A New Medley of Memories

by Sir David Oswald Hunter Blair

The opening of the Lent Term of 1908 at Oxford was dreary enough, with a succession of the dense white fogs which only the Thames valley generates in perfection. It is not cheering to come down morning after morning to find what looks like a huge bale of dirty cotton-wool piled up against one's window-panes; and the news at this time was as depressing as the weather. We heard early in February of the brutal murder of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal, before the eyes of wife and mother; and I was saddened in the same month by the death of an exemplary member of our community at Fort Augustus, though that had been long expected. I was myself on the sick-list, and recall little of interest during these weeks, except a most excellent lecture—of course on boy scouts—given by General Baden-Powell, which I only wished could have been heard, not by dons, ladies, and undergraduates, but by the cigarette-slobbering, street-corner-loafing lads who were, I think, more in evidence at Oxford than anywhere else. Early in March I was in London, for the wedding of my old pupil, Charles Vaughan of Courtfield, to the pretty niece of the Duke of Newcastle. I got to Westminster Cathedral an hour before the appointed time: the chapter-mass was being celebrated, and waves of sonorous plain-song floating about the great misty domes overhead. After the ceremony I joined the wedding guests at the Ritz for a short time, and, amid the frou-frou and va-et-vient of all the smart people, managed to impart to a few intimate friends the news that I was going into hospital in a few days, with no very certain prospect of coming out alive!

The next fortnight or so was of course taken up with inevitable worries—giving up work for an indefinite period, resigning for a time (it turned out to be for good) the mastership of my Hall, and finding a locum tenens letter-writing to a host of inquiring friends, and all this when physically fit to do nothing. I spent the last days of freedom at Arundel, receiving from the good people there every possible kindness; and on March 18, under the patronage of the Archangel Gabriel (saint of the day), betook myself to my nursing home in Mandeville Street. Nurses (mine were most kind and devoted), surgeons and anæsthetists soon got to work; and for a time at least (in the almost classic words of Bret Harte) "the subsequent proceedings interested me no more."

A critical operation, followed by a slow and difficult convalescence, ranks, of course, among the deeper experiences of a man's life. "We were all anxious," said an Oxford friend some weeks later, a good old chemist whom I had known for years; "for we heard that you were passing through very deep waters." The expression was an apt one; and I suppose no one rises from such waters quite the same man as he was before. This is not the place to dwell on such thoughts; but one reflection which occurs to me is that in such a time as I am now recalling one realizes, as perhaps one had never done before, how many kind people there are in the world, and appreciates what true friendship is. During my long stay in hospital my nearest relations chanced to be greatly scattered, some of them in very remote parts of the world. This made me all the more grateful for the extraordinary kindness and attention I received, not only from approved friends, but from many others whom I had hardly ventured to count as such. I remember a little later compiling a kind of libro d'oro, with a list of the names of all who had been good to me in word or deed during those weary weeks. Some of them I have hardly ever seen since: many have passed beyond the sphere of one's gratitude here on earth; but I still sometimes con my list, and thank the dead as well as the living for what they did for me then.

I remember my first drive—round Regent's Park, on a perfect May day, in the steam-car of which I have already spoken; and very tiring I found it. After a lazy fortnight at St. John's Lodge, and daily trundles in a Bath chair among the gay flower-beds of the park, I was able to get down into the country; and after a sojourn with Lady Encombe and her two jolly little boys near Rickmansworth (a wonderfully rural spot, considering its nearness to London), I made my way to Arundel, where it was pleasant to meet the Herries's and other kind friends. The great excitement there was the hoped-for advent of a son and heir, who made a punctual and welcome appearance before the end of the month, and was received, of course, with public and private jubilations in which I was happy to be able to participate. After this I paid quite a long visit to my soldier brother at Kneller Court, the pretty place near Fareham which he was occupying while commanding the Artillery in that district. There were plenty of pleasant neighbours, who treated me to pleasant motor-drives through a charming country little known to me; and the elm-shaded hall (I believe Sir Godfrey Kneller had really lived there once), with its gay old garden and excellent tennis-lawn, was a popular resort for young officers from Portsmouth and elsewhere, who dropped in almost daily to luncheon, tea, or dinner, and doubtless found the society of a kind hostess and her two pretty daughters a welcome diversion from their naval and military duties. One June day we spent in Portsmouth, lunching with Sir Arthur and Lady Fanshawe at Admiralty House, a big, cool roomy mansion like a French château, full of fine old portraits. We went out afterwards on the flag-captain's launch to see the Victory, a visit full of interest, though I was unequal to climbing the companions connecting the five decks. A man whom I sat next at tea in the Admiral's garden said he was connected with the Patent Office (I do not think he was actually Comptroller-General, but he was something high up in that rather mysterious department of the Civil Service), and told me some entertaining yarns about early patents and monopolies.[[9]] One was granted in 1618 to two men called Atkinson and Morgan, "to find out things in monasteries!" Another man, about the same time, secured the exclusive right of importing lobsters, which had hitherto cost a penny; but the patentee bought them out at sea from Dutch fishermen, and sold them at threepence. In Charles I.'s reign a "doctour in phisick" called Grant got a patent for a "fishe-call, or looking-glass for fishes in the sea, very useful for fishermen to call all manner of fishes to their netts, seins, or hooks." In the same reign it was made compulsory to bury the dead in woollen in order to encourage the wool manufacture; and ten years later Widow Amy Potter got a (rather gruesome) patent for the elegant woollen costume she devised for this purpose.[[10]]

