The Life and Times of Lieutenant General Adrian Carton de Wiart

Soldier and Diplomat

Alan Ogden

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350233157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this ground-breaking new book, Alan Ogden brings to life Lt Gen sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, soldier, statesman and an often-overlooked figure in British Military and Diplomatic History. Framed through the life of Carton de Wiart this book also offers an exploration of important topics and developments in the first half of the 20th-century, including the Boer War, World War I, World War II and Anglo-Sino relations. This biography ranges from de Wiart's early life, his wartime experiences and role as Churchill's personal representative to Chiang Kai-shek. Ogden draws from an extensive array of primary sources including previously unseen private family papers to examine, in exquisite detail, the life and times of a man who experienced the horrors of war to rise up the ranks and become a personal representative of Winston Churchill and then Clement Attlee. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars studying British Military and Diplomatic history in the first half of the twentieth century.

Part I

Early life 1880–1913

1

Who was Adrian Carton de Wiart?

The year 1880 was one of celebrations for the Kingdom of Belgium, beginning with the engagement of fifteen-year-old Princess Stéphanie, the elder daughter of King Leopold II, to Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria and heir apparent to the Habsburg Empire, and culminating in the spectacular Cinquantenaire exhibition in Brussels which marked the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence from the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Neither was a total success. Stéphanie returned home when it was discovered that she had not reached puberty; most of the Triumphal Arch at the Parc de Cinquantenaire ended up hastily constructed out of wood like Potemkin’s village.

For Léon Carton de Wiart there was also much to celebrate for his first child Adrian was born on 5 May 1880 in Ixelles. Or was there? For while still suckling Adrian, his twenty-year-old mother Ernestine bolted, and a country girl from Waterloo had to be quickly brought in to continue to feed him.¹ A cloud of scandal enveloped the family.

The Carton de Wiarts originally came from Hennuin which is in today’s northern France.² In 1719, Gabriel Carton, the officer in charge of the Maquis de Vauban’s great fortification at Ath, acquired the lordship of Wiart on the banks of the Dendre. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, Pierre-Francois-Bonadventura Carton de Wiart and his family settled in Brussels. His son became a lawyer, a profession subsequently embraced by many members of the family including Léon.

Educated at Stonyhurst College in England which had originally been founded in the sixteenth century in St Omer in France to educate English Catholic boys denied a Catholic education in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, Léon read law at Louvain University and then became an advocat in Brussels. With the Belle Époque in full swing, business in the capital flourished as Belgium enjoyed the rewards of early industrialization. Fortunes were made in banking and industry as the country became electrified and criss-crossed with railways connecting it to export markets. The jewel in the commercial crown, the Congo Free State, belonged to the king through the Association Internationale pour l’Exploration et la Civilisation de l’Afrique Centrale, an innocuous sounding title that masked a story of atrocities which came to haunt Belgium for the next hundred years.

The circumstances around Léon’s marriage to nineteen-year-old Ernestine Wenzig, the daughter of a wealthy German furrier, are somewhat mysterious.³ Supposedly born in Brussels in 1860, her father Ferdinand Wenzig was married to Pauline Levasseur who came from a distinguished French family which over time had accumulated four maquisards.⁴ Some commentators describe Ernestine as Irish but they are confusing her with Léon’s mother, Zoé-Marie-Isabelle Ryan, who had been born in Huddersfield in Yorkshire and was indeed of Irish descent.

First, the date of the wedding, 15 October 1879, and then the register of Adrian’s birth on 8 May 1890 (three days after the actual event) indicate that he was conceived three months out of wedlock.⁵ Secondly, given that her parents lived nearby, why, after deserting her husband and abandoning her baby, did Ernestine completely vanish until surfacing some forty years later when Adrian received a letter from her informing him that she was married with several children and living in Bordeaux? Was this the action of a loving daughter of a respectable family?⁶

Adrian Carton de Wiart later confided that he believed his mother to be a Circassian girl bought by his father in a Turkish slave market ‘for at least partly chivalrous purposes’.⁷ His cousin Edmond Carton de Wiart told the same story to Adrian’s daughter Ria when she was seventeen.⁸ The problem with this story is that there is no evidence that Léon as a studious young lawyer would have either been inclined or indeed found the time to embark on a lengthy trip to Turkey or the Levant. However, Ferdinand Wenzig as a furrier would have most probably gone to Istanbul to buy furs for its huge eighteenth-century fur market continued to thrive. Maybe he took pity on a Circassian girl in the Tavukpazari slave market or just acquired her from her parents and unofficially adopted her as his daughter or engaged her as a servant. In these circumstances, the Wenzigs might well have lent their name to her in a hasty wedding.

