Galloper Jack

SIR – Quite what prompted as grand a historian as Lord Lexden to attack our grandfather Jack Seely (Letters, December 3) defeats us. For our family, it is a matter of sad but accepted fact that Seely’s life included two manifest misjudgments, the first over Northern Ireland (the “Curragh Crisis”) in 1914 and the second over Appeasement, right up to 1939.

But to dismiss the rest of his distinguished work in the Commons, the Cabinet and the Lords as “utter political incompetence” is a canard for which we will sentence his lordship to reading all 367 pages of the Seely biography Galloper Jack by Brough Scott – still available in paperback.

Before that, we might as well get pernickety about some facts. First, the painting of Seely on his war horse Warrior was not done after the Battle of Moreuil Wood in March 1918 but in January of that year. It was the very first of the 41 works of the Canadian Cavalry war effort that Alfred Munnings did in France over five months, which are now on show at the National Army Museum for the first time in a century.

Secondly, Seely and Churchill were not at Harrow together and did not meet until afterwards.

Of course Grandpa was over the top. He was said to have recommended Warrior for the VC with the citation: “He went everywhere I went.” But he was also a lovely, kind, intelligent, brave and wonderful man.

Brough Scott

Patrick Seely

Brook, Isle of Wight