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A Battleship Salesman

It sounds like a terrific book: ‘Of the greatest possible interest’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘Illuminating’ (The Times), ‘Sound . . . informing . . . fascinating’ (Spectator). It sold very well, too. And why ever not? Here was an unimpeachable and wonderfully readable account of the hitherto unknown inner working of the Chinese court during the Boxer Rebellion of 1899. I quite enjoyed it myself when I picked up a copy years ago at the Paragon Book Gallery in New York.

So I wish I could recommend it, but alas I can’t. At least not since reading Hermit of Peking (1976) by Hugh Trevor-Roper. I now know, as do the dozens of historians and commentators who for decades depended on China under the Empress Dowager for hard if colourful facts, that its authors J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse – Backhouse particularly, since he supplied the material – cobbled together most of it in an imaginative exercise that can only be called phenomenal, as talented as it was corrupt.

Hugh Trevor-Roper was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford when in 1973 he received a letter from a Swiss doctor named Reinhard Hoeppli. Hoeppli had a strange request. He was in possession of a manuscript of memoirs written by an English scholar he had known in Peking. The author, Edmund Backhouse, had died in 1944; Hoeppli, presumably acting on Backhouse’s wish, wanted the manuscript to be deposited in the Bodleian and perhaps published. After all, the scholar had once donated a number of rare Chinese books to the library. Would Trevor-Roper examine the text and see to its fate in Oxford?

Trevor-Roper, being the best sort of endlessly curious scholar himself, agreed to have a look. What he found was startling. In frank and explicit but plausible detail, Backhouse told of his experiences as the friend, and frequently lover, of dozens of the most notable figures of his time, from Verlaine to Walter Pater, Gladstone and Max Beerbo

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It sounds like a terrific book: ‘Of the greatest possible interest’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘Illuminating’ (The Times), ‘Sound . . . informing . . . fascinating’ (Spectator). It sold very well, too. And why ever not? Here was an unimpeachable and wonderfully readable account of the hitherto unknown inner working of the Chinese court during the Boxer Rebellion of 1899. I quite enjoyed it myself when I picked up a copy years ago at the Paragon Book Gallery in New York.

So I wish I could recommend it, but alas I can’t. At least not since reading Hermit of Peking (1976) by Hugh Trevor-Roper. I now know, as do the dozens of historians and commentators who for decades depended on China under the Empress Dowager for hard if colourful facts, that its authors J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse – Backhouse particularly, since he supplied the material – cobbled together most of it in an imaginative exercise that can only be called phenomenal, as talented as it was corrupt. Hugh Trevor-Roper was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford when in 1973 he received a letter from a Swiss doctor named Reinhard Hoeppli. Hoeppli had a strange request. He was in possession of a manuscript of memoirs written by an English scholar he had known in Peking. The author, Edmund Backhouse, had died in 1944; Hoeppli, presumably acting on Backhouse’s wish, wanted the manuscript to be deposited in the Bodleian and perhaps published. After all, the scholar had once donated a number of rare Chinese books to the library. Would Trevor-Roper examine the text and see to its fate in Oxford? Trevor-Roper, being the best sort of endlessly curious scholar himself, agreed to have a look. What he found was startling. In frank and explicit but plausible detail, Backhouse told of his experiences as the friend, and frequently lover, of dozens of the most notable figures of his time, from Verlaine to Walter Pater, Gladstone and Max Beerbohm. Here is Henry James at a homosexual club in Jermyn Street, there Backhouse dines with Oscar Wilde. A protracted affair with a British Prime Minister. A summer spent with Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana. An assignation – only the first of many – with the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi herself. And so on. What on earth to make of it all? Hermit of Peking is what Trevor-Roper made of it, and to anyone with a taste for eccentrics and historical detection, it is a delight. Concluding that there must be much more to be discovered about this odd character than that contained in the anodyne DNB account written by a lady who knew him in the old days in Peking, Trevor- Roper embarked upon a ‘quest for Backhouse’. His model was A. J. A. Symons’s classic Quest for Corvo, and justifiably so. Backhouse was clearly ‘no less elusive and preposterous’ than Symons’s quarry Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo. The investigation begins on fairly firm ground. Backhouse was born in 1873 into an upper-middle-class family, educated at a fashionable school and matriculated at Oxford, where he at first did well. But ill-health intervened, along with a propensity for spending money, and he departed in 1895 with a declaration of bankruptcy and no degree. His debts were said to amount to a then staggering £23,000. It is at this point that Backhouse’s history shifts into the fabulous. The first of what Trevor-Roper calls his ‘vanishing tricks’ obscure his whereabouts until 1899, when he turns up in Peking, in command (who knows how) of several languages, including Russian, Japanese, Chinese and modern Greek. Failing to secure a position in the British-run Imperial Customs Service despite his linguistic facility, he falls back on a job translating documents for the great Times correspondent George Morrison, whose reputation as the premier Chinese expert was not hampered by the fact that he knew not a word of Chinese. Backhouse did. Not only that, as he later claimed, he also boasted the friendship of many high Chinese officials, and through them an unrivalled knowledge of court affairs. This proved invaluable when John Bland, another journalist, proposed that they write a book together. The subject – the private history of the Manchu court, especially during the 1899 anti-foreign uprising – was of great interest back in Britain. The Boxer Rebellion had led to a 55-day siege of the foreign legations in Peking, thrown the entire country into chaos, and brought still more foreign punitive expeditions. Backhouse claimed to have wonderful material to hand, especially the actual private diary of an important court official named Ching Shan, which he said had been rescued during the extensive looting following the invasion of the Allied troops. The book, as noted above, was a success. But from the start there were suspicions about the authenticity of the documents, especially Ching Shan’s diary. It was just too good to be true. And as Trevor-Roper demonstrates, as he delved still deeper into the murk that increasingly swathed Backhouse’s life, there was reason to harbour doubts about everything he touched. For example, while in hope of getting the Oxford professorship of Chinese he did in fact donate dozens of crates of rare books to the Bodleian (which had to pay for the shipping). These were followed by offers of still more spectacular collections, unfortunately involving large payments in advance. The money went to Backhouse, but instead of the books the library received a long procession of excuses, and finally only six boxes (out of the 150 promised) that proved to be mainly late reprints and readily identifiable fakes. Embarrassment reigned among the stacks. In Peking, however, Backhouse was busy with other activities. To describe in detail what these activities were, and their improbability, I must refer you to Trevor-Roper. With evident pleasure, if not always admiration, he succeeds brilliantly in unearthing the truth behind them. There is the time when Backhouse, on the strength of his supposed high-level contacts, secured the unlikely job of battleship salesman to the Chinese. (None were sold.) Then we see him acting as a British agent running a vast, deeply secret arms-buying operation, supposedly rounding up surplus weapons and ammunition for dispatch to the Western Front in 1915, where they were badly needed. Projected at the highest levels in London, the scheme might have worked, except for the fact that there were no surplus weapons in China. This fact did not deter Backhouse. He reported locating thousands of rifles – and even some Maxim guns – and negotiating (with unnamed Chinese authorities) to buy them. But somehow the munitions never seemed to arrive. The shipment was always on the way. And when it finally became apparent that no arms would ever arrive, and that the whole charade had been a fantasy, Backhouse had the Chinese authorities to blame. For the British government to blame Backhouse, of course, was all just too shaming; the gambit had been its idea. Anyway, he soon had another project in hand – to sell banknotes to the Chinese on behalf of the American Bank Note Company. The outcome here was oddly similar – a purchase agreement secured from the ‘authorities’ (that is, Backhouse’s presumed friends in the Manchu court) and then no follow-through. But who would dare challenge him? ‘With his family connexions,’ notes Trevor-Roper, ‘his grand Chinese contacts, his perfect knowledge of Eastern languages, and his powerful position as a secret agent of the British government, [he] was still too important a person to slight on mere suspicion.’ As Hermit of Peking makes delightfully clear, Edmund Backhouse was no ordinary con man. To the extent that he believed his own fantasies, he was not even exactly dishonest. He did know Chinese well, he did understand, better than most, the inner workings of an intricate and decadent ruling class, and he played the role of reclusive scholar – complete with long beard and mandarin gown – most convincingly. Trevor-Roper nevertheless unmasks him with hugely entertaining precision and wit. The famous memoirs offered by Hoeppli receive a particularly delicate evisceration. While they ‘might occasionally deviate into veracity’, in Trevor-Roper’s view they are ‘grossly, grotesquely, obsessively obscene’ and useful largely as a testament to Backhouse’s peculiar psychology. In any case, we are told, they are far too repellent to warrant publication. We are left with the impression that it was with palpable if unexpressed relief that Trevor-Roper relegated them to the oblivion of a back shelf in the Bodleian. Those with stronger stomachs than his (or mine) may be interested to know that a small publisher in Hong Kong has recently issued an edition of a portion of the memoirs in English under the title Decadence Manchoue. Hermit of Peking is written with an attractive lightness of tone quite unlike that of Trevor-Roper’s other historical studies, which may explain why I, when a publisher in New York, was able to get my hands on it. His regular American publisher, apparently put off by the author’s sprightly departure from such heavy-duty works as The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century or The Last Days of Hitler, turned it down. We published it happily, to enthusiastic reviews. That was in 1977. In retrospect it is sadly ironic that Trevor-Roper did not at that point cease his fraud-hunting activities. In 1983 the Sunday Times asked him, as a German expert, to confirm the authenticity of papers purporting to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler. He accepted, which was his primary mistake since, as he later admitted,he wasn’t all that strong on German handwriting. He okayed them; they were fake; he never lived down the error. He would not have made such a blunder with Edmund Backhouse.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Charles Elliott 2015


About the contributor

Charles Elliott is a former senior editor in a New York publishing house, where he published Hermit of Peking. He recalls once having possessed several pages of Backhouse’s unpublished memoir but can no longer find them.

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