Empire Bungler

THE SPLENDID PAUPER by Allen Andrews. 256 pages. Lippincott. $4.95.

Kipling's instructions are clear enough: ;'If you can make one heap of all your winnings;/ And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,/ And lose, and start again at your beginnings . . ." Moreton Frewen, Winston Churchill's scapegrace uncle, could do all of this and did, time after time, with astonishingly consistent results. He kept on losing.

He lost with intelligence, sincerity, style, imagination and enormous diligence in Wyoming, Monte Carlo, London, Australia and Hyderabad. His projects included cattle raising, real estate, mining, political advocacy, and remunerative marriage, as well as occasional casino gambling. Frequently the odds against losing seemed insuperable, but Frewen always beat the odds.

Dear Horse. He was born in 1853, a younger son of a wealthy Sussex squire. In three years, after leaving Cambridge University, he ran through what seems to have been a sizable inheritance. He decided to gamble himself back to affluence, did well for a while, and then grandly staked all his winnings on a two-horse race, having made up his mind to recoup his fortune in the U.S. if he lost. Later he wrote: "The dear, handsome little horse ran most gamely, but in the last hundred yards tired under the weight and just failed to get home. So America was under the lee, and I felt quite excited and bucked up."

Frewen was still in good spirits when it came time to leave England. Farewelling boozily with his hunting and gambling friends and with the actress Lillie Langtry, a mistress he shared with the Prince of Wales, he missed the boat train to Liverpool. His ship, the Bothnia, was to dock in Ireland before continuing to New York, so Frewen caught the night boat to Dublin, hired a special train to speed him to the port in Cork, and arrived just as the Bothnia steamed out of the harbor. He had, however, cabled his brother Richard, who was already on board, to send a tender for him, and he made a dashing transfer to the Bothnia at sea.

Late in the fall of 1878, the two brothers and four of Moreton's hunting friends from Cambridge reached southern Wyoming and spent six weeks shooting. By wintertime, when it was clearly too risky for any sensible man to cross the Big Horn range, the two Frewen brothers slogged through waist-high snow to the spot on the Powder River where they intended to become cattle barons.

Elephant Trap. Within three years, Frewen had married Clara Jerome, the daughter of a New York financier (her younger sister Jennie had recently married Lord Randolph Churchill). He had also regularized the shipment of champagne to the Powder River settlement, introduced white riding breeches and the English saddle to the region, made a friend of Buffalo Bill Cody, and become manager of a cattle empire capitalized at $1.5 million. In 1884, his sixth year in Wyoming, his Powder River company declared a dividend of 24%. The next year, however, a combination of bad weather, rustlers, homesteaders and an obtuse board of directors in London started the company on a long slide toward worthlessness. Frewen, forbidden as manager to sell his shares, came out with nothing but debts.

Successively, he became involved as an investigator of graft in Hyderabad (he nailed the grafters), in the promotion of a machine to extract gold from low-grade ore (it did not work well), the colonization of Kenya (he fell into an elephant trap), lobbying for a gold-silver currency standard (it was not adopted), and the hawking of a patent disinfectant called Electrozone. If his promotion was good, his financing was inadequate, and if both were good, someone cheated him out of his commission. He borrowed from his brothers, his friends, their friends and his children, and lectured his nephew Winston on politics and the art of prose composition.

He talked well, ate well, hunted superbly, and knew every U.S. President from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. The wedding reception of his daughter Clare in 1910 was attended by four members of the British Cabinet, including Churchill, then Home Secretary. It was also attended by several bill collectors, who were seated by themselves in a downstairs parlor. Frewen had, however, paid cash for his daughter's wedding gown. The seamstress who delivered it that morning had refused to accept a check.

Biographer Allen Andrews, a British freelance writer, has sized up both Frewen and the times delightfully. He is right to point out that though other adventurers have enriched both themselves and vast territories with wilder schemes, they are perhaps less interesting as people. Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder, died leaving Rhodesia and the Kimberly Mines. Frewen, an empire bungler, left only splendid material for a loser's biography.

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