case over gifts he had given her, and which he claimed she had stolen. Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, then nearing completion, was something of a laughing-stock – Punch noted gleefully that the statue of the great sailor closely resembled Napoleon. The Royal Hunt Cup was first run at Ascot in 1843 and “The Bohemian Girl” opened at Drury Lane in November of that year.
Various government reports appeared in the early 1840s on conditions in mines and factories; they were horrifying. The atrocities referred to in Morrison’s conversation with Solomon may be traced in those reports and in others from the preceding decade. As a result, Lord Ashley (later Earl of Shaftesbury) got a Bill through the Commons in 1842 prohibiting the employment of women or childen below thirteen in the mines, although the Lords subsequently lowered the age to ten; in 1843 the publication of the report of the Children’s Employment Commission (“Home’s report”) led to further legislation, including a reduction in factory working hours for children and adolescents. (See Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) 1842; the second report of the CEC, 1843; and other papers quoted in Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution, by E. Royston Pike.)
Lola Montez was Flashman’s mistress for a brief period in the autumn of 1842, until they quarrelled; he took revenge by engineering a hostile reception for her when she made her début as a dancer on the London stage in June, 1843. Following this incident, she left England and began that astonishing career as a courtesan which led to her becoming virtual ruler of Bavaria – an episode in which Flashman and Otto von Bismarck were closely involved. (See biographies of Lola Montez, and Flashman’s own memoir on the subject, published as Royal Flash.)
From Flashman’s description of the “bluff-looking chap in clerical duds” with the crippled arm, it seems certain that he was Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845), author of The Ingoldsby Legends, of which one of the most famous relates how Lord Tomnoddy, accompanied by “… M’Fuze, and Lieutenant Tregooze, and … Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues”, attended a Newgate execution, and revelled the previous night at the Magpie and Stump, overlooking the street where the scaffold was erected. However, Barham’s inspiration did not come from the execution which Flashman describes; he wrote his famous piece of gallows humour some years earlier, but may well have attended later executions out of interest. Thackeray’s presence is interesting, since it suggests that he had got over the revulsion he felt at Courvoisier’s hanging three years earlier, when he could not bear to watch the final moment. (See Barham; The Times, 7 July 1840, and 27 May 1868, reporting the Courvoisier and Barret executions; Thackeray’s “Going to See a Man Hanged”, Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840; Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge and “A Visit to Newgate”, from Sketches by Boz; and Arthur Griffiths’ Chronicles of Newgate (1884) and Criminal Prisons of London (1862).)
Mr Tighe’s bet was that Flashman would “carry his bat” (i.e. would not lose his wicket, and be “not out” at the end of the innings). A curious wager, perhaps, but not extraordinary in an age when sportsmen were prepared to bet on virtually anything.
The Regency practice among noblemen of patronizing prize-fighters, and using them (usually when they had retired) as bodyguards and musclemen, had not quite died out in Flashman’s youth, so his fears of the Duke’s vengeance were probably well-founded – especially in view of the names mentioned by Judy. Ben Caunt, popularly known as “Big Ben” (the bell in the Westminster clock tower is said to have been named after him) was a notoriously rough heavyweight champion of the 1840s, and the other fighter referred to can only have been Tom Cannon, “the Great Gun of Windsor”, who had held the title in the 1820s.
The first sale of Australian horses, imported into Singapore by Boyd and Company, did not in fact take place until 20 August 1844. These were the first of the famous cavalry “walers” (so called after New South Wales) of the Indian Army.
Not quite so ancient and shrivelled nowadays, perhaps. Flashman, writing in the Pax Britannica of the Edwardian years, could not foresee a time when the tribes of North Borneo would resume the practice of head-hunting which British rule discouraged. The Editor has seen rows of comparatively recent heads in a “head-house” up the Rajang River; the locals admitted that most of them were “orang Japon”, taken from the Japanese invaders of the Second World War, but some of them looked new enough to have belonged to the Indonesian tribesmen who at that time (1966) were fighting the British-Malay forces in the Communist rebellion.
Frank Marryat, son of the novelist Captain Marryat, served as a naval officer in Far Eastern waters in the 1840s, and confirmed Flashman’s opinion of the dullness and prudishness of Singapore society. “Little hospitality, less gaiety … everyone waiting to see what his position in society is going to be.” His description of the city, its people, customs, and institutions, tallies closely with Flashman’s. (See Borneo and the Indian Archipelago (1848), by F. S. Marryat, and for a wealth of detail, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, by C. B. Buckley.)
Catchick Moses the Armenian and Whampoa the Chinese were two of the great characters of early Singapore. Catchick was famous not only as a merchant, but as a billiards player, and for his eccentric habit of shaving left-handed without a glass as he walked about his verandah. He was about 32 when Flashman knew him; when he made his will, at the age of 73, seven years before his death, he followed the unusual procedure of submitting it to his children, so that any disputes could be settled amicably during his lifetime.
Whampoa was the richest of the Chinese community, renowned for the lavishness of his parties, and for his luxurious country home with its gold-framed oval doors. His appearance was as Flashman describes it, down to his black silk robe, pigtail, and sherry glass. (See Buckley, Marryat.)
As Flashman later admits, the name of James Brooke, White Raja of Sarawak and adventurer extraordinary, meant nothing to him on first hearing, which is not surprising since the fame of this remarkable Victorian had not yet reached its peak. But Flashman was plainly impressed, despite himself, by his rescuer’s personality and appearance, and his description tallies exactly with Brooke’s famous portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, which catches all his resolution and restless energy, as well as that romantic air which made him the beau ideal of the early Victorian hero. The painting could serve as the frontispiece for any boys’ adventure story of the nineteenth century – and sometimes did. All that is missing is the face-wound which Flashman mentions; Brooke had received it in a fight with Sumatran pirates at Murdu on 12 February 1844, so it would still be incompletely healed when they met.
If it seems unlikely that even an emotional Victorian can have spoken such purple prose, we can be certain that Brooke at least wrote it, almost word for word. In his journal,
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