Major-General Sir Charles Vere Ferrers Townshend, (21 February 1861 – 18 May 1924) was a British marine and later soldier who led an overreaching military campaign in Mesopotamia during World War I. His troops were besieged and captured at the Siege of Kut (December 1915 – April 1916), which historian Christopher Catherwood called "the worst defeat of the Allies in World War I".
Controversially and in contrast to the miserable captivity endured by his men, Townshend was held on Prinkipo, where he was treated like an esteemed guest until his release in October 1918. He was briefly a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1920 to 1922.
Early life Townshend grew up poor in an otherwise prominent family, the son of a railroad clerk, Charles Thornton Townshend (1840–1889), and Louise Graham, a Melbourne native who brought no dowry. He was the great-great-grandson of Field Marshal George Townshend, 1st Marquess Townshend. His paternal grandfather, Rev. George Osborne Townshend (1801–1876), was the son of politician Lord John Townshend, the second son of the first marquess.
He was very ambitious and nourished high hopes of inheriting the family title and the family estate at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, as his cousin Viscount Raynham, the heir to the title, had no children until later in life.Perry, James Arrogant Armies, Edison: Castle Books, 2005 page 248. He was educated at Cranleigh School and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. On graduation from Sandhurst, he was granted a commission with the Royal Marine Light Infantry in 1881.
Townshend was a well-known "playboy" officer in his youth, famous for his womanising, drinking, for playing the banjo while singing very bawdy songs and for spending an excessive amount of his time in the music halls. He was often described by those who knew him as a "ladies' man" who was very popular with the opposite sex owing to his dashing personality and good looks. He was also known for his theatrical style, and he liked to associate with actors.
In 1884, Townshend was part of the relief expedition to rescue the besieged army of General Charles Gordon, better known to the British public as "Chinese Gordon", at Khartoum. As a Royal Marine officer, he strictly speaking should not had been part of an Army expedition, but he wrote to Field Marshal Garnet Wolsely asking if he could go, and his request was granted.Knight, Paul The British Army in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, Jefferson: McFarland, 2013 page 27. The way that Gordon had defied the orders of the government to leave Khartoum, knowing full well that the government could not abandon a national hero like himself and would have to send out a relief expedition to save him made a great impression on Townshend. Even through Gordon had flagrantly and repeatedly ignored orders to evacuate Khartoum, the British press had generally portrayed "Chinese Gordon" as a Christian hero and martyr who had died heroically resisting the Islamic army of the Mahdi, and attacked the government of William Gladstone as abject cowards whose efforts to save Gordon were too little, too late. The power of the press and its ability to rouse public opinion in favour of heroic generals besieged by Islamic fanatics was noted by Townshend at the time. In January 1885, he fought at the Battle of Abu Klea, which was his first battle and the first time he killed a man. In 1886, he transferred from the Royal Marines to the British Army, largely because he felt it offered better prospects of promotion. The American historian John Semple Galbraith wrote that "Townshend was an inveterate self-advertiser, constantly and actively promoting his own brilliance in the hope of recognition by a grateful country, preferably in the form of a KCB."Galbraith, John "No Man's Child: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1916" pages 358–385 from The International History Review, Volume 6, Issue # 3, August 984 page 359.
A passionate Francophile who spoke fluent French, Townshend preferred to be addressed as "Alphonse" – something which often annoyed his colleagues, who regarded his "Frenchified" manners as extremely snobbish and off-putting. An intensely ambitious man, he was constantly writing letters to friends, relatives and anyone who might be able to help him achieve a promotion, saying that he desperately needed a promotion and asking them to "pull some strings" to help him. Townshend's biographer, the British historian A.J. Barker noted, "Anybody who could further his career was invariably called up to help, often in the most pleading of terms". Sean McKnight, the Deputy Head of War Studies at Sandhurst, called him "just about the most dramatically ambitious senior officer I think I've ever come across. He's never content, he's always looking for the second or third job down the line, and one of the most irritating facets of him is, even when he's got something he should be very happy with, he's not content". Townshend's endlessly ambitious streak, together with his tendency to view whatever position he held as insufficient for him, and a penchant for writing letters attacking whoever was his commanding officer as incompetent to their commanding officer, made him very unpopular with his other officers, who viewed him variously as a treacherous intriguer forever scheming for a promotion, a pathetic whiner who was never happy with what he had, and a dangerous megalomaniac whose vainglorious quest for yet another promotion led him to take gratuitous risks.Perry, James Arrogant Armies, Edison: Castle Books, 2005 page 246. The British historian Geoffrey Regan described him as an officer whose high intelligence and abilities were marred by his egomania.
