Shan Hackett

The Pursuit of Exactitude

Roy Fullick

• Publisher: Leo Cooper
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781783036936
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Seconde Guerre mondiale

'Shan' Hackett is remembered by his own and succeeding generations for a variety of achievements and attributes. A superb fighting soldier, he served with the Trans-Jordan Force, had fought through North Africa and was involved in the formation of the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS and Popski's Private Army. He went on to raise 4th Parachute Brigade which he commanded with flair at Arnhem where he was wounded and captured. He escaped and got back to British lines. He rose to high rank filling key command and staff appointments in the British Army and NATO.Always an intellectual, yet highly practical man, he retired to become Principal of King's College London where he was revered by staff and students. He wrote many acclaimed works including The Third World War and its sequel The Third World War - The Untold Story. He was constantly in demand in Britain for his television programs and radio commentary up to his death in 1997

Chapter One

ANTECEDENTS, AUSTRALIA AND THE AMERICAN CONNECTION

The history of the Hackett family is intertwined with that of Ireland from the time of the Norman invasion of the country in 1170, one William Haket forming part of the expeditionary force that sailed in August of that year under Richard “Strongbow” de Clare, Earl of Pembroke. It may be inferred that the Hakets were Normans who, following the success of William of Normandy, the first King William of England, at Hastings in 1066, had taken part in the occupation and colonization of the south western part of Wales, this being the base from which the invasion of Ireland was launched and which is known to this day as ‘Little England beyond Wales’.

As in England and in Wales after their Norman occupations, the victorious in Ireland were rewarded with greater or lesser grants of land, with feudal rights over the indigenous peoples of the territory. The Hakets [the unreliability of early spelling and the uncertainties of the development of patronymics being what it is, the present-day “Hackett” will be used from here on to refer to all descendants of the original invader] were given lands on the eastern side of what is now the County of Tipperary, in and around the towns of Fethard and Rathmacarthy.

The first directly traceable ancestor is a Sir John Hackett, Knight, of Rathmacarthy, who is believed to have lived around the year 1300. He had two sons whose names have not been recorded and of whom the younger inherited the Fethard properties, becoming the head of the branch that led to our Sir John Hackett. The tomb of Edmund Hackett, which recorded his ‘pious death’ together with that of his wife Anne on 27 July 1508, was certainly still to be found in the church at Fethard up to the outbreak of the first World War but it is not certain that it has survived the changes that followed during the remainder of the twentieth century.

The family, as pre-Cromwellian Irish landed gentry, played its part in the twists and turns of their country’s history. There were bishops and archbishops bearing their name in the early Catholic church. They lived through and came to terms with the Reformation and a Sir Thomas Hackett was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution in England and of considerable turmoil in Ireland.

Through marriage over the centuries, they established connections with the Pakenham-Walshes and the Winthrops, the ancestors of the latter family being prominent in the young American colonies, father and son becoming respectively Governors of Massachusetts and of Connecticut and whose descendants remain influential in the United States and particularly New England to this day. The Winthrop connection was established by Shan Hackett’s great-grandfather, a serving officer of the 8th Light Dragoons, the regiment which as the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, as it had become, he, Shan, was in turn to join and to serve in with great distinction.

John Winthrop Hackett, Shan’s father, was born in 1847, one of the eight children of the Reverend John Winthrop Hackett, rector of St James’s Church at Bray, County Wicklow, and his wife Jane, who came from the distinguished family of Monck-Mason. He was the third-born and the eldest boy of three sons and five daughters, one of the girls, Jane, being John’s twin. All three boys had distinguished academic careers and, additionally, John seems to have been a good athlete, have a fine speaking voice and be fond of speech-making. To his father’s disappointment, he decided not to go into the Church, although both his brothers were to, Thomas, the younger, succeeding his father at St James’s and Henry becoming Dean of Waterford.

John Winthrop gained his BA at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1871 and was called to the English and Irish Bars in 1874. Despite his athletic prowess, he seems not to have been an altogether fit man and was prone to catch cold easily. The death of John’s twin-sister from tuberculosis at the age of fourteen may also have given cause for concern about his health. A great friend, Alexander Leeper, had already made one visit to Australia and had been most impressed with the potential of the young country. Leeper had decided to return to Australia and proposed to John Hackett that they should go together to the new land, where two intelligent young men might make successful careers for themselves as well, perhaps, as their fortunes. There was an extra incentive for Leeper, who was of a delicate state of health, in the likelihood that the climate of Australia would prove more beneficial to him than the rain and low-lying mist and fog of his native country. This consideration was put to John Winthrop as well and Leeper’s enthusiastic persuasion and the picture he drew from his recent and direct experience soon removed any doubts that John Winthrop might have held. The family were persuaded of the soundness of the proposal and accordingly, in 1875, at the age of twenty-eight, JWH set sail with Alexander Leeper in the sailing ship Hampshire for the other side of the world. They went first to Sydney, where John Winthrop was called to the Australian Bar but here he found the weather, although vastly different from that of Ireland, still not entirely favourable to his health. The following year he moved south to Melbourne, where he was appointed sub-Warden of Trinity College at the University and lectured in Law, Political Economy and English. The academic life was not sufficient to satisfy this determined and ambitious man and he began to think seriously that his future might lie in the developing territories some two thousand miles away on the far side of Australia. With the matter of his health never far from his mind, he might well have been influenced in his deliberations by talk of the cooling breeze, known as the Fremantle doctor, that blew in from the sea with unvarying regularity each afternoon. Whatever weight this carried, in 1882, at the age of thirty-five, John Winthrop made the decision that his future lay in Western Australia, where he next went and where he was to build a remarkable career and accumulate considerable wealth as a newspaper publisher. He had the great good fortune to be befriended soon after he arrived there by the Reverend Charles Harper, who offered John Winthrop a position as sub-editor on the West Australian newspaper of which the Harper family were the proprietors. Western Australia was, at the time of John Winthrop’s arrival in 1882, in an accelerating stage of development. The British Government began to take a serious interest in the territory in 1826 when it became concerned about French colonial ambitions in the area. A programme of colonization was put in train and, as elsewhere on the sub-continent, soldiers and transported convicts formed the nucleus of the first communities. Surveying began and proposals were made for settlements to be established in the region of the Swan River. These efforts made a faltering start; labour was in too short supply to work the vast tracts of land open to development and so until 1868 the workforce continued to be augmented by the transportation of convicts. Despite the mineral and agricultural possibilities of the territory, the population of the whole of Western Australia at the time of John Winthrop’s arrival was not much over 40,000 and it was not until immigration was stimulated by, in particular, the discovery of gold that numbers started to increase sharply so that by 1910, the year of Shan’s birth, they had reached 275,000.

The economic development that sustained this population growth was to provide the perfect backdrop for the intelligent, shrewd and ambitious John Winthrop. He quickly perceived, as many others before and since, that one sure way to power and influence in a young territory of enormous potential was through the press. From his first appointment in 1882 as a sub-editor of the West Australian, his progress was rapid, becoming a partner in 1883 and editor in 1887. By 1912 he was the sole proprietor of both that paper and of the Western Mail and had become an extremely rich man. This success was not achieved without serious differences with his original benefactor. The first arose when the Reverend Harper’s second son, Prescott, a Rhodes scholar, returned to Perth from Oxford and John Winthrop was instrumental in denying the young man the partnership in the newspaper that his family felt was his natural right.

John Winthrop chose his alliances skilfully. Early on in Perth he became a close friend of a man of his own age, John Forrest, the able and ambitious son of penniless immigrants, who had explored much of Western Australia as its Surveyor-General. Much of Forrest’s growing wealth derived from the gold discoveries that his own survey work had helped to reveal and when his attention turned to politics he found a willing and powerful ally in the newspaperman. Between them, they led the drive towards self-government for the territory, which was achieved in 1890, with Forrest as the first premier of Western Australia. From there their energies were directed toward the greater goal of Commonwealth status for Australia; both went on to become members of the national convention that in the years 1897–98 drew up the commonwealth constitution. It was said of the two of them that it was Hackett who had the subtle brain and Forrest the commanding will. John Forrest was later the first native-born Australian to be raised to the peerage while John Winthrop, after two unsuccessful attempts to enter the Commonwealth Parliament in the Liberal interest, confined himself more to his own power-base at the western end of the continent and remained a member of the Legislative Council (upper house) of Western Australia for twenty-six years. He was knighted in 1911.

During all this active and productive time John Winthrop remained a bachelor and his half-century came and went. He seems to have been a good employer and was the first in Australia to introduce the eight-hour working day. He used the power of his newspapers to further the causes of economic development, of the federation of Australia and, again ahead of his time, female suffrage. What he lacked was a wife and a family that might inherit his energies and abilities and make their own contribution to his adopted country.

