LITMIR.BIZ

      Valentine Baker, always called Val in the family, was named for his naval grandfather. There is a photograph of him as a young man in Ceylon: he wears a high collar and stock, his hair is long, his arms are folded composedly across his chest. His moustache is in the experimental stage and has yet to find its voluptuous curves. It is the eyes that tell the story. What is most striking about Val’s expression is its calm. If the camera represents the outer, public world, then he is looking into it with an eerie self-possession. That same look in the eye of a wild animal would have sent an instant warning signal to Sam Baker, tightening his finger on the trigger.

      A boy among men, Val came out to Ceylon on the Earl of Hardwicke with the rest of Sam’s party in 1845. From the beginning he was only ever a lukewarm farm colonist. For example: after a season or two on the plateau Sam Baker invented for himself a sort of woollen suit for his jungle explorations, the fabric dyed a muddy and streaky green by the juice of plants. It was cinched at the waist by the belt that carried the killer knife. He wore this kit without embarrassment and was always eager to press its advantages on others. It is not possible to picture Val ever wearing anything like it, even if it stood between him and sudden death.

      He was at school in Gloucester during the Mauritius years and still only nineteen when he came to Newera. A windswept plateau halfway up a mountain was never going to satisfy his curiosity about life in the tropics. In any case, Val was only in Ceylon under licence – his father had long wished that he and his youngest brother James should enter the army. The family was rich and had worked its way into becoming part of the landed interest in Gloucestershire; and so, to old Sam Baker, the way forward for his youngest sons pointed to service in the Guards or, better still, a good cavalry regiment. Looked at in this light, Val’s journey to Ceylon was no more than a jaunt. Unfortunately, as his photograph shows, there was very little of the jaunty about him.

      To have a soldier in the family was a fatherly ambition that could turn out, under the wrong circumstances, to be ruinously expensive. The army offered its officer elite the opportunity of a plural life such as some parsons had enjoyed in the eighteenth century – they were gentlemen first and soldiers only afterwards. In the fashionable regiments no officer, however cautious in his habits, could subsist on his pay alone. His path to senior rank was choked by elderly and often grievously incompetent men who saw the purchase system, by which everything from a cornetcy to a colonelship could be bought and sold, as a guarantee of their pension. The first step in a military career – the right regiment – was the most important one. Thereafter, deep pockets helped – Lord Brudenell raised himself by reckless purchase from cornet to command of his own regiment in just eight years. As Earl of Cardigan he is reputed to have spent a further £10,000 annually to ensure the 11th Hussars remained among the most fashionable (and reactionary) of British cavalry regiments. Cardigan’s manic personal vanity made him a particularly vivid example of what was, in a dozen or so regiments, the norm. The Guards, the Household Cavalry and certain favoured Hussar regiments had become, in effect, the junior branches of the aristocracy in uniform.

      If this was old Sam Baker’s ambition for his son Val, it must have caused consternation when news came that he had ridden back down the mountain only a few months after arriving at Newera and purchased an ensignship in that very undistinguished foot regiment, the Ceylon Rifles.

      Touching the role of a young officer in times of peace, Thackeray wrote woundingly: ‘The professional duties of a footman are quite as difficult and various.’ He had this further to say in his Book of Snobs, published in 1846, the year Val joined the Rifles:

      When epaulets are not sold; when corporal punishments are abolished and Corporal Smith has a chance to have his gallantry rewarded as well as that of Lieutenant Grig; when there is no such rank as ensign and lieutenant (the existence of which rank is an absurd anomaly, and an insult upon all the rest of the army), and should there be no war, I should not be disinclined to be a major-general myself.

      Val had joined as modest a regiment as could be found, tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the Army List. His decision may have seemed inexplicable in Gloucestershire but a motive based on local conditions suggests itself. Up in Newera Sam, in his blustery and good-humoured way, was developing his role as the social outsider, a reputation he enjoyed and did his best to burnish. By joining the Rifles Val indicated an alternative. An ensign’s duties might be mostly comprised of smoking and lounging but what they also offered was the pleasure of belonging. The elements of obedience and submission implied by regimental life were handsomely offset by the sense of fraternity engendered. A man who purchased the queen’s commission anywhere was joining a select, if

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