CHAPTER I
MY LIFE (1856-1886)
I was born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal grandfather. My father, a solicitor by profession, who died in the last days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the sixteen children of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L., J.P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. The name St. Barbe has been freely bestowed on their descendants because the first St. Barbe in this country has the honour of appearing on the Roll of Battle Abbey.
My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary Wynfield. Mr. Wheelton (I was never able to discover any other person named Wheelton, till I found, among the survivors of the loss of the Titanic, a steward called Wheelton; truly the name has narrowly escaped extinction), from whom I get my third Christian name, was in business as a shipper on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the Cordwainers’ Company. He was Sheriff of London in the year of Queen Victoria’s marriage. Though he lived at Meopham near Tonbridge, he came from Manchester, and I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of the house. But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester.
Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a frequent guest at his hospitable table, and has immortalised him in one of his books. He was in a way immortalised by taking a leading part in one of the most famous law cases in our history, Stockdale versus Hansard. As Sheriff he had to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House of Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates a libel on Mr. Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of privilege, and sentenced the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the Speaker’s house, from which he was shortly afterwards released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City of London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members of the House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions by bringing in a bill to make the reports of the proceedings of Parliament privileged and this duly became law.
I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, supported by allegorical figures of Justice and others, which the City of London presented to my grandfather in honour of this occasion, with a few survivors of a set of leather fire-buckets, embellished with the City arms, which now do duty as waste-paper baskets.
I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly afterwards my parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington, continuing there till 1862.
It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was born, just before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who married the late Rev. Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was born in 1850. My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins, eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, and afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 1851; and my brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, who holds one of the City livings, St. Margaret Patten, was born in 1858.
My father, having become better off by the death of my two grandfathers in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six years’ lease of Phillimore Lodge, Campden Hill, which I sold in 1911.
I believe that I never left London till I was four years old, when we all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William Springett, who still survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near Canterbury. While we were there I first saw and dipped my hands in the sea, which I was destined to traverse so often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from Dunkirk.
From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children generally spent the summer at Brighton, from which my father went away to a moor in Yorkshire for the grouse-shooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of Brighton, which seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to think that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like a very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen at Deal, where we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen’s dower-house, shortly after our visit to Dunkirk. There we had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to the beach in front of our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and the Deal luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and had seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I loved the woods we had rambled in, between Dunkirk and Canterbury, even better still. I never found the ordinary seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of golf. Without golf these places are marine deserts.