A New Medley of Memories

by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

One recalls delicious rambles with our brethren or our guests during those sunlit autumn days: sometimes among the verdant Glengarry woods, sometimes at our outlying "chapel-of-ease," some miles up the most beautiful of the glens which run from Central Inverness-shire to the sea. A veritable oasis this among the hills, with its green meadows, waving pines, and graceful bridge spanning the rushing river; and all framing the humble chapel, its eastern wall adorned with a fresco (from the brush of one of our artist monks[[3]]) which the little flock—sadly diminished of late years by emigration—greatly admired and venerated. A week-end was sometimes spent pleasantly and not unprofitably at some remote shooting-lodge, saying mass for Catholic tenants, and perhaps a handful of faithful Highlanders. One such visit I remember this autumn at a lodge in Glencarron, a wild wind-swept place, with the surrounding hilltops already snow-coated, which Lord Wimborne (for some years Lovat's tenant at Beaufort) had recently acquired. Although in the heart of the forest, the lodge was but two hundred yards from the railway; there was no station, but the train would obligingly stop when signalled by the wave of a napkin from the front door! A crofter's cow strayed on the line one day of my stay, was, by bad luck, run over by one of the infrequent trains, and (as a newspaper report once said of a similar mischance) "cut literally into calves."[[4]] The night before I left Glencarron, we were all wakened, and some of us not a little perturbed, by two very perceptible shocks of earthquake—a phenomenon not unusual in the district. We heard afterwards that at Glenelg, on the west coast, the shocks had been more severe, and some damage had been done; but, as a witty member of our party remarked, Glenelg might have been turned inside out, or upside down, without suffering any appreciable change.[[5]] On my way back to Fort Augustus I stayed a day at Beaufort to wish bon voyage to Lovat's brother-in-law and sister, who were just off to visit another married sister at our Embassy in Japan, and (incidentally) to travel round the world. I met on the steamer on my way home one of my Wauchope cousins, a spinster lady who had gone some time before to live in Rome, and had asked me for letters of introduction to "two or three Cardinals." Tired of Rome, she was now making for the somewhat different milieu of Rotherhithe, with some work of the kind popularly called "slumming" in view.

I visited, on my way south, a married brother at his charming home in Berwickshire, where there was much tennis, and pleasant expeditions by motor to interesting spots on both sides of the Border. One lovely autumn day we spent at Manderston, where our hostess had her brother, my lord chancellor of Oxford University, staying with her. The great man was very affable, and asked me to go and see him in Michaelmas Term, when he would be in residence at the "Judge's Lodgings" in St. Giles's. I joined a family gathering at Newhailes, a few days later, for the pretty wedding of my niece, Christian Dalrymple—"a very composed bride," remarked one of the reporters present, "as befitted a lady who had acted as hostess to the leading lights of the Conservative party ever since she left the schoolroom."[[6]] Her uncle, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, tied the knot (of course "impressively"), and I was glad to find myself at Newhailes in his always pleasant company. Driving with him to pay a call or two in the neighbourhood, I amused him with an à propos story of the bishop who rode out on a long round of leaving-calls, attended by his groom, who was sent into the house, before starting, to get some cards. When they reached the last house, the order came, "Leave two cards here, James"; and the unexpected reply followed: "I can't, my lord; there's only the ace of spades left!"

After a few days at Niddrie Marischal, the fascinating old seat of the Wauchopes near Edinburgh (General "Andie" Wauchope's widow had lived there since her husband's gallant death at Magersfontein), I went to Cumbrae to visit Lady Bute at the Garrison, her home on that quaint island in the Firth of Clyde. The house, too, was quaint though comfortable, built in semi-ecclesiastical Gothic, with a sunk garden in front, and a charming moonlight view from my window of the broad Firth, with the twinkling lights of the tiny town in the foreground. Millport was a favourite "doon-the-water" resort for Glasgow folk on holiday; and I had quite a congregation at my Sunday mass in the little chapel in the grounds, as well as a considerable catechism-class afterwards. Winifred Lady Howard of Glossop, my lady's stepmother, was paying her a visit, and as an inveterate globe-trotter (if the word may be respectfully applied to an elderly peeress) kept us entertained by stories of men and things in many lands. I spent one afternoon at the college and "cathedral" of the Isles, the quaint group of buildings, redolent of Butterfield and looking like an Oxford college and chapel through the wrong end of a telescope, which the sixth Earl of Glasgow (my brother-in-law's predecessor) had more or less ruined himself in erecting. Provost Ball, whom I found at tea with his sisters, received me kindly, and showed me the whole establishment, which looked rather derelict and neglected (I fancy there was very little money to keep it going); and the college had been closed for some years. Some of us crossed the Firth next day in an absurd little cockle of a motor-boat (unsuitable, I thought, for those sometimes stormy seas), and I was glad to find myself on terra firma, in a comfortable White steam-car—my first experience of that mode of propulsion—which whirled us smoothly and swiftly to Glasgow, in time for me to take the night train to London and Oxford.

