Forty years of 'Spy'

by Sir Leslie Ward

I very frequently travelled to Cambridge with Mr. "Rudy" Lehmann, whose reputation as a rowing coach—both for his own University, as well as Oxford and Harvard—is so widely known as to make further comment superfluous. He was the originator of the Granta and is on the staff of Punch, for which journal one of his best known and most amusing contributions was a skit purporting to be from the Emperor William to Queen Victoria. As a man of letters he has made his mark. He is the father of a very fine little boy who should make a reputation as an oar, and follow in the footsteps of his distinguished father.

When I arrived in Cambridge on one of many occasions after a visit at Oxford where I had gone with the object of producing C. M. Pitman for Vanity Fair, I discovered the contemporary number of the Granta had again been on my track and chaffed me more than ever; as I was on excellent terms with the authors of that publication, I took their friendly "digs" in the spirit they were intended. Here is a further specimen of their humorous prose:

"Mr. Leslie Ward has turned up again to gather his usual crop of caricatures for Vanity Fair. Mr. Pitman[6] is to suffer first, I understand. Last year I think I informed you how Mr. Ward borrowed a cap and gown in order to attend the lectures of Professor Robinson Ellis[7] whom he was commissioned to draw; and I have no doubt he will go through adventures just as surprising on his present visit.

"On arriving in Oxford last Monday, Mr. Ward remembered that some years ago he had breakfasted in certain rooms in King Edward Street, with a friend whose name he had forgotten. He therefore concluded that these must be the lodgings of the President of the O.U.B.O. Imagine his astonishment after he had driven there, when he was informed that Mr. Pitman had never occupied the rooms. Eventually, however, he ran his victim down at 155, High Street.

"Mr. Ward's next proceedings were characteristic of his amiable nature. At the bottom of the stairs he dropped his gloves, at the top of the stairs he dropped his stick, and in the room itself he dropped his hat. Having recovered all his scattered property, he took off his coat, and in doing so distributed over the floor a considerable fortune in loose gold and silver and copper, which for greater security he had placed in one of the outside pockets of his garment. Great and resounding was the fall thereof, but Mr. Ward, on having his attention called to the fact, merely observed with an easy carelessness that marks the true artist, that he thought he had heard something fall but wasn't sure.

"On being asked what other celebrities besides Mr. Pitman he proposed to draw, he declared that he had all the names written down on a piece of paper. Up to the present, however, though Mr. Ward had looked for it in the most unlikely places, this piece of paper has defied every effort to find it. Is it true, by the way, that once when on a visit to Cambridge, Mr. Ward who was staying at 'The Hoop,' wandered into the 'Blue Boar' and insisted, in spite of the landlady's despairing efforts to persuade him to the contrary, that he had slept there on the previous night and wanted to be shown his room, as the staircase had somehow become unfamiliar to him?"

1896. SAM LOATES.

1884. ARTHUR COVENTRY.