Frederick George ("Eric) Hamnett

• Matriculated: 1907

• Born: 28 April 1889

• Died: 15 November 1918

• Regiment: King’s Royal Rifle Corps and Intelligence Corps

• Grave/Memorial: Lille Southern Cemetery: I.B.31

Family background

b. 28 April 1889 in Penge, south-east London, as the only son (second of three children) of Frederick Harper Hamnett, ICS, CIE (b. 1857 in Madras, d. 1927) and Florence Helen Hamnett (née Stillwell) (1863–1943) (m.1883, probably in India). The family lived at Trewin, Kodaikanal, southern India, probably during the summer months only, since this town is in the Tamil Nadu Mountains and a long way inland. At the time of the 1901 Census the family was living at 14 Wellington Close, Ramsgate (four servants); at the time of the 1911 Census it was probably back in India; in August 1915, Hamnett was living at 11 Acol Road, West Hampstead; in the early 1920s his parents were living at Horsted Lodge, Maidstone Road, Chatham, and in 1927 at 87 Carshalton Road, Surrey. When, in 1934, Florence travelled to South Africa on the RMS Kenilworth Castle in the company of her daughter Kathleen, she gave their home address as 23 Kensington Square.

Parents and antecedents

Hamnett’s paternal grandfather, George Hamnett, CIE (b. c.1826, d. 1904 in Ootacamund, India) was the Inspector General of the Registration Service in Madras. His son, Hamnett’s father, was also an official in the Indian Civil Service. Hamnett’s father was educated at Clifton College and, for the Hilary Term of 1877 only, was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, after which he entered the Indian Civil Service in 1878. He arrived in India on 17 November 1879 and was sent to the large commercial city of Madras (now Chennai and the capital city of the state of Tamil Nadu), on India’s south-east coast, where he was an Assistant Collector and Magistrate until 1885. From 1885 to 1886 he stayed there as Assistant Accountant-General, and in April 1886 he became an Acting Sub-Collector in the Godavari District of the Madras Presidency (Head Assistant in November 1887). In June 1891 he was promoted Sub-Collector and Joint Magistrate, in February 1895 District and Sessions Judge, in October 1899 Collector and Magistrate, and in April 1901 Judge.

Hamnett’s mother was the daughter of Edward Swift Stillwell (1826–78), who described himself as a merchant.

One of Hamnett’s paternal uncles was George Edward Hamnett (b. 1864 in Madras, d. 1940), a professional soldier who rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army Service Corps but was cashiered in October 1906 for alleged financial misconduct. His brother officers clubbed together to buy him a motor-driven taxi-cab, and in order to practise his new profession, he and his family moved to London and lived in “Maristow”, Avenue Gardens, Acton, London W3. In 1889 he married Mary Elizabeth De Bois Archdeacon (b. c.1863 in Canada, d. 1947), the daughter of a naval officer and cartographer, and they produced four children, the eldest of whom was Nina Hamnett (b. 1890 in Tenby, south Wales, d. 1956).

Nina was a lively and independent-minded young woman, who, having spent her childhood years in a succession of British army camps and the stuffy respectability of Tenby, found herself in constant collision with social convention and patriarchal authority. She studied at several art schools in London and rapidly became disillusioned with the academic training they offered. But once she had persuaded her family to allow her to study at the London School of Art in Earl’s Court, which was run like a French atelier, under Frank (later Sir Frank) Brangwyn (1867–1956), John Macallan Swan (1846–1910) and William Nicholson (1872–1949), her work began to become more individual. The school offered Nina artistic freedom and the entrée into the bohème of late Edwardian London. It also increased her receptivity to the work of the continental avant-garde, which, thanks largely to the efforts of Roger Fry (1866–1934) at the Grafton Galleries, was shocking the British public by breaking with realism and representationalism and even going beyond the confines of Impressionism. In 1912 she paid her first visit to Paris and to the Café Royal in London’s Regent Street, where she became acquainted not only with the rising English avant-garde and the ageing aesthetes who were left over from the 1890s, but also their emancipated woman friends. In 1913, soon after they opened in July, she became a member of Fry’s Omega Workshops at 33 Fitzroy Square, London, where she managed to make some money from the sale of her work. In the same year she also exhibited some of her own work for the first time – in the exhibition of the Allied Artists’ Association that took place in the Albert Hall. And 1913 was also the year in which a nude sculpture of her torso (now in the Tate Gallery) was carved by the Polish-French avant-garde sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915; killed in action in the trenches at Neuville-St-Vaast on 5 June 1915 while serving with the French Army). In February 1914 she visited Paris for the second time, where she modelled nude for the academy of the abstract Cubist painter Marie Vassilieff (1884–1957) in Montparnasse and came under the almost indelible influence of Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) until the outbreak of war forced her to return to England.

In 1914 Nina married her lover, Roald Kristian (aka Edgar de Bergen) (b. 1893), a Norwegian artist who lived in Paris and to whom she was married for a couple of years in London. During the last two years of the war she established her position within London’s artistic circles, had a year-long affair with Roger Fry, and in June 1918 held her first two solo exhibitions – in Cambridge and London’s Eldar Gallery. After the war, in March 1920, she returned to France, staying there until 1926 and becoming the best-known British woman artist in Paris; she then established a similar reputation for herself in London. By the mid-1930s, however, her talent was in decline, and her reputation as “Queen of Bohemia” had correspondingly more to do with her wit, her eccentric life-style, her excessive consumption of drink and drugs, and her sexual libertinism. On 16 December 1956 she died either by accident or design when she fell from the window of her flat at 164 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2, and impaled herself on the railings below. She is best remembered as an artist for her sensitive and insightful portraits, especially of women, which hover between Impressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (often misleadingly translated as “New Objectivity”).

Nina’s younger brother Kenneth George (b. 1901) began by working in business in India and in 1932 married Barbara Keating, but by 1939 he was a rubber plantation inspector in Malaya (now Malaysia). In 1935 he was involved in a court case during which he revealed that someone had tried to bribe him in order to procure a favourable report. In 1946 he was awarded the OBE for his work as the Director of the Government Transport Service in Bombay.

In 1930 Nina’s younger sister Helen (1896–1980) married Arthur (Booth-)Clibborn (1893–1969), a grandson of General William Booth (1829–1912), the founder of the Salvation Army.

It has not been possible to find out anything about Nina’s third sibling.

Siblings

Hamnett’s two sisters were:

(1) Ella (b. 1884 in Ramnad, Tamil Nado, India, d. 1967);

(2) Kathleen M. (b. c.1892, probably in India).

Neither sister appears to have married.

Wife and child

In 1917 Hamnett married Carmen Calpini dei Castellani (b. 1898 in Formaggia, Italy, d. 1961 in the USA); they had one son, born in 1919. In 1918 Hamnett’s widow was living at 11 Acol Road, West Hampstead, London NW6, and by 1920 she had moved to 82 Hurstbourne Road, Forest Hill, London SE23.

Education and professional life

Hamnett attended St Lawrence College, Ramsgate, Kent, from c.1896 to 1902, and Charterhouse School from 1902 to 1907. He was awarded a Junior Entrance Scholarship by competitive examination in 1902 and in 1904 this was turned into a Senior Entrance Scholarship. In 1907 he was awarded a Talbot Scholarship, a Medal Prize for Classics, and a leaving Exhibition (one of five for boys who were leaving the school; it lasted for four years and was valued at £80 p.a.). In his final year, Hamnett was Head of the School, a surprising honour given that he appears to have been totally uninterested in sport. He matriculated at Magdalen as a Demy in Classics on 15 October 1907, having passed Responsions in Hilary Term 1907.

Hamnett’s tutor, however, Herbert Wilson Greene (1857–1933; Fellow and Tutor in Classics, especially Latin and Greek translation, 1888–1910), had a less elevated opinion of Hamnett and thought only that he “would do”. Whereupon Hamnett seems to have begun working extremely hard, for in December 1907 Greene noted that he had “done well and improved” and awarded him an alpha mark. But in February 1908, whilst noting that he “takes himself seriously”, Greene described him only as “quite good”, and a month later Greene’s opinion was simply that he was “comp[etent] v[ery] promising”. In May and June 1908, another Classics Tutor, the Senior Tutor Christopher Cookson (1861–1948), noted that he was only “quite good”, recorded that he was “not enormously struck with him” and concluded, rather lamely, that he “will do all right” even while awarding him the required alpha mark. Although Hamnett passed the First Public Examination in Hilary Term 1908, his performance had worsened considerably by the time he returned to Magdalen in October 1908 and Greene noted: “Latin fair – Greek weak – untidy worker”. Hamnett’s Collections in December 1908 were “not up to 1st” and by February 1909 he had clearly seized up academically, for Greene’s comment was “Has done nothing – ill health”. When, in March 1909, Hamnett broke down in Schools, presumably while taking Classical Moderations, he was awarded an “Aegrotat”, and on 16 March 1909 the Tutorial Board granted him leave of absence for the following two terms on medical grounds. On 21 June 1909, this leave of absence was extended until the end of the calendar year, but Hamnett never returned to Magdalen and left without a degree “owing to illness”.

From 1909 to 1910 he studied in the Commercial Branch of the University of Berlin, and then went into business, working in Manchester from 1910 to 1913 for the cotton goods and textile exporters S[alomon] L[evy] Behrens and Co. Ltd, whose offices were at 16 Oxford Street and who had come to northern England from Hamburg – where they had been part of an influential Jewish banking family – in about 1814. Despite that, Hamnett kept in contact with President Warren, who clearly had a better opinion of him than Magdalen’s Classics Tutors, and he asked him for references so that he could apply for a Commission in the Army. By 1914 Hamnett had decided to try for a post with the Consular Service, and from January to August, while preparing for the Entrance Examination, he worked as a private tutor in Classics and Modern Languages for N. Pearson, who lived at 3 Egerton Gardens, London SW.

War service

Hamnett had been a Private in the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps from October 1907 to March 1909, and a Trooper in the Cheshire Yeomanry from October 1910 to about April 1912, but being frequently abroad on business, he was unable to attend many training sessions and felt compelled to resign from the Yeomanry Regiment. Nevertheless, when war broke out, he attested at Brompton Barracks, Chatham, Kent, on 27 November 1914, but was rejected both as potential officer material and as a potential candidate for the infantry because he suffered from varicose veins. But he was passed suitable for a Commission in the Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, there were no vacancies for that kind of work, as a result of which, according to his personal file and the letter that he finally wrote to President Warren on 17 August 1915, he “soon got tired of hanging about the War Office, trying for [a Commission in] the Intelligence Corps”.

So just after his attestation he joined the Royal Engineers and became part of the Motor Cycle Section within the Royal Engineers Signal Service – for there was no independent Corps of Signals until 1920. On 1 January 1915, as he wrote to Warren, he “went to the front on a motor-cycle, with which odious machines I made a slight acquaintance during my first Long Vacation, never renewed until the present war”. Once in France, he worked as a despatch rider with the rank of Mechanist Corporal – first, with effect from 16 January 1915, in No. 6 Signal Company (i.e. the Signal Company of the 6th Division) and then, on 28 April 1915, in the 31st Indian Signal Company (i.e. the Signal Company of the Indian Expeditionary Force, which had arrived in Marseilles on 30 September 1914 under the command of General Sir James Willcocks (1857–1926)). Hamnett went on to describe his work as “a curious trade, but the only one open to me when I enlisted last Autumn [1914]” after his rejection for the infantry because of a “minor defect”, and admitted to having had “a few thrilling rides, but many more of simple discomfort”. He told Warren, for example, of how he rode into a shell-hole on the night of 13 April 1915 and had to spend the rest of the month (actually only until 21 April (RWS]) in hospital – first in No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station at Bailleul, northern France, and then in No. 13 General Hospital at Boulogne, on the French coast. Hamnett’s injuries must have been minor, since he recovered very quickly. He spent the winter of 1914/15 with the 6th Division at Armentières, which, he assured Warren, “is generally subject to desultory bombardment”.

But then, on 24 April 1915, Hamnett joined the Base Signals Depot for four days before being attached to the headquarters of the Indian Corps, where, he admitted later, he had not been “really busy since the fighting on the Estaires–Labassée road in May [i.e. the Battle of Festubert, 15–27 May]”. During this battle, the Indian Corps performed disappointingly and suffered 4,200 casualties, mainly because of inexperience, inadequate training and low morale that had a lot to do with the unaccustomed climate of northern Europe. In June–July 1915, now attached to the 31st Indian Signal Company, Hamnett was temporarily detached for intelligence work with Captain (later Colonel Sir) William Louis Oberkirch Twiss (c.1879–1962), a Regular Officer in the 9th Battalion of the Gurkha Regiment who was making his name as an Intelligence Officer in the Indian Corps HQ and had been with the Indian Corps in France throughout 1915. Hamnett was probably selected for this attachment because of his fluency in French and German and he spent much of his secondment interrogating prisoners and doing similar work. On 16 August 1915 Hamnett tried once more for a Commission in the Intelligence Corps, this time successfully, but nothing was done to expedite his Commission and transfer for over a year.

