Compton Mackenzie first came to Addison Mansions as a small boy at St. Paul’s School, where he was a friend of my son. They began to be men very early in my son’s little cupboard of a study, overlooking Lyon’s cake-factory. I did not see him after he made his fame as a novelist till we came to live at Richmond. He has, like myself, a passion for gardening. He is, of course, a son of Edward Compton, the actor, and Virginia Bateman, and his great-grandmother was a Symonds, aunt of John Addington Symonds, so there is one of the best strains of literary ability in the family. The famous Sir Morell Mackenzie was Edward Compton’s cousin.
When I wrote to ask Compton Mackenzie, who is now indulging his passion for gardening by living in Capri and making landscapes round his house, what first impelled him to write novels, he said—
“I can remember shooting peas at your guests as they came in, and throwing cake, etc. I don’t suppose we did it always, but I distinctly remember doing it once or twice. It is difficult to extract anything from the past and account for my writing novels. Yet I always had a passion for writing. In the Upper Sixth in 1896, I, with two other boys, ran a paper called The Hectona, of which, so far as I know, only two numbers are in existence. It was printed on gelatine, and all the contributions were copied out by myself in my execrable handwriting. Like many magazines since, it expired of illegibility. Later, at Oxford, I ran another paper called The Oxford Point of View.
“Gardening I took up to console myself for not being able to find a publisher for my first book. It toured round London for nearly two years, and I did not sit down and write The Carnival until The Passionate Elopement lay bound upon my table. This was according to a vow I had made. I started very early. The Passionate Elopement was printed just after I was twenty-five. It was originally—or some of it—a play which I wrote to console my father for having got married without warning or expectation. That was when I was twenty-two.
“The Carnival, I suppose, may be called the result of helping my brother-in-law, poor Harry Pelissier, with his Alhambra Revue. I used to rehearse the Corps de Ballet, and, I suppose, naturally made use of such an opportunity to make a book.”
Lord Monkswell, who wrote a single novel, and whose sister, the Contessa Arturo di Cadilhac, born Margaret Collier, has written some valuable books about life in Italy, I met constantly as one of the directors of the Authors’ Club. He was also my sponsor for another club. He was very regular in his attendances at the Board Meetings of the Authors’ Club, which he occasionally illuminated with a naïve outbreak, as in his dictum about the National Liberal Club. At one of our Board Meetings, I was advocating some change in the financial arrangements of the billiard-room, and quoted as an example to be followed the rule at the National Liberal Club.
“National Liberal Club!” cried Lord Monkswell, who was at that time Under-Secretary for War in a Liberal Government; “why, I don’t call that a club at all—I call it a railway station!”
Richard Orton Prowse has won admiration in high places with his work. One of his novels ran as a serial in the Cornhill, and he had a play produced by the “Stage Society.” He used to come to Addison Mansions because we were in the same small house at Cheltenham College—Gantillon’s, in Fauconberg Terrace. There were only about half-a-dozen boys in the house, but we used to knock up a game of football on a waste bit of ground at the back of the terrace, with two small day-boys who lived in an adjoining house. There were not more than eight of us all told—I think only seven, and of the seven, besides Prowse and myself, there were the two famous Renshaws, and the two famous Lambs. The Renshaws were very small boys in those days, but so absolutely certain in their catching, and their drop-kicking, that they counted in football games with boys three or four years older. When they grew up, their extraordinary scientificness in games was proved in the lawn-tennis courts, because for years, until one of them died by his own hand, they were undisputed champions. As it happened, I never met either of them after they left school, but one day I was driving through a remote Buckinghamshire village, White Waltham or something of the kind, with a friend, when we observed a crowd, in the street outside the village pound, of persons whom you would not have expected in such a place. We inquired what the trouble was, and found that it was an inquest on a suicide—one of the famous Renshaws.
Curiously enough, there was the same element of tragedy in the history of the brothers Lamb—Captain Thomas Lamb and Captain Edward Lamb, were for years the finest shots in the British army. Edward Lamb was the only boy who ever won the Spencer Cup twice; when he was at school, there had never been such a shot at a public school. Thomas Lamb, who had the finest nerve I ever remember in any one, broke down in a match when he went over to the United States to represent England, and was so mortified that he shot himself on the way home.
I shall always remember with pride that I was the first person who ever put a rifle into the hands of those two Lambs. I taught them how to shoot, and did most of the explaining in that house in Fauconberg Terrace, Cheltenham. I was at the time Captain of the school shooting eight, and I had won the Spencer Cup myself in the Public Schools matches at the preceding Wimbledon Meeting. I rather despaired about Tommy Lamb; he was not quick at taking things in, but I knew that if he could learn to shoot, his nerve and his doggedness might carry him to any heights of success. The houses of Fauconberg Terrace were very high, and there was a high parapet about a foot wide on the roof. I have seen Tommy Lamb run along that parapet from end to end. He said, “If it was only two or three feet from the ground, instead of two or three feet from the roof, it would be nothing. Why should it make any difference? It is all the same to me.”