I went from Kneller to spend a breezy week at Brighton with Captain Frank Grissell, to whom his brother, my old Oxford friend, had left practically all his possessions and collections, and who had just purchased a pretty villa in Preston Park in which to house them. No brothers were ever more dissimilar or more devoted than Hartwell, whose whole interests in life had been ecclesiastical and Roman, and his brother Frank, ex-cavalry officer, to whom horses and hunting, racing and coaching, were the salt of life. He had arranged his brother's miscellaneous treasures, in one or two spacious rooms, with great care and pains; and it was a curious experience to pass out of an atmosphere and environment of religious paintings, Roman bookbindings, panels from cardinals' coaches, Papal coins and medals, Italian ecclesiological literature, and what the French call objets de piété of every description, to the ex-lancer's own cheerful living-rooms: the walls hung with pictures of hunters, steeplechasers, coaching and sporting scenes; stuffed heads, tiger-skins, and other trophies of the chase everywhere about, and the windows looking out on a pretty garden, in the improvement and cultivation of which the owner was promising himself unfailing interest and occupation.

"Doctor Brighton" (was not this affectionate sobriquet the invention of Thackeray?) did much for the restoration of my health and strength; and I was able to get to Oxford before the end of summer term, to spend a fortnight with kind Monsignor Kennard at his charming old house in St. Aldate's, where I had a room so close to Tom Tower that the "Great Bell of Tom" sounded as if it were tolling at my bedside![[11]] In his pretty chapel (of which the open roof was said to be a relic of Oseney Abbey), I had the happiness, on Trinity Sunday, of celebrating Mass for the first time for more than three months—a greatly-appreciated privilege.

[[1]] "A brown Gregorian is so devotional.... Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a violent magenta."

[[2]] Dr. Selden Talcott, of the State Asylum, Middleton, New York; according to whom early rising is the most prolific cause of madness. "A peremptory command to get up, when one's sleep is as yet unfinished, is a command which grinds the soul, curdles the blood, swells the spleen, destroys all good intentions, and disturbs all day the mental activities, just as the tornado disturbs and levels with advancing ruin the forest of mighty pines.... The free and lazy savage gets up when he feels ready, and rarely or never becomes insane." Dr. Talcott quotes the percentage of lunacy among country people as compared with professional men. The latter, almost without exception, get up comparatively late, whereas our manual labourers all leave their beds long before they should. "The early morning hours, when everything is still, are peculiarly fitted for sleep; and it is a gross violation of Nature's laws to tear human brains out of the sound rest they enjoy at this time." A weighty utterance, no doubt: still, it is but fair to point out that among monks, who perhaps, as a class, get up earlier than any men living, the number of those whose good intentions are destroyed and mental activities disturbed, and who finally become lunatics, is really not alarmingly large.

[[3]] Dom Paulinus Gorwood, who had been a choirboy at Beverley Minster, and draughtsman in a great shipbuilding yard, and had studied religious art in the famous Beuron Benedictine school at Prague. He had industry as well as talent; and there were specimens of his handiwork in places as remote from one another as the Highland Catholic Church at Beauly, and the college chapel at St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate.

[[4]] This printer's feat somehow reminds me of the statement in an Edinburgh paper that a certain eminent tenor, who had had a bad fall alighting from the train, was nevertheless "able to appear that evening at the concert in several pieces." But the funniest printer's slip which I remember in connection with trains was an announcement in a Hampshire newspaper that "The Express Engine was seriously indisposed, and confined to bed." The distinguished invalid was really the Empress Eugénie!