As a result of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, it was decided in autumn 1915 to send the Indian Corps’s two battered Infantry Divisions to the Middle East theatre of war and to retain on the Western Front only the two Divisions that formed the Indian Cavalry Corps. This transfer began with the 3rd Indian (Lahore) Division in October 1915, and on 27 December 1915, three weeks after the start of the calamitous siege of Kut-el-Amara (7 December 1915–29 April 1917), Hamnett, who had left the Royal Engineers as a Lance-Sergeant, followed them on attachment. This was at the request of Major (later Brigadier-General) Edmund William Costello, VC, DSO (1873–1949), another former Regular Officer in the Indian Army (22nd Punjabis) who was becoming a distinguished Intelligence Officer with the Indian Army. Once in the Middle East, Hamnett was assigned to ‘I’ Branch, on the HQ Staff of the newly formed III (Tigris) Corps that was commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir George Gorringe (1868–1945) and comprised the 3rd (Lahore) Indian Division, the 13th (Western) Division, evacuated from Gallipoli in January 1916, and two or three other mixed Divisions whose make-up, identities and commanders are surprisingly difficult to determine. The new Corps was tasked with raising the siege of Kut, situated in a loop of the River Tigris, 100 miles south of Baghdad and 180 miles north of Basra, where the Ottoman 6th Army had encircled and was slowly starving out a garrison that was commanded by Major-General Charles Townshend (1861–1924) and consisted of the survivors of the 6th (Poona) Indian Division and various battered British Battalions (see R.P. Dunn-Pattison and H.F.C. Horsfall). It seems that Costello wanted Hamnett to work for him because of his linguistic ability – in particular “to conduct French correspondence re. terms of surrender of Kut-el-Amara, and subsequent exchange of prisoners with the Turkish Commander-in-Chief [Khalil Pasha (1881–1957)]” after the Anglo-Indian forces had suffered a series of defeats from January to March 1916, which culminated in their pyrrhic victories at the Battle of Sannaiyat (5–9 April 1916) and Beit Aieesa (17–18 April 1916). The failed campaign to relieve Kut cost the Anglo-Indian forces c.23,450 officers and men killed, wounded or missing and the Turks c.10,000 officers and men killed, wounded or missing, and of the c.13,300 prisoners captured at Kut, about 60 per cent died in Turkish captivity, with the level of mortality significantly higher in the Indian contingent. While in Mesopotamia, Hamnett also made himself useful doing other kinds of intelligence work such as interpreting maps and examining prisoners.

There is also some evidence that Hamnett went to Russia on an intelligence mission, as a result of which he acquired a certain amount of the language – though nothing is known about the mission’s purpose. But if the story is true, the visit must have happened in the first half or so of 1916, and its rationale was very probably Britain’s attempt to get military help through to Mesopotamia from Tsarist Russia via General Nikolai Nikolaevich Baratov (1865–1932), who commanded the 20,000-strong Cossack Corps on the Caucasus Front. Following the pyrrhic victory by the Imperial forces over the Turks at the Battle of Ctesiphon (22–25 November 1915), 16 miles south-east of Baghdad, two of Baratov’s tasks were to secure Persia’s oil supplies from the Turks and then link up with the British and Commonwealth Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia. By the end of December 1915 he had effectively isolated Persia from Ottoman Turkey and in April 1916 begun to advance southwards towards Baghdad and Kut, but he turned back when the news reached him of Townshend’s capitulation in late April. So there was every reason why Costello, whose Regiment was one of those trapped in Kut, should want to make contact with General Baratov, and why he should have taken along with him a bright young man who was well-travelled and linguistically gifted. But Hamnett fell ill, and on 15 August 1916, now back with the 31st Signals Company, he was taken from Basra to India on the SS Edavana (1911; scrapped 1955).

