The Tragic Destiny of Basil Blackwood

April 2014

Two months later on May 23, the regimental chaplain, Reverend A.J.L. Heaver, who had actually examined Basil's dead body under fire, vividly wrote of his wounds, the state of his corpse and their inability to get him out of the battlefield:

I can indeed confirm that Lord Dufferin's body must have been buried by the Japs near point 534 [on the 1" map of Burma], for our patrols were sent over the same spot repeatedly and there was no trace of either his body or that of the private soldier killed near him.

His death must have been instantaneous as we got out to him only a little time after he was reported hit and from my examination I could see that he must have been hit through the heart and lungs for the nature and extent of the bleeding proved it. Also, his body was rigid. I don't think more than an hour and a half at most can have passed before we got to him.

It will always be a sorrow to me that we couldn't bring his body in but though I dragged it for some yards, I had to give it up as the man next to me was hit and we all had our work cut out to bring him in under covering fire.

Two years after Basil's death, Evelyn Waugh gave Nancy Mitford an amusing account of an incident that occurred when both Basil's widow and Randolph Churchill were probably drunk at a London ball: "Maureen gave Randolph a terrific box on the ear. Instead of striking back like a man he tried to pacify her. They stood in the centre of the ball room sweating & arguing for three minutes and then — another more terrific box. I said to her: ‘I am all for Randolph being struck but why particularly do you strike him now?' She: ‘He never wrote a letter of condolence when Ava was killed.' "

Betjeman chose the glorious but not entirely accurate words for Basil's memorial at Clandeboye:

A man of brilliance
And of many friends
He was killed in action at Letze on March
25th 1945 at the age of thirty-five,
Recapturing Burma the country which
His Grandfather annexed to the British
Crown.

In "Runaway", addressed to Blackwood's daughter Caroline, who was his third wife, the American poet Robert Lowell followed the memorial inscription and wrote about "your father's betrayal of you, / rushing to his military death in Burma, / annexed for England / by his father's father, the Viceroy." Betjeman exaggerated Basil's heroic exploits; Lowell saw them as a personal "betrayal" of his abandoned children.

Basil Blackwood had an illustrious literary and diplomatic heritage, impressive title, good looks, great wealth and formidable intelligence. As W.B. Yeats wrote of another gallant Irishman, Major Robert Gregory, "Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, / And all he did done perfectly." The detailed documents in the military archives solve the mystery of Basil's death, which occurred nearly 70 years ago. His personal charm, difficult to capture and define, impressed everyone who knew him. A brilliant scholar, with a gift for friendship, he was destined for high office but had his career cut off in his mid-thirties. He held an important position in the British government, but showed personal courage by volunteering for dangerous duty. It's sadly ironic that he was killed on a comparatively unimportant mission. In Burma, Basil was destined to follow the tradition of his gifted but tragically doomed family.

Additional research by Stephen Fogden