“Is Mrs. Alec Tweedie here?”
Yes, Mrs. Alec Tweedie was having her tea, and heard the question. Truly a nice situation! To be enquired for at a gaol.
But even that is capable of explanation. The man on the doorstep held a letter in his hand addressed to me by name, but only vaguely “Glasgow” otherwise. With the usual brilliancy of the postal authorities, they had found the rest of the address and pinned me to the prison, for I was staying with the Governor, who had married a friend of my kindergarten days.
The letter was an invitation to christen a “P. & O.” steamer on the Clyde at Greenock: to be godmother to an infant of twelve thousand six hundred tons, that, lying in her cradle, was four hundred and fifty feet long and fifty-four feet wide. When she sailed out to sea on January 6th of 1900, this mighty goddaughter of mine carried two thousand three hundred troops between her ample decks.
Needless to say, the sponsorial honour thus offered—the responsibility being light—was duly accepted.
It was a most glorious day when the Governor of the prison escorted me to Greenock. The P. & O. has become one of the most important factors in the commerce of the nation, under Sir Thomas Sutherland, so the christening was not only impressive to “those who go down to the sea in ships,” but to all onlookers. Those great yards on the Clyde employ several thousand men, all of whom, with their wives and children, were spectators of the ceremony, to say nothing of an invited public.
How enormous that ship looked, her great iron sides standing out from what shipwrights are pleased to call the “permanent ways”. She owned as yet no masts or funnels, or indeed any et ceteras, only there loomed her enormous iron carcase. One felt a fly on the wall standing beneath the shadow of her massive frame. She literally towered above us, a monster of steel and bolts and rivets. At the stern a wooden erection had been made, with a little staircase leading to a platform, and on this the builder of the vessel, Mr. Patrick Caird, and I stood alone.
It was a most exciting moment. The sun shone, there resounded a dull thud, thud, thud, for the men below were hammering her sides loose from the wood in which she had been embedded for about two years. Then came an almost breathless silence among the vast audience, when Mr. Caird turned to me and said:
“Be sure and break the bottle.”
I had never thought of doing anything else, knowing the importance to the superstitious sailor-man that the glass should be shattered to atoms, but his serious tones sent a shiver through me, and I recognised, as in a flash, the gravity of the moment.