WITH A PREFACE BY
SIR FRANCIS W. DE WINTON K.C.M.G.
PORTRAITS & ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY ALBEMARLE STREET
1896
PREFACE
On his retirement from public service in 1886, Sir John Hay Drummond Hay, at the instance of many friends, undertook to set down the recollections of his life. Some of these notes were published in Murray’s Magazine in 1887 under the title of ‘Scraps from my Note-book’; others were laid by to be incorporated in a complete volume. The work was, however, interrupted by an accident to one of his eyes which rendered it impossible for him to write. For a time he confined himself to dictating to my sister, who acted as his amanuensis, quaint stories and detached incidents connected with the Moors, intending to resume the continuous tale of his life when his sight grew stronger. But, shortly after the recovery of his eyesight, and before he had proceeded much further in ‘unwinding the skein of his memories,’ he was prostrated by a severe illness, followed by influenza, of which he died in 1893.
It has fallen therefore to my sister, Miss Drummond Hay, and myself, his two daughters, to endeavour to unite, to the best of our ability, these scattered notes and memoranda, and to add to them such details as could be supplied from our own recollections. In this task we have been naturally somewhat restricted. In the first place, we have been obliged to omit from the memoirs of one who lived and died so recently much that might have been published twenty years hence. In the second place, as we have been necessarily debarred from using any official documents except those published in the Blue Books, our work can scarcely do full justice to the life of a public servant. These restrictions have not lightened our task; and, had it not been for the kindly help and advice of friends, we should have had still greater difficulty in tracing, from my father’s notes and private correspondence, the course of his lifelong labours in Morocco.
The main portion of Sir John’s letters are addressed to his mother—to whom he was a devoted son—and, later, to his eldest sister, Mrs. Norderling, who was during her lifetime the sympathetic and intelligent sharer of his confidences. Except with his mother and sister he carried on but little private correspondence, principally on account of his sight, which was enfeebled after an illness in 1859. But he wrote occasionally to friends, several of whom preserved and have kindly lent us his letters. Some of these have been utilised, and for all of them our thanks are most gratefully tendered.
On my father’s account of his school days at the Academy in Edinburgh and at the Charterhouse in London, on his early life at Tangier, or on his apprenticeship to diplomacy at Constantinople under Lord Ponsonby and the great Elchi, it is unnecessary to dilate. The recollections and impressions of boyhood and youth break off when more serious work presses on him after his appointment as Consul General in Morocco in 1845. Though considered very young for such a post, for he was only twenty-eight, his training in Egypt and Turkey well qualified him for a position which was destined to give scope to a character eulogised by one of his chiefs as vigorous, temperate, and straightforward. He was aided by his great facility in writing and speaking foreign languages, as at that time he had perfect command of Turkish, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic; and to the end he retained his fluency in the last three.