W. W. Jacobs, the author of “Many Cargoes,” recollects,
“I cannot recall my first meeting with Chesterton: it was so very long ago. But I do remember an occasion when he sat next to me at dinner and said that he had rheumatism so badly that he did not know how he would be able to stand up for his speech. A difficulty which he solved by keeping my right shoulder in a strong hand and bearing down upon it. It was a good speech, but it seemed to be the longest I had ever listened to.”
“I regret that I never met G. K. C. personally,” laments James Hilton, “but I did when quite a small boy send him a poem I had written (a drinking song as a matter of fact), modeled after his own style, and received a charming letter from his wife, I think, saying that he had been much interested and ‘believed that after the war there would be a great recrudescence of drinking songs.’ This was my first letter from even the wife of a celebrity and I was very proud of it. As a matter of fact, in my entire life I have only written anything you could call fan letters to two authors, Chesterton on this one occasion, and again later to Galsworthy.
“I wish I could give you more interesting reminiscences of Chesterton, whose work I admire very much, but we were of different generations and it happened that we never met, though we had many mutual friends. I think my favorite book of his is ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ which I remember reading during my school days. I am very pleased to hear from you that he expressed admiration for ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips.’ I did not know of this and it is a source of deep gratification to me.”
Christopher Hollis first met G. K. C. in company with one of Belloc’s sons:
“The first time that I met Mr. Chesterton was, when as an undergraduate at Oxford, I was in the company of Hilary Belloc, the son of Mr. Belloc, to see the Association Football Cup Final—the culminating event of the English football season—at Wembley. We were traveling by motor bicycle from Oxford to Wembley and, passing through Beaconsfield in the middle of the morning, Hilary Belloc took me to pay a call on Mr. Chesterton, whom we found walking in the garden with his wife.”
And Hilaire Belloc himself:
“I met Mr. Chesterton first when I was thirty, and he, I think, twenty-six. That was at the end of the year 1900. I had already written and spoken for some years on what later became known as ‘Distributism.’ I do not think that he had by that time written or spoken upon public affairs.”
Gilbert Frankau is “afraid that I only met G. K. Chesterton once. This was at a debate. He took the chair and was, I remember, a little sarcastic about my own contribution. But the sarcasm was so beautifully done that it became almost a compliment. He really had a rare charm of manner. And he really was a character. Characters being only too rare in this modern world where all tend to become stereotyped. I was, of course, a Father Brown fan. But which really made the deepest impression on my young mind was Chesterton’s poetry. It had, for me, the supreme virtue of vigor.”
The critic Coulson Kernahan admired Chesterton hugely: