Breaking of Bumbo

by Andrew Sinclair

Bumbo Bailey is a coward and a bit of a hero; a martyr, an egoist, a clown, a debs' delight and a Suez mutineer; a non-conformist Old Etonian Guardee . Partly his own victim, and partly the victim of his own small world, he is Made, and has his Season; and is Broken. Bumbo pursues his career from Caterham to an Officers' Training School; from the Officers' Training School to Wellington Barracks; and from Wellington Barracks to any number of wildly assorted parties. He learns a lot about Sex and Love and Discipline - and a little about himself; in the end he behaves very oddly indeed; and faces, in his own way, the consequences.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Andrew Sinclair was born in Oxford in 1935 and was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. After earning a Ph.D. in American History from Cambridge, he pursued an academic career in the United States and England. His first two novels, written while he was still at Cambridge, were both published in 1959: The Breaking of Bumbo (based on his own experience in the Coldstream Guards, and later adapted for a 1970 film written and directed by Sinclair) and My Friend Judas. Other early novels included The Project (1960), The Hallelujah Bum (1963), and The Raker (1964). The latter, also available from Valancourt, is a clever mix of Gothic fantasy and macabre comedy and was inspired by Sinclair’s relationship with Derek Lindsay, the pseudonymous author of the acclaimed novel The Rack (1958). Sinclair’s best-known novel, Gog (1967), a highly imaginative, picaresque account of the adventures of a seven-foot-tall man who washes ashore on the Scottish coast, naked and suffering from amnesia, has been named one of the top 100 modern fantasy novels. As the first in the ‘Albion Triptych’, it was followed by Magog (1972) and King Ludd (1988).

Sinclair’s varied and prolific career has also included work in film and a large output of nonfiction. As a director, he is best known for Under Milk Wood (1972), adapted from a Dylan Thomas play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Sinclair’s nonfiction includes works on American history (including The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman, which won the 1967 Somerset Maugham Award), books on Dylan Thomas, Jack London, Che Guevara, and Francis Bacon, and, more recently, works on the Knights Templar and the Freemasons.

Sinclair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've no idea why I'd never heard of this novel before, only encountering it 58 years after its original publication - and coincidentally my own birth - through finding a 1970 Penguin paperback, little-read, in a box of books my wife had put out for a charity shop. It was, apparently, something of a *succes de scandale* in its day, and later when it was filmed by its author, who ranked - again apparently, for I knew nothing about him - as one of the 1950s 'Angry Young Men', alongside Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, et al.

It is the brief tale of the National Service (that is, military conscription) of an old Etonian in the Brigade of Guards, that elite regiment of the British Army, at a time when the old assumptions of British superiority in the world were looking increasingly hollow, and the traditional social class-system that sustained them - in the eyes of the British at least - being questioned by a more democratically- minded population.

Although a very short narrative, the novel crams in a great deal of telling detail, absurd humour, and a quasi-modernist style which works very well in context, where many similar contemporary attempts at such experimentation ended up either pretentious or unreadable, or both.

Being familiar with most of the social and historical phenomena dealt with by Sinclair, I found this a compelling and vivid story. I recognise that many younger readers might not have the same knowledge to bring to bear upon it, but would recommend it as a fine document, and a very good piece of writing, through which to acquire it.

[Anthony Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something of a dated novel, based heavily on the writer's experience of National Service in the 1950s. The world it depicts seems so distant, partly because it refers to a phenomenon that no longer exists, and partly because it is set in the world of Eton, high society and debutantes, and the Guards. Some knowledge of these social curios seems to me to be necessary for the reader: how else is one to understand the stuff about the Guards' civvy street dress code requiring bowler hat and umbrella (though I understand it still exists), or the notion of the debutante? Nevertheless, I imagine these codes of behaviour that Bumbo, our anti-hero, knows well and finds absurd are more or less fathomable to those who are unfamiliar with them.

That aside, the novel is very enjoyable. It's short, adopts a refreshingly individual approach to speech punctuation, and is written in a pretty snappy style, except when presenting the ramblings of the Bohemian millionaire, Jock, or some of Bumbo's thinking, either when he is drunk or trying to make sense of a world he doesn't really belong to.

And that sense of not belonging is what permeates the character of Bumbo. His parents are not Society - perhaps what were described to me when I was growing up as "NQTD, dear" - and though he has been put through Eton (where he excelled because he was clever and played games well) and joined the Guards, he does not have the money that many of his fellow officers take for granted. Aged 18/19, he finds himself in Wellington Barracks (I think) with London, both upper crust and lower crumb, on his doorstep, but without a clear idea of who he is or what he wants to do in life. Because he is not a natural part of the establishment he's joined, he finds it philistine and absurd and is more at home with the men he commands who also find him a good sort in the way they don't find the conventional officers.

Bumbo is not, however, spineless by any means. Exhausted and drunk and humiliated on an early training exercise in Greece, he is ordered by his CO to accept a lift back to camp. Determined to lead his men back to camp, he refuses, telling the CO to 'bleed off'. (Blood and Bleed are generally used by the author for f**k, I think, though he does - daringly for 1959 - use shit a couple of times.) This he is complemented for as showing guts. And the description of the Rugby League game played by the northerners in his Brigade against the Army Pay Corps shows him at his spirited best, ending up leading a team who manage to incapacitate three of the opposition, and receiving a wound in the chest caused by a broken corner flag.

What really gets him, however, is Suez, and the thought that he might be required to fight a war which he does not believe in. As a result, he voices his anxieties to his rugby team. This is duly reported by Sgt Issy (QM), who has been reported by Bumbo for stealing stores, and the CO has no choice but to arrest him. Shortly after, he is released from his duties.

There is some love interest in the narrative as well: the liberated Susie and the confined deb with not much going for her, Sheila Anne Gorebroughton Smith Percy. I won't risk a spoiler here.

The strength of the novel lies , I think, partly in its depiction of a time and a set of establishment attitudes, and partly in the way an unformed, critically intelligent, young man finds himself excited but adrift in a world that he does not belong to. From this latter point of view, the fact that in spite of his intelligent misgivings about the social world he is moving in, he feels he has let the side down, and his sensitivity to his parents' pleasure in the social milieu he has been projected into, the ending is rather sad, I thought.

An interesting first novel from Andrew Sinclair. And for those who may be interested in my sourcing of it, I borrowed it from a friend who has an extensive collection of Penguins from the 50s and 60s.

[Flob · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining read. Very typical of the lucky Jim school of plots so popular in the 50s. Confused young man who, though part of an elite, feels alienated from his privileged caste. Futile attempts to break free with hilarious consequences. The past is a foreign country.

[Katherine R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Astute and comical