New Spalding Club > House of Gordon > Gordons under arms

THE MAKING OF THE MUSTER. xxili
difficult — to find the origin of a Gordon in a i<nown regiment, or to find
a regiment for a Gordon of a well-defined family. In the first case
comparatively few documents at the Record Office assist. The India
Office is much more satisfactory, but in no case is an officer traced
further back than his father. The silence is deliberate, for genealogy,
which is, of course, not necessary to the War Office, seems to be con-
sidered a breach of good form. Thus, Major-General D. O'Callaghan in
his counsel of perfection, The Young Officer's Don't, lays down the advice
— " Don't set undue value on pedigree or family connections ". As a
matter of fact, the advice is, as the Professor of Greek would have said,
a matter of supererogation. The young British soldier, so far from
setting undue value on his origin, sets no store by it at all. The
classic case, the most tantalising example, is that of David Gordon,
the great-grandfather of "Chinese" Gordon, whose family have given
fourteen male descendants to the Services. The fame of the hero of
Khartoum is so great that several well-defined families would like to
claim him, and his own kinsmen would like to connect him with some
Scots line. But in spite of the most laborious investigation — practi-
cally co-extensive with the present book itself — we are as far off knowing
David's origin as ever ; not only so, but we are still more mystified by
Mrs. Skelton's discovery that David's own (unnamed) father was in the
Army, for his grandson in a return of services made in 1831, says : " My
son [that is David's great-grandson] is the fi/tk generation of my family
who have served in the regular Army ". The failure to find a father
for David is all the more disappointing, because it was the desire to
solve his origin which led Mrs. Skelton first to visit the Record Office
several years before undertaking the present work : indeed Gordons
UNDER Arms is largely the result of the desire to solve this puzzle.
Unfortunately a great many other officers remain unidentified in
point of origin as follows : —
The counterpart is that in which we know the genealogy of an officer
but have no evidence of the branch of the Service he belonged to.
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