Imperial soldier He served in the Sudan Expedition of 1884, then on 12 December 1885 he was appointed on probation to the Indian Staff CorpsLondon Gazette 18 December 1885 and was permanently appointed on 15 January 1886.London Gazette 15 November 1887 He went on to serve on the Hunza Naga expedition in 1891. Townshend was involved in the storming of the Nilt fort held by the Hunza tribesmen, writing in his diary on 20 December 1891: I write this at Thol. It has been a real day of success. Thirty shots from each corps paraded on the ridge this morning and we fired on the sangars so accurately that they could hardly get a shot back.
On 4 May 1893, Townshend left to take command of a fort at Gupis, writing to a girlfriend in London: This is a most awful place. You never saw such a desert. Just see if you can find it on the map. It is north of Gilgit. However, I know you will never find it, and it don’t much matter, but here I am stuck down with a few troops".
In 1894, while commanding the newly built fort at Gupis, he entertained the visiting George Curzon, "through a long evening with French songs to the accompaniment of a banjo."George Curzon, A Viceroys' India: Leaves From Lord Curzon's Note-Book. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984, p. 146 At Fort Gupis, the Francophile Townshend decorated the interior walls of the fort with illustrations advertising the latest plays popular in Paris. In January 1895, he was sent to north of Chitral, a remote town in the extreme north of India almost on the borders with the Russian Empire in what is now Pakistan in an area known as "the Roof of the World" owing to its extreme height.
Townshend made his name in England as a British Imperial hero with the assistance of London's Fleet Street's coverage of his conduct as the besieged garrison commander during the Siege of Chitral Fort on the North West Frontier in 1895, for which he was made Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). The North-West Frontier of India comprised what is now the "badlands" that make up the border between today's Pakistan and Afghanistan, a remote, backward area inhibited by Muslim Pashtun hill tribes that were in a state of more or less permanent low-level warfare with the tribes on the British side of the frontier, constantly revolting against the authority of the Raj under the banner of jihad, while raiders from Afghanistan were crossing over to wage jihad against the British infidels. The British Crown Colony of India comprised all of what have since become India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The British never fully controlled the North-West Frontier, and from 2 March – 20 April 1895 an Indian force under the command of Captain Townshend sent to maintain a friendly ruler in remote Chitral was besieged instead by the local tribesmen.Knight, Paul The British Army in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, Jefferson: McFarland, 2013 page 28. After being defeated by the tribesmen following an attempt to storm the village, despite being outnumbered, Townshend ordered a retreat into the fort, writing: We had a long way to go; and from all the hamlets as we approached Chitral we were fired into from orchards and houses right and left, front and rear! It was now very dark. I saw there was nothing for it but to double or else none of us would reach the fort alive, and this we did.
During the siege, he decorated his room with the latest Art Nouveau posters from Paris promoting the current plays. On 24 March 1895, Townshend wrote in his diary: "Incessant rain. There is nothing for the horses to eat, so we eat the horses." After a siege of forty-six days by Muslim Hunza tribesmen, the fortress was relieved by Captain Fenton Aylmer, and Townshend returned to Britain a national hero. The fact that he and his four hundred Indian troops were vastly outnumbered by the Hunza tribesmen during the siege further added to his heroic lustre.
Upon his return to London, Townshend had dinner with Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, who publicly thanked him as a hero of the recent campaign, an experience that helped to increase the size of his already ample ego. Afterwards, he was personally made a member of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath by Queen Victoria, which was a rare honor for a captain in the Indian Army. His fame allowed him to develop friendships with the two social groups whose approval he most craved-the aristocracy and actors, especially the stars of the West End theatre scene. He visited the family that rented Balls Park from the Townshend family, leading him to write in his diary: The Phillips were very kind to me, and I spent all Sunday going about the house and grounds. It is most awfully sad to think of it all. A splendid old family like ours, and Lord Townshend cannot now afford to live at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, which is let to Sir Edmund Lacon, or at Balls Park, let to Mr Phillips; and from what I heard from Lord St. Levan the other day, Balls Park will have to be sold and most of the land at Raynham as well. To think of it all, and the last century there was no family more powerful than ours. …I wonder if ever I shall be the means of restoring some of the old prestige to the family.
A keen amateur military historian who took the study of military history very seriously, Townshend had developed a set of ideas about the "principle of economy of force", the "principle of mass" and the "adoption of the Napoleonic principles by Moltke", which he believed would guarantee victory to any general who followed them. A military intellectual and a Francophile, he was one of the few British officers who before 1914 had studied the writings of Ferdinand Foch, regarded at the time as France's premier military intellectual and via Foch, he discovered the writings of General Carl von Clausewitz. The British historian Hew Strachan described him thusly: Townshend was a cultured man. He married a French wife, he was very fond of all things French, and he saw that as part of his character. And in many ways therefore not a typical Army officer of the day, another reason for his being seen to be slightly out of the mainstream professionally. In fact, he was wasn't a comfortable man from the point of view of others in the Mess.