In university circles I found a certain amount of uneasy trepidation owing to the official presence of Lord Curzon. A resident Chancellor was a phenomenon unprecedented for centuries, and one unprovided for in the traditional university ritual, in which the first place was naturally assigned to the Vice-chancellor. There was much talk as to when, and in what direction, the new broom would begin to sweep, and amusing stories (probably ben trovati) of dignified heads of houses being called over the coals at meetings of the Hebdomadal Council. Personally the Chancellor made himself very agreeable, entertaining everybody who was anybody at his fine old mansion, once the "town house" of the Dukes of Marlborough. It was all, perhaps, a little Vice-regal for us simple Oxonians, who were not accustomed to write our names in a big book when we made an afternoon call, or to be received by a secretary or other underling instead of by our host when we went out to luncheon or dinner. But it was all rather novel and interesting; and in any case the little ripples caused on the surface of Oxford society by our Chancellor's sayings and doings soon subsided; for, as far as I remember, his term of residence did not exceed a month or so altogether. I was kept busy all this autumn term by the considerable work I had undertaken (the contribution of nearly eighty articles) for the American Catholic Encyclopædia. One of the longest was on Cambridge; and I felt on its completion that I knew much more about the "sister university" than about my own! Most of my work was done in the Bodleian Library; and it was a pleasant and welcome change to find oneself installed in the new, well-lighted and comfortable reading-room arranged in one of the long picture-galleries, instead of (as heretofore) in an obscure and inconvenient corner of Duke Humphrey's mediæval chamber. The then Bodley's Librarian was a bit of an oddity, and perhaps not an ideal holder of one of the most difficult and exacting offices in the university; but he was always kindness itself to me, and, whatever his preoccupations, was always ready to put at my service his unrivalled knowledge of books and their writers. His memory was stored with all kinds of whimsical rhymes: sometimes he would stop me in the street, and—at imminent peril of being run over, for he was extraordinarily short-sighted—would peer in my face through his big spectacles, and say, "Did you ever hear of

——the learned Archdeacon of York,
Who would eat his soup with a knife and a fork:
A feat which he managed so neatly and cleverly,
That they made him the Suffragan Bishop of Beverley!"

Or it would be, perhaps, "Listen to this new version of an old saw:

Teach not your parent's mother to extract
The embryo juices of an egg by suction:
The aged lady can the feat enact
Quite irrespective of your kind instruction."

And before I had time to smile at the quip I would be dragging my friend off the roadway on to the pavement to escape the oncoming tramcar, bicycle or hansom cab. Sometimes we walked together, usually in quest of some relic of antiquity in the neighbourhood, in which he would display the most lively interest, though I really believe it was all but invisible to his bodily eyes. One such walk was to inspect the old lepers' chapel of St. Bartholomew, in the fields near Cowley—a lovely derelict fragment of the ages of faith, which the local Anglican clergy had expressed their intention of "restoring to the ancient worship." "You," said my friend the librarian, with his ironic smile, "will doubtless regard this promise as what our friend Dean Burgon would have called 'polished banter,'" the allusion being to a phrase in a sermon preached by the future Dean of Chichester at St. Mary's at the time when the spread of the so-called "æsthetic movement" was causing some concern to sensible people. "These are days," he cried, "when we hear men speak, not in polished banter, but in sober earnest, of 'living up to their blue china!'" I heard him speak these words myself; and recalling that inimitable tone and accent, can imagine the impression made by a more memorable utterance from the same pulpit, when the new doctrines of Darwin were in the air, and the alleged affinity of man with monkey was fluttering orthodox dovecotes. "O ye men of science! O ye men of science! leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I will willingly leave you yours in the Zoological Gardens!"

I had the pleasure in November of paying a short visit to the wise and good Bishop of Newport, for a church-opening at Cardiff. A profit as well as a pleasure, one may hope; for indeed no one could spend any time in Dr. Hedley's company without instruction as well as edification. We spoke of the late Lord Bute's remarkable philological gifts; and I asked the Bishop if he had found his ignorance of Welsh any practical hindrance to the work of his diocese. "No," was his reply. "Fortunately for me (for I am no Mezzofanti) I find English a good enough means of communication with my people, the majority of whom are neither Welsh nor English, but Irish." I told him, much to his amusement, of the advice once given to an Englishman appointed to a Welsh (Anglican) see, as to the proper pronunciation of the Welsh double l. "May it please your lordship to place your episcopal tongue lightly against your right reverend teeth, and to hiss like a goose!" A young Oxford friend of mine whom I met at Cardiff carried me thence to Lichfield to stay a night at the Choristers' House of which his father was master. It chanced to be "Guy Fawkes Day," and I assisted at the fireworks and bonfires of the little singing-boys, who (I was rather interested to find) did not associate their celebration in the slightest degree with the old "No Popery" tradition. The merry evening concluded with some delightful part-singing.

I recall a week-end at Arundel when term was over: a large and cheerful party, and the usual "parlour games" after dinner, including dumb-crambo, in which I was almost the only spectator; for everybody else was acting, the Duke being a polar bear rolled up in a white hearthrug! My customary Christmas was spent at Beaufort, in a much-diminished family circle. Lord Lovat was on his way home from South Africa, one brother absent on a sporting tour in Abyssinia, another gold-mining in Rhodesia; his second sister with her husband in Japan, and two others still en voyage round the world. Some schoolboy nephews, however, and their young sisters, were a cheerful element in our little party, and there was a great deal of golf, good, bad, and indifferent, on the not exactly first-class course recently laid out in the park.[[7]] I had to go south soon after New Year, to tie the knot and preach the wedding sermon at a marriage in Spanish Place Church.[[8]] A thoroughly Scottish function it was, with Gordon Highlander sergeants lining the long nave, the bridegroom's kilted brother-officers forming a triumphal arch with their claymores, and a big gathering of friends from the north afterwards at the Duchess of Roxburghe's pretty house in Grosvenor Street. I attended next evening at our Westminster dining-club, and heard Father Maturin read a clever, if not quite convincing paper, on "The Broad and Narrow Mind," some of his paradoxes provoking a lively subsequent discussion which I found very interesting. I had a stimulating neighbour in Baron Anatole von Hügel.