In those days the Victoria and Albert was only inhabited by a small party of caretakers except when she was actually on some cruise, or when the Queen was paying her summer visit to Osborne, during which time the Royal Yacht lay at Cowes in full commission. During the winter stay of the Court at Osborne and during the greater part of the year the officers lived on board the Royal George, the old hulk that had been the Royal Yacht in the days of George IV and King William, and all communication with Cowes was carried on either by the tenders, Alberta and Elfin, or by picket-boat. I loved the old hulk. We were very comfortable, as the officers messed in what had been the Royal apartments. She was tiny, but had been built as a miniature copy of the frigates of her day, and had been full rigged. I believe that the last time she was in use as a Royal Yacht was in 1842, when Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort paid their first visit to Scotland. On that occasion the Royal Party embarked on board the Royal George at Woolwich, and were towed round in her to the port of Leith. I am not surprised, however, that Queen Victoria preferred to make the return voyage on board a steamer belonging to the General Steam Navigation Company, where Her Majesty found that the accommodation was better and more spacious than on board the Royal George.
During the Queen’s winter residence at Osborne no leave was given, as it was never known when we might be required, and when the Royal Yacht lay at Cowes, in the summer, the officers were not allowed ashore until it had been finally ascertained that Her Majesty had no further commands for that day; but when the Court was not at Osborne we had a very easy time. The two Lieutenants used to take it in turn to go on leave, one of them having to live on board the Royal George, but as soon as Morning Prayers had been read there was little or nothing more to do, and there was no trouble about attending such Race Meetings as Sandown and Kempton, which, being on the South-Western Railway line, were easily reached, as indeed was London. At that time I belonged to the Naval and Military Club, and a very cheerful place it was, especially for a sailor. There was one corner of the huge smoking-room,—which is still, I believe, called Besika Bay Corner,—where one was sure to meet one’s old comrades and their soldier friends who had garrisoned Malta in the late ’seventies and early ’eighties. And so the time passed agreeably enough, interspersed, as it was, with a good many trips across the Channel. In the middle of November the Prince of Wales embarked on board the Royal Yacht and was conveyed to Flushing to meet, the then, recently widowed Empress Frederick. Her Imperial Majesty arrived on board with her three daughters and crossed to Port Victoria, where she was met by Queen Victoria and most of the members of the Royal Family, and travelled with them to Windsor. The winter season, commencing, as was general, in the middle of December, was a busier one than usual, for the Empress Frederick had accompanied her mother to Osborne, and there was a great deal of running to and fro to convey the various members of the Royal Family backwards and forwards.
In the middle of February 1889 the Queen left Osborne, and some ten days later the Empress Frederick crossed in the yacht to Flushing, with her daughters, on her way home. In early March Queen Victoria embarked for Cherbourg en route to Cimiez. The Victoria and Albert was escorted across the Channel by a veritable procession of yachts, including the Osborne, Alberta, Enchantress (the Admiralty Yacht), and the Galatea (the Trinity House boat). Her Majesty returned to England in April.
Our next trip was at the end of June when we were sent to Antwerp to embark the Shah. I remember the late King of the Belgians came to Antwerp to see him off, so I suppose that Oriental Potentate had been officially visiting Belgium before coming to England.
The Shah was attended by Sir H. Drummond Wolff, then H.M. Minister at Teheran, and Sir H. Rawlinson, who were with him during the whole of his visit. He also had an enormous retinue of Persians for us to embark. Some of them, such as Ali Asmer Asgher Khan, Amin us Sultan, the Grand Vizier, and Prince Malcom Khan, the Persian Minister, and a few others, were no doubt very distinguished men; but the tail end of the suite seemed to me to consist principally of what the Bluejackets used to call “scallawags.”
On the 1st July we duly arrived at Gravesend, where the Prince of Wales boarded us, to welcome the Shah, and then up the Thames we went and the real fun began. The river, of course, swarmed with excursion steamers, and the one idea of the excursionists was to try and keep alongside the Royal Yacht, and as near as possible, so as to get a sight of the Shah. This congestion of passenger boats, all overcrowded with sight-seers was extremely dangerous, and as the smallest collision would have sunk any of those lightly-built craft, an accident would have resulted in an appalling loss of life. As usual the men in charge of these boats behaved very badly and took great risks, but it meant a harvest for them in the shape of tips from their passengers, and human nature being what it is, it would be ridiculous to blame them, and as, moreover, thanks to good luck, no accident happened, there was no harm done. The Royal party eventually landed in a sort of glorified steam-launch at Westminster Steps.
In the middle of July, the Queen went, as usual, to Osborne, but her visit there was broken by a journey she had to make to London to enable her to be present at the wedding of Princess Louise of Wales and the late Duke of Fife on the 27th. Two days after Her Majesty’s return to Osborne, the Royal Yacht conveyed the Shah there to take leave of the Queen, and thence to Cherbourg. Meanwhile, a large Fleet had assembled at Spithead, under the command of Sir J. Edmund Commerell, Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, so that the Shah on his way to Cowes might be enabled to see something of the British Navy. I am bound to say that he did not appear to be in the least impressed. He firmly declined to come on deck, and obviously disliked the noise of the salute. In fact, he took no notice of the Fleet whatever. My old friend, the late Mr. Bennett Burleigh, the well-known War Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, had by some mysterious means managed to smuggle himself on board the Royal Yacht. I have an idea that the late General Sir John McNeil, then on board as one of the Queen’s Equerries, had rather connived at his presence, for he and Sir John had been old cronies and campaigners together. However, being there, he behaved with the most commendable tact, and had not ventured near the saloon where the Shah had ensconced himself, and consequently had to rely on second-hand information. I, being on duty, was in the immediate vicinity, and so was duly pumped by my friend.
“What a splendid sight the salute was! I am sure the Shah must have been greatly impressed. What did he say?”
As I have already written, the Shah paid no attention whatever to the Fleet, but, thinking that he ought certainly to have made some sort of remark, I gravely answered that His Majesty had said: “Wah, Wah, Allah is great, and the English are a mighty nation,” which I thought would do just as well for the readers of the Daily Telegraph as anything else. I am rather afraid that Mr. Burleigh was too old a hand to be caught, and greatly doubt whether the imaginary ecstasies of the Shah were ever published.
That particular season at Cowes was an interesting one, for it was in 1889 that the Kaiser made his first descent on Cowes in the shape of a visit to his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He arrived on August 3rd, and with his usual arrogance, or perhaps to save himself from paying their board in Germany while he was in England, he brought over an immense and entirely unnecessary suite. Osborne, and all its little dependencies, were strained to the utmost to house this swarm of locusts, and even then an overflow party had to be put up on board the Royal Yacht. This was the first occasion that I had ever come into contact with any number of Germans, and I have heartily disliked them ever since. To my mind, even on a pre-war standard, there is nothing good to be said about them. I detest all their ways and works, their eternal bows, and clicking of heels, and the equally eternal shaking of hands, and impertinent inquiries about one’s digestion. Moreover, they have the odious habit of leaving sheaves of visiting cards in all directions. We were thirteen officers on board the Royal Yacht, and when our unbidden guests insisted on leaving a card apiece upon us it literally made up one or more packs to be littered about. In view of our present experience of them, I think that I can congratulate myself on a certain amount of prescience in the detestation with which they, one and all, inspired me so many years ago.