Another prominent family of Western Australia was that of Drake-Brockman, whose head, like John Forrest before him, had been the Surveyor-General of the territory. When Frederick Drake-Brockman, nine years younger than John Winthrop, found himself in 1905 the intended father-in-law of the older man, it was a situation by no means to his liking. His daughter Deborah being only seventeen at the time the proposal was made, his resistance was fierce and determined and was buttressed by the Harpers, for many years close friends of the Drake-Brockmans and equally disapproving. The Harpers’ opposition was the second instance of difficult relations between them and John Winthrop. Although Deborah’s mother had herself been only twenty at the time of her marriage, the age difference with her husband was merely three years and not the almost forty years seniority which John Winthrop was proposing to bring with him. Here again his choice was shrewd. Deborah Drake-Brockman was a remarkable daughter of a remarkable mother, Grace (Bussell) Drake-Brockman, who had been born into one of the earliest pioneer families of Western Australia and who in 1829 created the settlement of Busselton. When she was sixteen, Grace was riding with a young native servant along the beach near her home when they saw a sailing vessel, the Georgette, in difficulties and being driven ashore in heavy surf. Without hesitation, the two rode into the water and were successful in conducting the whole of the ship’s company to safety on dry land. This brave action earned her the gold medal of the Royal Humane Society and the gift of a watch and chain from the British Government and she was known for the rest of her life as the ‘Grace Darling of Australia’. Her daughter Deborah lacked none of the determination of her mother. As far as she was concerned, John Winthrop would become her husband, whatever her parents’ view might be and however strong their opposition. They were married in 1905, in the Busselton church built by her grandfather with his own hands and where the weddings of both her mother and her grandmother had taken place.

The ceremony was described in the contemporary newspaper report as quiet. There is the inference that invitations to the ceremony and the reception that followed (held not in the bride’s home but at the Esplanade Hotel) had been restricted to relations and close friends. Certainly Sir John Forrest, the bridegroom’s close political and business ally, was, for whatever reason, not able to attend and a fulsome message of good wishes from him was read out by John Winthrop during his reply to the toast of the bride and groom.

Whatever the misgivings might have been of the bride’s parents and however potentially damaging the very considerable age difference between the partners might have been to the achievement of a successful and fruitful marriage, the auguries for any future offspring were good. From the mother’s side would come qualities of proven ancestral courage, great determination and strength of will and a preparedness to flout convention and overturn received wisdom. This she had demonstrated not only in overcoming opposition to her marriage to an older man but earlier, in her formal education, which had been conducted in a boys’ school. From the father would come the benefits of a highly educated brain, a deductive mind, sound political and commercial judgment and an unbroken track record of success along his chosen path through life. As would have been usual in any newly-married couple at the time, children were not long in arriving. By the time Shan was born in 1910, three sisters had preceded him, Verna, Patricia and Joanna. The arrival of a boy after a sequence of three girls was greeted, according to family lore, ‘with such joy that the church bells were rung’. Whether this literally happened is not recorded. In 1913 another sister Debbie, the final member of the family and almost certainly conceived in the hope of producing a brother for Shan, was born when her father was sixty-six years of age.

Shan was not yet six when his father died, acknowledged as having been a great contributor and benefactor to the State of Western Australia. He played principal parts in the foundation of the University of Western Australia, in the building of Perth Cathedral, in the setting up of Perth Zoo and even in the planting of cherry trees to beautify the city. The greater part of his large fortune was left not to his family but went to support those institutions he had helped to found and become established. His only son never expressed the slightest resentment at his father’s action but approved strongly of wealth accumulated in Western Australia being returned to it to help the advance and development of the State. Shan was later to say that he was happy not to have been left great sums as that might have encouraged him to lead an idle life.

The Australian society into which Shan was born, while modelling itself to a large extent on the late-Victorian and Edwardian society of the United Kingdom and particularly on the dominant English part of it, nevertheless had very much its own conception of the ways in which the new country would develop. In a number of these John Winthrop played a leading role as a believer in universal suffrage, in strong State and Federal structures backed by sound constitutions and in the continued economic development of his own Western Australia. The way of life of the successful was on the opulent side of comfortable; they built large mansions for what were invariably large families, continuing right up until 1914, as in England, to assume that a supply of servants to maintain and to run these great establishments would be as constant as the rising and setting of the sun. So, too, a family of a size able to carry on the development of the seemingly limitless potential of the country, while maintaining and increasing its own wealth and standing was the norm. In the expression of the time, parents were expected to produce ‘a quiver-full’. Shan had four sisters, but, as we know, no brothers, while his mother was one of seven Drake-Brockman children, of whom four were boys. As an expression of the responsibility they bore towards the privileged situation they had been born into, children were expected to excel, both academically and physically, and the circumstances to support these aims progressively came about. Schools with very high teaching standards were set up and flourished, while the climate and large family properties encouraged an active outdoor life.

