An officer and a Dublin man: Frank McNally on ‘perhaps the most brilliant general in British history’

Fans of the comic opera composers Gilbert and Sullivan may be labouring under the misapprehension that one of the duo’s best-known songs opens with the line: “I am the very model of a modern major-general”.

This is not correct. If you look closely at the original libretto, the line reads: “I am the very model of a modern major-gineral”, a pronunciation that might suggest the protagonist was Irish, from Galway or Mayo perhaps.

Of course, WS Gilbert’s deliberate misspelling was not intended to evoke a mock-Hibernian brogue (his partner, Arthur Sullivan, was the one with Irish heritage, on both sides).

It had more to do with setting up the rhyme scheme of a comic patter-song, the second line of which goes: “I’ve information vegetable, animal and mineral.”

Even so, it is well attested that the real-life model for Gilbert’s protagonist was indeed Irish – albeit a Protestant Dubliner, who would not have rhymed “mineral” with “general”, except when singing along with the song, which he often did.

Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833–1813), as he became, was born in Inchicore of an old English family that had been in Ireland for centuries.

Much later in life, during the 1890s, he would also spend a period living in another part of Dublin 8, at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, as commander-in-chief of the British army in Ireland.

But in between, during decades in England and “the colonies”, he had established himself as Britain’s best-known general, whose stiff bearing, large moustache and visible war wounds (a limp and a missing eye), made him the very model of a veteran military man.

He did not, however, fit the rest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s bill for the fictional Major-General Stanley: an officer educated in everything except military know-how.

On the contrary, Wolseley was a career soldier who had made it to the top the hard way, and not by the then traditional route for men of his class: buying commissions.

[ A look at Britain’s military commanders in Ireland up to end of War of IndependenceOpens in new window ]

Straitened family circumstances after his father’s early death had even prevented a young Wolseley going to Eton or Harrow. Instead, he had to settle for Rathmines, and to leave school at 14 for a job in a surveyors’ office.

Already bent on an army life, he wrote to a fellow Dubliner, the Duke of Wellington, looking for a leg up. Wellington told him to ask again when he was 16, then ignored him when he did.

But heavy losses in troublesome corners of the empire were creating vacancies in the ranks. So Wolseley soon made it in anyway. By 1852, while still a teenager, he was a junior officer in Burma and got himself shot for the first time.

More than a century later, his reckless courage would earn him an appearance in the Flashman novels of George McDonald Fraser, who wrote of the real-life figure:

“He won no distinction as a commander in a great war, but his record in the so-called ‘little wars’ – indeed, the variety and success of his service generally – is probably unique in the history of arms. An Anglo-Irishman, he followed his own maxim that if a young officer wants to do well he should try to get himself killed; Wolseley tried really hard.”

Among his many battles on several continents thereafter, he helped put down the Indian mutiny of 1857 and to thwart the Fenian invasion of Canada in 1866.

But his greatest victory was at Tell El Kebir in 1882 when, via a tactical masterclass, he defeated Ottoman-backed rebels in the decisive action of the Anglo-Egyptian War.

[ Garnet Wolseley was an Irishman through and throughOpens in new window ]

A measure of that battle’s fame, even in post-independence Ireland, was that until the mid-1960s, Dublin had a Tel-el-Kebir Dairies in Monkstown. That in turn gave rise to the TEK United football club, which is still playing today, with the Egyptian sphinx on its crest.

Fighting aside, another thing Garnet Wolseley was famous for was efficiency – so much so that he became a catchphrase. If everything was well anywhere in Britain or Ireland, circa 1900, it was said to be “All Sir Garnet”.

He was back in the news this week, in the arts pages. A portrait of the elderly soldier, in all his pomp was among a large collection of Wolseley family paintings sold by the English auctioneering house Batemans. It went for £1,350.

Wolseley has been described by one historian as “undoubtedly the most brilliant general of the Victorian era, perhaps the most brilliant general in British history, but it was his misfortune never to have commanded in a big war”.

That caused him to be overshadowed in later life by another Anglo-Irish general, Frederick “Bobs” Roberts, Kipling’s favourite, who had been predicting a big war in Europe from as early as 1904 and whose jingoist rhetoric helped make one happen.

In the event, neither man lived to see that empire-ending disaster play out. The 82-year-old Roberts caught a fatal pneumonia while visiting troops in France in the autumn of 1914. Wolseley had died a year previously, also in his bed, aged 79.