Author(s): Alexander Cochrane

Biographies and memoirs

It is not often that a great Scottish family dating back six hundred years has produced a line of fighting men who have served God and Country to the degree which Clan Cochrane can justly claim. Even less often that the continuity of this tradition can lend itself to a book which, by the telling of a family history, illuminates whole eras of our past. In this way, The Fighting Cochranes can be compared with Nicholas Monserrat's The Master Mariner.Several of the protagonists in the stories have been written about before. For instance, Thomas Cochrane, later Admiral the 10th Earl of Dundonald, has earned no fewer than fourteen biographies. He, the perfect storybook character on whom G.A. Henty, Captain Marryat and C.S. Forester founded characters, was such an amazingly colourful personality that the author is to be congratulated on compressing the story into one chapter. Then there was Douglas Cochrane, later General the 12th Earl, who fought hand to hand with Dervish warriors when they broke into a British 'square' during the Gordon Relief Expedition; whose mounted troops, 'Dundonald's Cavalry', became a by-word for their elan in South Africa during the Boer War; and who galloped with Lieutenant Churchill into Ladysmith to relive that beleaguered town. His exploits and those of many other high-ranking Cochrane naval, military and, later, air force Commanders influenced the course of history.Yet it is also the first hand experiences of less famous Cochranes who fought under Nelson, in the Boer War, against the Mahdi, in the Indian Mutiny, the Ashanti Wars, the American War of Independence, against Chinese pirates, in the Peninsular and Zulu Wars - to mention but a few - which makes The Fighting Cochranes such an unusual book. With stories of ancient Scottish clan feuds, inventors, skullduggery and fraud - there is something for everyone - and the list of Regiments with which the family served is like a roll-call of the British Army.The Fighting Cochranes creates a disciplined structure within which the author, through ten years of original research, has recreated much British military and naval history - and the family thread gives it colour and substance.