph. While a painting performs a synthesis of a person’s attributes, a photograph captures an aspect of an individual or a specific moment of the person’s existence.

Represented in photographic form, EMSC is first seen as a captain in a line-up of Guards officers in the 1885 Sudan campaign some days either before or after the battle of Abu Klea. In South Africa he is seated by a table in the officers’ mess hut. More tomorrow