Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

At last he made his appearance, breathless, and, upsetting a water-bottle as he took his seat, blurted out, “Whitelaw Reid” (then editor and proprietor of the Tribune) “has been moving heaven and earth to get the Court of St. James’” (i. e. the post of American Minister to England), “but the President won’t give it him. He’s afraid that England will refuse to receive him because of the way in which the Tribune has behaved.”

A good many years later he achieved the goal of his ambition, for I. N. Ford had come to England in the interval, and had made the Tribune to America what the London Times is to England in the matter of foreign politics. Ford had won distinction earlier as an author writing on travel in Central America.

Another man who did a lot of spade-work in promoting the entente cordiale was John Morgan Richards, who has lived in England for many years, and has more than once been President of the American Society of London. American from his backbone to his finger-tips, John Richards had a fine Quaker sense of justice and peace on earth which made the eagle lie down with the lion like a couple of lambs wherever he was present. His brilliant daughter, Mrs. Craigie—better known in literature as John Oliver Hobbes—was a potent link between the two countries.

Both he and his converse, G. R. Parkin, the Canadian, who was the real father of Imperial Federation, and who is now usefully and congenially employed in managing the Rhodes Scholarship Fund, were often at our house. G. R. Parkin and Gilbert Parker, another Canadian, were sometimes confused with each other in those days, by people who did not know them personally.

Canada has sent us a lot of good men. Beckles Willson, who lives in the old mansion in Kent which was the birthplace of General Wolfe, the conqueror of Canada, has poured out a stream of information about Canada in a most attractive form. Who does not remember the elder Pitt asking Wolfe, a boy of thirty-three, to dinner just after he had appointed him to command the military in Canada? Wolfe got very drunk, and for a moment Pitt feared that he had made a mistake. But he remembered how the boy had behaved under fire in that descent on the Breton coast, and let him go to Canada without misgivings.

I have known Seton Watson, the Perthshire Laird who has done so much for the Slav population of Hungary, since he was a small boy. When at New College, Oxford, he showed his future bent by winning the Stanhope—the University Prize for an historical essay. His first work, after he went down, was to translate Gregorovius’s Tombs of the Popes. But he soon began to give his attention to Hungary, where he has travelled a great deal, and took up the cause of the Slav races who are being oppressed by the Magyars. He held a successful exhibition of their art in London a year or two ago.

Another friend of mine who has done similar good work is Campbell Mackellar. He, however, has chiefly devoted himself to the Balkans, and in Montenegro no Englishman is so well known and beloved. At his hospitable table I have met some of the leading representatives of the Balkan States who came to England during the war.

Connected both by property and family with Australia, his book-writing has been chiefly about Australia, and it was he who wrote the description of the Adam Lindsay Gordon country in South Australia which appears in the book I wrote with Miss Humphris about Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia. Mackellar has likewise done a good deal for the recognition of Australian Art in London—a fact commemorated in an album of original sketches presented to him by the Australian artists who are over here.

It was no mere accident which made Miss Humphris and myself collaborate in Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia. It was true that we were strangers when she wrote to ask me to collaborate, but we brought common traditions to bear on the book. In Cheltenham, where Gordon spent his boyhood, Miss Humphris lives, and I was six years at the College. Gordon was a College boy, and his father was a College master. Miss Humphris could not be at the College, as I was, but her grandfather was the architect who built its principal buildings. Like Gordon, both Miss Humphris and I went to Australia, and we spent years there, though not so many as he did, and as a connection of one of Australia’s greatest racing men—the famous Etienne de Mestre—it was natural that she should take an absorbing interest in the steeplechasing exploits of Adam Lindsay Gordon.