Appendix II
Yakub Beg and Izzat Kutebar
Yakub (Yakoob) Beg, who became the greatest chief in Central Asia and the leading resistance fighter against Russian imperialism, was born in Piskent in 1820. He was one of the Persian-Tajik people, and a descendant of Tamerlaine the Great (Timur)—Flashman's description of him corresponds closely to the reconstruction of features recently made from Timur's skull by the Russian expert, Professor Gerasimov.
In 1845 Yakub became chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, and then Pansad Bashi (commander of 500). He was made Kush Begi (military commander) and Governor of Ak Mechet, an important fortress on the Syr Daria, in 1847, and in the same year married a girl from Julek, a river town; she is described as "a Kipchak lady of the Golden Horde". Yakub was active in raiding the new Russian outposts on the Aral coast, and after the fall of Ak Metchet in 1853 he made strenuous efforts to retake it from the Russians, without success.
After the Russian invasion, Yakub eventually turned his attention to making his own state in Kashgar. In 1865, as commander-in-chief to the decadent Buzurg Khan, he took Kashgar, then dispossessed his own overlord, and assumed the throne himself as Amir and Atalik Ghazi; in this same year he married "the beautiful daughter of Ko Dali, an officer in the Chinese army", by whom he had several children.
As ruler of Kashgar and East Turkestan, Yakub Beg was the most powerful monarch of Central Asia. He remained a bitter enemy of Russia and a close friend of the British, whose envoys were received in Kashgar, where a British-Kashgari commercial treaty was concluded in 1874. It was Russia's fear that he would eventually unite all the Muslims of Central Asia in a holy war against the Tsar, but in 1876 Kashgar was attacked by China, and Yakub was driven out; he was assassinated on May 1, 1877, by Hakim Khan, a son of Buzurg Khan.
His biographer has described Yakub Beg as "a great man born centuries too late". Certainly, as a nationalist leader and resistance fighter he was unique in his time and country, for "alone in Central Asia he remained free", and he fought his campaigns and ruled his independent state without wealth or any large following: his great gifts, according to contemporaries, were a keen intelligence, a winning and handsome appearance, and a refusal to be panicked—he also seems to have had a sense of timing, as witness the neatness with which he betrayed Buzurg Khan.
Anywhere else in the world he would probably be remembered as William Wallace, Hereward, and Crazy Horse are remembered, but not in modern Russia. In Tashkent recently I asked an educated Russian what kind of place Yakub Beg occupied in local history: his name was not even known. (See D. C. Boulger's Yakoob Beg, 1878.)
Izzat Kutebar, brigand, rebel, and guerrilla leader, was a Kirgiz, born probably in 1800. He first robbed the Bokhara caravan in 1822, and was at his height as a raider and scourge of the Russians in the 1840s. They eventually persuaded him to suspend his bandit activities, and rewarded him with a gold medal (see page 268), but he cut loose again in the early fifties, was captured in 1854, escaped or was released, raised a revolt, and lived as a rebel in the Ust-Yurt until 1858, when he finally surrendered to Count Ignatieff and made his peace with Russia.
NOTES
[1]Possibly because of the war scare, as Flashman suggests, there was a craze for growing moustaches, in addition to beards and whiskers, in the early months of 1854. Another fashion among the young men was for brilliantly-coloured shirts with grotesque designs, skulls, snakes, flowers, and the like. Both fads bore an interesting resemblance to modern "hippy" fashions, not least in the reactions they provoked: Bank of England clerks were expressly forbidden to join "the moustache movement", as it was called.
[2]The "eunuchs". The open-range musketry target in use at this time consisted of the usual concentric circles, but with a naked human figure in the centre; the bull was a black disc discreetly placed below the figure's waist-line.
[3]Although Britain was not formally at war until March 28, 1854, the preparations for conflict had been going on for many weeks amid growing popular determination for a showdown with Russia. The Scots (3rd) Guards had embarked a month earlier, and Palmerston, the Home Secretary, and Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, made their jingoistic Reform Club speeches on March 7. These were brilliantly parodied by Punch ("Shomeshay we're norrawar. Norrawar! Hash-ha! No! Norrawar! Noshexactly awar. But …") But while the war fever was strong in Britain it was not as universal as Flashman suggests; there was an active peace movement, and anti-war sentiments could be passionate. For an extreme but interesting view, see J. McQueen's The War: who's to blame? (1854).
[4]The play was almost certainly Balzac's "The Married Unmarried", which caused a minor controversy.
[5]Shell-out, skittle pool, go-back, etc. The rules of these early variations on pool (and forerunners of snooker) are to be found in "Captain Crawley's" standard Victorian work, Billiards, which is a mine of practical information and billiards lore, and contains much information on pool-room sharks and swindles. Joe Bennet was a champion player of the time. A jenny is a difficult in-off shot to the middle pocket, usually with the object ball close to the side-cushion; a pair of breeches is a simultaneous in-off and pot red in the top pockets.
[6]Sir William Molesworth's Commons committee met in March, 1854, to consider small arms production. Lord Paget was among the members, and Lt-Col. Sam Colt, the American inventor of the Colt revolver, was among those who gave evidence.
[7]Quite apart from the popular criticism he had been receiving for allegedly meddling in State affairs, Prince Albert's zeal for designing military clothing attracted considerable ridicule in the spring of 1854. In fact, judging from contemporary sketches, the so-called "Albert Bonnet" for the Guards was a sensible, if ugly, multi-purpose forage cap. But there was growing controversy at this time about British uniforms—the traditional tight stocks and collars being a principal target—and any suggestions from H.R.H. were, as usual, unwelcome.
[8]The main bombardment of Odessa by British ships took place on April 22, but without doing great damage.
[9] Villikins and his Dinah" was the hit song of 1854.
[10]From this, and one later reference, it seems obvious that Flashman was particularly impressed by a Punch cartoon, published shortly after Balaclava, showing a stout British father brandishing a poker with patriotic zeal in the morning-room as he reads news of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
[11]The Cabinet did meet at Pembroke Lodge, Richmond, on the evening of June 28, 1854, and agreed on important orders to be sent to Lord Raglan for the invasion of the Crimea. "Agreed" may be too strong a word, since most of the Cabinet were asleep during the meeting, and were not fully aware of what orders were being sent; they woke up once, when someone knocked over a chair, and then dozed off again. The authority for this is no less than A. W. Kinglake, the great Crimea historian, who devotes a separate appendix to the incident in his massive history of the war, The Invasion of the Crimea. Kinglake was obviously uneasy about disclosing that the Cabinet had taken the vital decision of the war while in a state of torpor, and speculated about the possibility "of a narcotic substance having been taken by some mischance" in their food. He was too tactful or charitable to mention the obvious conclusion, which is that they had had too much to drink.