“Pater’s Book of Rhymes.”
I do not want to anger my readers at the threshold with heraldic learning of the couching lions and ramping cats to which the Parrys of Nerquis are by right entitled, but I claim a Welshman’s privilege of setting down so much of genealogy as is necessary to the understanding of my story. And truly one of the temptations that lured me to this task was a desire to write down what I could remember of my father, John Humffreys Parry—Serjeant Parry—who died more than thirty years ago, and left so fine a memory among his comrades in the battles of old in Westminster Hall.
And I often heard my father talk of his Welsh ancestry, though he himself was a Londoner born in 1816, and he would tell us what he remembered of his father, John Humffreys Parry, the Welsh antiquary and writer who was called to the Bar in 1811,
and died when my father was a boy of sixteen. He was the writer of the “Cambrian Plutarch” and editor of the “Cambro Briton,” a journal of Celtic folk-lore and the ancient literature and history of Wales. Nowadays he would probably have been a professor at a Welsh University, but in those days people cared for none of these things. I remember reading in some Welsh account of his career—and among Welshmen he is far better known than my father—how he was educated at Mold Grammar School and articled to Mr. Wynne, solicitor, of that town, and married a daughter of John Thomas, solicitor, of Llanfyllin, which is away down in the wilds of Montgomeryshire. This biographer wound up his story with the compendious statement that “he went to London, was called to the Bar, took to literature and dissipated his estates.” But if he had any estates, which is at least doubtful, he wasted them not in riotous living, but in the printing and publishing of the Welsh literature he loved. From the earliest he was an eager and ready writer. I have a small brown scrapbook, the leaves of which are saffron-tinged with age, in which are pasted with proud care the author’s letters and verses contributed to the Chester Courant in the early part of the century, when he was a youth in Mr. Wynne’s office in Mold.
Some years ago curiosity led me into the land of my forefathers, and I climbed the steep hill between Mold and Ruthin to reach Llanferres, going past “The Three Loggerheads,” the sign of which
Richard Wilson, R.A., the landscape painter, is reputed to have painted. It is the old jest of two heads grinning at you—the third you supply for yourself. And if Wilson painted it, as they say he did, it was probably done in his early days, for he came from Mold, and as he died in 1782 the sign must have been there in my great-grandfather Edward Parry’s time, when he became rector of the little hill village of Llanferres in 1790. And doubtless he often saw it as he walked down the hill to visit his wife’s relatives in Mold, or went across to Nerquis to see his father Edward Parry, the tanner.
And at Llanferres I searched the church registers, and finding that the rector was carried home to his native village of Nerquis, I turned my steps along the narrow roads down the side of the hill where his funeral must have passed and found a little village church at the foot-hills on the English side, so much away from the bustle of the world’s traffic that I think it must be much the same to-day as it was when my great-grandfather was carried back to his early home. And when the little churchyard of Nerquis gives up its collection of Parrys it will relinquish a goodly number who lived and died in this quiet, solitary place, and from what one reads on marble slabs and the like, they were a godly, honest and well-doing people. But to my regret I find that Edward the tanner’s father was the Rev. Canon Edward Parry, M.A., Vicar of Oswestry in 1763, and his father was Thomas, an attorney of Welshpool who lived near the bridge, so that as we reach the
seventeenth century it dawns upon me that I do not belong to North Wales at all, and I cease my researches into the past, in dread that I should discover after all that I am no better than a South Wales man, a “Hwntw” in good northern speech, or “man from beyond.”
My very earliest personal recollection of my father was in the days of my childhood, when we lived at No. 1, Upper Gloucester Place, overlooking Dorset Square. In the interests of the committee of the society that busies itself placing decorative lozenges on the birth-places of the famous it is well to record that I have it on hearsay evidence that this is where I was born.
I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that house, but only on one day of the week—the Sunday. On other days I cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at its hands.