Australian society very much took its example from England as the mother-country and modelled its life styles as closely as possible upon English practices. The recent origins of Australian family fortunes, their almost invariably humble beginnings and the absence from society of previous generations of aristocracy and squirearchy whose manners had to be aped and aspired to, meant that children tended to grow up with the same high ambitions as their fathers and grandfathers and to bring equal levels of energy and drive in achieving them. An indolent class of sons of nouveau-riche parents, anxious to be seen as gentlemen rather than as hard-working sons of successful men, seems not to have taken root in the new land of Australia.

If geography and circumstance helped protect Australian society from the risks of contagion from some aspects of English decadence, it did not diminish its admiration for the facts of imperial power and imperial achievement. Around the turn of the century, as the long Victorian age was replaced by the Edwardian, the British Empire was at its height, its dominion over a great part of the globe apparently unchallengeable, its rule, at least in its own eyes, enlightened and progressive, its industrial might only just beginning to be overtaken by others. The bright focus of this great power, the source from which it all appeared to spring, was the Imperial Court and it was on this Court that the wealthy and aspiring Australian family turned a fascinated attention. When knight-hoods, baronetcies and peerages began to be bestowed on prominent and important Australians, there were some individuals who staunchly refused to be considered for them on the principle that such things did not belong in a new country, in control of its own affairs and making brisk progress towards developing its own strong political structures. It was, however, rare to find a mother whose dearest wish was not to see her daughters presented at Court and taking part in a London season, whatever the expense of the enterprise and the tedium of the long sea voyage that had to be undertaken to achieve it. There was also, more often than not, the discomfort of being regarded as coarse colonials by certain of the English society in whose company they might find themselves during the adventure of their English season. A contemporary account speaks both of the welcoming smile on the lovely but lacquered face of Queen Alexandra and of the boredom on the face of King Edward the Seventh as the line of young ladies moved forward to their presentation, a boredom relieved only by the arrival before him of a particularly striking or beautiful example of womanhood.

The effect of the snubs and boorish behaviour, of which many Australians were the victims, was to build in them a desire to compete and to show the Motherland of what the young country was capable. Lineage, long tradition and established social customs they might be without, but what they did have were great physical and material resources and the determination to exploit them, in sport as well as in commerce. The Hacketts were, perhaps, less susceptible than some others to the risk of slight. John Winthrop’s long Irish lineage was documented and unchallengeable, while his wife’s family, the Drake-Brockmans, could without question be described as belonging firmly in the upper classes of Australian society.

Shan’s mother was presented at Court in 1910, the year of Shan’s birth, when she must already have been pregnant with her only son. There was a return to London during the following year, when John Winthrop was invested with his knighthood. Shan was born into a confident and successful family, certain of its place in the establishment, with the father exercising great and enlightened influence at the heart of the developing constitutional scene and the mother, dynamic, enquiring, entrepreneurial and still, as a mother of four children, only twenty-three years old and with a great deal left to achieve during what was to be a long lifetime. It must have been with justifiable optimism that the Hackett family in 1910 contemplated what seemed an expanding future in a settled and organized world, the outbreak of the Great War still four years away and not contemplated.

With such parents and with such a background, the outlook for the young Shan was propitious in the extreme. An only son with three older sisters, endowed with qualities of great potential and surrounded with every incentive to succeed at whatever he took up, there must have been a feeling of predestination about the course of his life. When he was two, one of his father’s most cherished projects came to fruition with the founding of the University of West Australia, John Winthrop being appointed as its first Chancellor. Before Shan was four years old, the Great War that was to destroy the Pax Britannica broke out, changing the face of Eu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Antecedents, Australia and the American Connection
• Chapter 2: Academe and the Army
• Chapter 3: Arabs and Others
• Chapter 4: Past Alamein to Airborne
• Chapter 5: Airborne to Arnhem
• Chapter 6: To the Market Garden
• Chapter 7: The End of 4 Parachute Brigade
• Chapter 8: The Stranger
• Chapter 9: Across the Rivers
• Chapter 10: Down to Earth
• Chapter 11: The Years of Progression
• Chapter 12: The Academic
• Epilogue: Statement of Account
• Bibliography