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A Cavalryman in the Crimea (Hardback)

The Letters of Temple Godman, 5th Dragoon Guards

Military > Pre-WWI > Crimean War

By Philip Warner
Imprint: Pen & Sword Military
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781848841086
Published: 15th October 2009
Last Released: 5th October 2009

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Among the British troops bound for the Black Sea in May 1854 was a young officer in the 5th Dragoon Guards, Richard Temple Godman, who sent home throughout the entire Crimea campaign many detailed letters to his family at Park Hatch in Surrey. Temple Godman went out at the start of the war, took part in the successful Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaklava and in other engagements, and did not return to England until June 1856, after peace had been declared. He took three very individual horses and despite all his adventures brought them back unscathed.

Godman’s dispatches from the fields of war reveal his wide interests and varied experiences; they range from the pleasures of riding in a foreign landscape, smoking Turkish tobacco, and overcoming boredom by donning comic dress and hunting wild dogs, to the pain of seeing friends and horses die from battle, disease, deprivation and lack of medicines.

He writes scathingly about the skein of rivalries between the Generals (‘a good many muffs among the chiefs’), inaccurate and ‘highly coloured’ newspaper reports and, while critical of medical inefficiency, regards women in hospitals as ‘a sort of fanaticism’. Yet at other times he will employ the pen of an artist in describing a scene, or wax eloquent on the idiosyncrasies of horses. He is altogether a most gallant and sensitive young cavalryman, and deservedly went on to achieve high rank after the war. Always fresh and easy to read, his letters provide an unrivalled picture of what it was really like to be in the Crimea.

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About Philip Warner

Philip Warner (1914–2000) enlisted in the Royal Corps of Signals after graduating from St Catharine’s, Cambridge in 1939. He fought in Malaya and spent 1,100 days as ‘a guest of the Emperor’ in Changi, on the Railway of Death and in the mines of Japan, an experience he never discussed. A legendary figure to generations of cadets during his thirty years as a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, he will also be long remembered for his contribution to more than 2,000 obituaries of prominent army figures to The Daily Telegraph. In addition he wrote fifty-four books on all aspects of military history, ranging from castles and battlefields in Britain, to biographies of prominent military figures (such as Kitchener: The Man Behind The LegendField Marshal Earl HaigHorrocks: The General Who Led From the Front (Pen & Sword, 2018) and Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier (Pen & Sword, 2006) to major histories of the SAS, the Special Boat Services, Phantom and the Royal Corps of Signals. 

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