Having been brought up in Canada on the St. Lawrence, she is a wonderful canoeist. Her grace on the water used to be the theme of the frequenters of Cookham Reach.
Her brother, Roger Pocock, has written the best novels of the Canadian North-West. They are descendants of the famous traveller, and had a great-great-uncle, Nicholas Pocock, the sea-painter who painted Nelson’s Battle of the Nile and Lord Howe’s Glorious First of June. Another ancestor wrote farces in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Lena Ashwell owns the Kingsway Theatre, and has produced some notable successes there, in which she showed her determination to give brilliant beginners—whether actors or dramatists—a chance. But since 1908, when she married Dr. Simson of Grosvenor Street, she has chiefly given herself up to feminist and benevolent movements—the chief of which was the founding of the Three Arts’ Club for young actresses, musicians, and painters to make their home as well as their club. The Three Arts’ Club has an excellent magazine of its own, and confers the various advantages of an Institute on its members. She is also a prominent worker for the Suffrage Movement.
One of the earliest of our actor friends, and one of our most frequent visitors, was James Welch, who first came with his brother-in-law, Le Gallienne. He had given up chartered-accounting for the stage for five or six years before we knew him. But a good many years more had to pass before he came into his own as the genius of farce, though he played with real power and success in several of Ibsen’s plays, and Bernard Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses. It was in Mr. Hopkinson, in 1905, after he had been on the stage for eighteen years, that he became an idol of the public, and was enabled to go into management.
Ever since then he has been enormously successful, and in spite of it, has remained the same simple, impulsive, unspoiled person as ever. He used often, as I have told in another chapter, to go to the Authors’ Club with me.
One night not long since, when I was chatting with him in his dressing-room at the theatre, and was asking him when he could have another game of golf, he said, “I don’t know, I’m sure. I have contracts with cinema-film photographers for seven thousand pounds, and I don’t see how the devil I am going to get them all in.”
I felt quite oppressed with the unfairness of things, for I had known this same man when he was just as brilliant an actor, eating his head off with chagrin at not being able to get an engagement (of which I am sure he was badly in need pecuniarily), and now here were photographers and film-makers tumbling over each other in their anxiety to take him in his inimitable fooling in When Knights were Bold, or his misery and stupefaction in his great condemned cell-scene from the Coliseum.
Welch is quite a decent golfer—down to 8, I think, though the time was when I had to give him 8. He is also a remarkably good spinner of golf stories. I tell him that whenever he is hard up for a curtain-raiser, he could easily hold a house for half-an-hour with his golf-stories.
One of his favourites is about his caddie at Aberdeen, to whom he gave two seats to see him in When Knights were Bold. Next day on the links, he asked the man how he liked it.
“My wife laughed,” said the cautious Scot.