The notion of a Circassian slave girl at the time is entirely plausible. Ever since the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 between the Russians and the Ottomans when the latter ceded the Circassian lands to the Tsar, the plight of the Circassians had worsened; and by the early 1860s mass deportations had begun. Some went by land, others by sea from the Black Sea ports; and by the end of the decade more than 400,000 Circassians had been evicted from their homelands and crossed into Turkey. With scant relief available, it was commonplace for refugee families to sell their children in the Ottoman slave markets. Of the families who survived typhus and smallpox in the appalling conditions they endured during their journey, many were settled in Bulgaria,⁹ at the time still part of the Ottoman Empire, which could account for a story de Wiart once told Polish Princess Olga Radziwiłł that his mother was a Bulgar.¹⁰ So Ernestine could well have been an orphan adopted by the Wenzigs.

So much for the questions surround ing his mother. What of his father? Would the young Léon with his strict Roman Catholic background and conventional career have risked prenuptial sex with Ernestine? One explanation is that Ernestine had deliberately thrown herself at Léon in the knowledge that under Belgian law she would have the right to sole custody of their child in the event of a separation or annulment and that right could be sold back to the father. Or is there an altogether a different explanation? For many years, it was rumoured that Adrian’s real father was Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Leopold’s marriage to Princess Marie Henriette of Austria, the granddaughter of the Habsburg Emperor Leopold II, had been in trouble from the beginning – poor Marie had written to her mother, ‘I am very unhappy and I pray that I will be dead as soon as possible’ – and it was well known that her husband had many affairs¹¹ and dalliances with courtesans.

Assuming that it was Leopold who was the father, there is a scenario that the Carton de Wiart family may have been approached by courtiers with whom they were friendly to provide a surrogate father for King Leopold’s child. The Wenzigs may have been similarly recruited, with money rather than political advancement, to become the parents of Ernestine, who in this scenario was nothing to do with them. The truth will never be known but Le Roi des Belges et des Belles never recognized Adrian as his illegitimate son.

Left with a small baby and a wet nurse and doubtless the subject of countless wagging tongues, Léon needed a change of scenery. According to the Register in the Belgian Embassy in Cairo,¹² he is shown as arriving in Cairo on 26 November 1883, his former addresses given as 75 rue de Stassart and 43 rue de Bosquet in Brussels. Little Adrian followed him, arriving on 12 November 1885, and Léon’s mother Zoé on 23 February 1887. She returned to La Hulpe in Brabant fourteen months later by which time Léon had remarried.

If this information is correct, it is likely that Léon either left Adrian in the care of his sister Hélène De Ryckman De Betz¹³ or his relatively youthful 42-year-old widowed mother until he had established himself in business in Cairo where there was a small coterie of fellow Belgian businessmen, lawyers and entrepreneurs. There had in fact been another Carton de Wiart in Egypt before him. His first cousin, René (1867–1906) had fought in Egypt when Kitchener was the Sirdar and finished the campaign as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Khedive’s army with the honorary title of Bey or Colonel.

This reinforces the idea that Léon was sent by the family to Cairo to set up a legal practice specializing in investment as Egypt was becoming increasingly popular with Belgian investors. Between 1895 and 1912, it is estimated that between 400m and 500m Belgian Francs were invested in forty-four Belgo-Egyptian ventures,¹⁴ mainly real estate, urban transport system like trams and light railways, and electrification. Once the second largest city in the Ottoman Empire after Constantinople, Cairo had resurfaced in the nineteenth century as a vibrant commercial and trading centre when the Suez Canal was opened in 1870. British occupation in 1882 served to accelerate economic growth and in 1883 the Alexandria Stock Exchange was established, followed by the Cairo Stock Exchange in 1903. The number of listed companies in 1907 was 228 with a market capital of about 91 million Egyptian pounds. This was a world where the legal services of Léon were held in high regard¹⁵ and he soon became a director of several companies including the flamboyant Baron Edouard Empain’s Cairo Electric Railways & Heliopolis Oases Company in which he personally held 7 per cent of the shares.

Within two years of his divorce from Ernestine coming through, Léon married again, this time to Miss Mary James, a 27-year-old Scots woman whom Adrian describes as formerly a ‘companion to a Turkish princess’.¹⁶ Little is known about her except that her family came from Cardiff and her father John died near Constantinople in 1871. Living at 32 Rue Qasr-el-Nil, Léon and Mary decided to start a family and two daughters, Beatrice and Edith, appeared in quick succession but tragically died as infants. Their son and only surviving child, Maurice, was born in 1895; another daughter Marie-Ghislaine, who was born in 1889, died aged one. Although Adrian remembered that his step-mother ‘appeared very pretty . . . full of rigorous ideas accentuated by a strong will and a violent temper’,¹⁷ she was far more a governess than the warm maternal figure the little boy had been so arbitrarily deprived of.

Peter Fleming, who served with Carton de Wiart in Norway and China in the Second World War and knew him well, empathized in the biography he started writing in the 1960s that Carton de Wiart

adjusted himself to a situation which few children (and still fewer only children) are called upon to face: a situation in which they lack not only a mother’s love and care but any clue to her identity. It is an experience which can hardly fail to leave its mark, especially when the child has no brothers or sisters and few playmates. De Wiart [sic], when he grew up, set a higher value on solitude and had far less fear of loneliness than is at all common among active, full-blooded men, and I suspect a cocoon of self-sufficiency into which he was always ready to retire was first woven during his waif-like childhood.¹⁸

Léon had one great advantage in Cairo for he had direct access to the King of Belgium’s investment affairs through his cousin Edmond, Chevalier Carton de Wiart. Four years his senior, he was the Chef de Cabinet of Leopold II and later Grand Marshal to King Baudouin and a Director of La Société Générale de Belgique. His other cousin Henri Carton de Wiart became Minister of Justice in 1911 and then prime minister after the First World War. Such close family connections were invaluable for winning business. Léon’s role would have been to prepare companies for listing on Stock Exchanges, legally sign off their prospectus and then often help to refinance them through rights issues or mergers with other corporations.

It would have been in this context that he applied to become a Student of Gray’s Inn in 1903¹⁹ at the age of forty-nine. Described as Doctor of Law (Brussels), advocate of the Belgian Bar and the Bar of the Mixed Tribunals,²⁰ Examiner in International Law at the Khedival Government School of Law in Egypt, he was introduced by Edmund Dicey CB, at the time Treasurer of the Inn but best known as a foreign affairs and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph. The two men had probably met in Egypt when Dicey was writing The Story of the Khedivate (1902), a follow up to his England and Egypt (1881). Léon was called to the bar in 1908 and continued to appear in the London law register until his death in 1915.

Living in Cairo with his father and step-mother, Adrian added street Arabic to his mother tongue, French, and the family lingua franca of English. It was a relatively carefree childhood with pony riding at home and holidays by the sea at Ramleh although as he later wrote, ‘it was a life too lonely and formal to be truly happy’.²¹ On reaching his eleventh birthday, he was despatched to England to the Oratory, a small Roman Catholic public school in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston that had been established in 1859 by Cardinal Newman, the champion of English Roman Catholicism. By this time, his father’s cousin Maurice was secretary to Cardinal Bourne, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England. Holidays were usually spent staying with school friends in England or in Belgium with his cousins at Hastière-pas-delà, a sleepy town on the banks of the Meuse where his uncle Constant lived in a rambling country house. Here there were fish in the river, wild boar and roe deer in the woods; and cliffs, caves and waterfalls to explore in the densely forested hills of the Ardennes.

Despite his fluency in English, Carton de Wiart’s classmates viewed him as a foreigner which made his life at an English public school far from easy. In addition to the irksome regime of ‘fagging’, he was regarded with typical xenophobic suspicion and it was only when he began to excel at games that he found acceptance with his peer group and his confidence grew. Ending his school days as Captain of the School and of cricket, football and tennis, he went up to Balliol in January 1899 after passing the Competitive Entrance E...