On 11 November 1916 he was formally accepted as potential officer material and in April 1917 he was recalled to Britain so that he could train for a Commission in the Infantry. But while en route his ship was either wrecked or torpedoed off Italy, and having landed there, after what must have been a truly whirlwind romance, he married Carmen Calpini, the eldest daughter of Giovanni Battista dei Castellani of Novara (Piedmont) at Formaggia on 23 April 1917. As there is no record of this marriage in British consular records 1916–20, they must have got married according to Italian conventions. Hamnett and his wife then returned to Britain, and from June to August 1917 he did his basic training as an infantryman with the 26th Training Battalion. On 10 August 1917 he was accepted for No. 2 Officer Cadet Battalion at Cambridge, where he was a member of ‘C’ Company. On 7 November 1917 he was asked to go back to Italy, presumably because of his connections there, but he declined; on 21 December 1917 he was formally discharged from the Indian Army; on 22 December 1917 he was gazetted Temporary Second Lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers with effect from 28 November 1917; on 27 December 1917 he was nominated for a Commission in the 5th (Reserve) Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC); and finally, on 12 January 1918, he was gazetted Second Lieutenant in the KRRC with effect from 28 November 1917.

He then underwent the necessary training course in intelligence work at “the Horse Guards” as a member of the 5th Battalion, the KRRC; on 29 April 1918 he was nominated for the Intelligence Corps itself on the basis of his earlier work with the Indian Army and because he could speak “French & German very well. Spanish & Italian very fairly & understands both languages well”. He joined ‘I’ Corps on probation on 6 May 1918; from 5 June to 15 November 1918 he was classed as a Staff Officer (in 30th Division), which was active in the area of Armentières and gradually advancing to the north-east, and on 7 July 1918 he was appointed as an Agent 4th Class. But from 13 to 20 July he was in hospital with scabies, a highly contagious skin infection that is borne by a parasite, causes severe itching, and was very common among soldiers in the trenches. On 7 September he left the Staff of 30th Division and was appointed on the following day as an Agent 3rd Class in the HQ of XV Corps, part of General Plumer’s Second Army since 12 April 1918.

After leave in England from 27 October to 10 November 1918, Hamnett returned to duty in France and probably reached his unit on 11 November 1918. But on the very next day he was admitted to No. 39 Stationary Hospital at Ascq, seven miles east of Lille, suffering from the influenza which he must have caught while in England and of which he died on 15 November 1918.

Hamnett is buried in Lille Southern Cemetery, Grave I.B.31. He left his wife £3,033 3s. 6d. and she received a gratuity of £101 18s. 4d. She gave birth to a son in the March quarter of 1919 and was still living at 82 Hurstbourne Road on 24 August 1920. She probably returned to her parents in Italy but married for the second time in the December quarter of 1954.

Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

Special acknowledgements:

*Denise Hooker, Nina Hamnett: Queen of Bohemia (London: Constable, 1986), passim.

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘Et Caetera; Second Lieutenant F.G. Hamnett’ [obituary], The Tablet (30 November 1918), 132, no. 4,099, p. 614.

[Anon.], ‘Miss Nina Hamnett: Bohemian Artist’ [obituary], The Times, no. 53,716 (17 December 1956), p. 10.

[Anon.], ‘Sir William Twiss’ [obituary], The Times, no. 55,523 (16 October 1962), p. 17.

Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry (Manchester: MUP, 1976), p. 22.

Ford (2010), passim, but especially p. 62.

Archival sources:

MCA: F29/1/MS5/4 (Notebook containing comments by H.W. Greene et al. on student progress [October 1901–April 1910]).

MCA: F29/1/MS5/5 (Notebook containing comments by H.W. Greene et al. on student progress [1895–1911]), p. 90.

MCA: PR/2/19 (President Warren’s scrapbook 1917–21), pp. 148–9 (Letter of 16 August 1920 from Alexander Hay Tod [1857–1942], master at Charterhouse School, to President Warren).

MCA: PR32/C/3/609 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letter relating to F.G. Hamnett [1915]).

OUA: UR 2/1/63.

WO95/1600/3.

WO95/2314.

WO339/70737.

On-line sources:

Wikipedia, ‘Indian Army during World War 1’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_I (accessed 10 April 2020).