The leave was all too short, and very soon I was back aboard the ship again, to learn, a few weeks afterwards, that I was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant. There being no available man-of-war going home just then, I, and two more newly promoted Lieutenants, were allowed to take a passage in a steamer and find our way home via Marseilles and Paris. Paris was then in the throes of the 1878 Exhibition, and consequently was very full and rather uncomfortable. However, we did our duty by spending a couple of days in visiting the Exhibition, and presently I found myself back in England and temporarily my own master, for, from the moment I set foot in my native country I became a Lieutenant on half-pay whilst waiting for further employment.
I may as well mention that the half-pay in question amounted to the munificent sum of four shillings per diem,—less than half the daily stipend of the present-day police constable.
Of course I was delighted to be promoted and to get home; but it was with very real regret that I had said good-bye to many of my brother officers in the Agincourt, and most of all was I sorry to be no longer serving under the flag of Sir Edmund Commerell. Surely there never could have been a Flag-Officer more beloved than was Sir Edmund. Literally one of the bravest of the brave, he had won his Victoria Cross in the Crimea. Later, when Commodore of the South African Station, he was very dangerously wounded whilst leading a boat attack up one of the West African rivers. His popularity in the Fleet was unbounded, his officers and men really loved him, and what was more remarkable still, was the hold he had established over the Turk. In the ranks of the Bulair Army they all knew that the British Admiral was an old Crimean Veteran, on the strength of which they spoke of him as Ghazi Commerell Pasha. As an instance of his never-failing courage, I well remember his behaviour on an occasion when his galley had been capsized. The Admiral was passionately fond of boat sailing, and, moreover, was a great expert; so one of his amusements was to take his galley for a spin round the Fleet. On this particular occasion at Gallipoli it was hardly a galley’s day, for it was blowing a strong breeze with nasty squalls. However, away he went. When an Admiral is sailing his boat a very sharp look-out is always kept by the officer of the watch, and so when, after a very heavy squall, his boat was seen to capsize, there was no delay in sending a steamboat away post-haste to pick him up. When the sub-lieutenant in charge of the boat arrived, he naturally selected the Admiral as being the proper person to be rescued first; but nothing would induce him to be touched until every member of the boat’s crew was on board the pinnace. Meanwhile, encumbered as he was with a heavy boat cloak, the dear old gentleman had swallowed such a quantity of salt water, that he was in measurable distance of being drowned.
He was always most anxious to try and do something to alleviate the terrible monotony of the men’s lives at that time. Leave was out of the question, so everything had to be done on board. The Agincourt had a splendidly clear upper deck, so there was no difficulty in laying out a racing track of ten laps to the mile, and many were the exciting contests that took place upon it. The most popular of all was a ten-mile go-as-you-please race between selected candidates from the marines and bluejackets respectively, the conditions being heavy marching order, the bluejackets to be dressed like the marines in busby and tunic, so as to make the conditions absolutely equal.
Another amusement was what the sailors used to call a sing-song. The upper deck being covered in, the Admiral and his Staff and officers not on duty being present, all the available talent on the ship was mobilised for a so-called musical entertainment. The most successful turn was given by one of the sub-lieutenants, who had some sort of a voice that had been partially trained during his time at Greenwich, and he used to give us the classic song, “We don’t want to fight.” This song, as rendered by the “great McDermott,” was the rage of the London Music Halls during the Russo-Turkish War. It was all very well for the peace party, who are always with us under all circumstances, to jeer at the vulgarity of the song and decry the so-called jingoism that was derived from it; but when sung by a thousand men, who were expecting every moment to be actively employed in taking measures to make it a certainty that “The Russians shall not have Constantinople,” it became rather more than a comic music-hall song. There was a grim earnestness about it as then sung on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war, that made it almost impressive, and eliminated its vulgarity.
Many years afterwards, when Sir Edmund stood as Conservative Candidate for Southampton, with these incidents in my memory, the cleanliness (?) of English electioneering practices was brought intimately home to me. He lost whatever chance he may have had of being elected in a constituency full of seafaring men, on account of a poster that was displayed all over Southampton by the agents of his opponent. The Admiral, one of the kindest and most chivalrous of gentlemen, was portrayed to the electors of Southampton as a prize specimen of the old flogging captain of the early part of the century. The poster actually depicted him, in cocked hat and epaulets, flourishing an enormous cat-o’-nine tails over the bare back, streaming with blood, of a bluejacket seized up to the breech of a gun.
Later on, he was Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indian Stations, Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, and afterwards for many years a Groom-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria.