Looking Back

by Sir Seymour John Fortescue

But to turn to the musical side of Covent Garden, what a number of fine artists I heard there during the many years I was a subscriber! The brothers de Reszke, Maurel, Ternina, Van Rooy Plançon (who was, perhaps, the best basse chantant we ever heard), Caruso, Vandyck, Sammarco, Mesdames Destinn and Edvina, and last, but by no means least, Dame Nellie Melba. The four last-mentioned artists have all been singing during the past two seasons. When the Ring, and Wagner generally, was given, with Richter as conductor, and with some of his Manchester musicians reinforcing the orchestra, without in the least posing as an expert, the performances to my mind were infinitely better all round than they were at Bayreuth. One very good reason being, that the very astute Frau Wagner greatly preferred a cheap artist to an expensive one; and even to my untutored taste Richter was a far greater conductor than Siegfried Wagner, whose only recommendation, I suppose, was that, being his mother’s son, he was very cheap indeed! As to individual performances, to my mind the two greatest artists of the Operatic Stage during my time were two men, Chaliapine and Jean de Reszke. The former, besides his magnificent voice and physique, was not only a very great actor, but was, I think, in Russian Opera, unsurpassable. I believe that he never sang at Covent Garden, but I heard him at Monte Carlo and many times at Drury Lane. One of his great rôles outside Russian Opera was Mephistofile, in Boito’s opera of that name. I can see him now as his Satanic Majesty, with all his subjects crouched round him, dominating the stage in almost the exact pose of Rodin’s “Penseur.” Jean de Reszke, who I knew very well, was probably at his best and greatest in three very different parts. He was incomparably the best Lohengrin I ever saw or heard on any stage, and the same appreciation applied to his Tristan. But I believe that in his secret heart and in the heyday of his career, his favourite part was Romeo. Roméo et Juliette, as rendered by him and Melba, with his big brother Édouard (as Frère Laurent) duly marrying them, some fifteen or twenty years ago, used to fill Covent Garden to its very roof. It is the fashion nowadays to decry Gounod’s music as being too sugary, and obvious, and all the rest of it; but, none the less, sung as it was by those great artists it used to delight a great many of us.

About this time I was anxious to put off the date at which I would inevitably be forced to retire from the Service, so I applied to the Admiralty for employment during the yearly manœuvres that were about to take place, and, the Prince having given his consent to my absence, I was appointed to the Theseus, then a comparatively new class of cruiser, for the duration of these exercises. The new system of mobilisation which had recently come in, consisted in the necessary officers and crews being marched bodily on board the ship, which, up to that time, was lying at a home port with nobody on board but the Chief Engineer, the Warrant Officers, a few stokers, and a small number of marines, who were employed as caretakers. The scheme must have been extremely well worked out, as can be shown by what actually took place in practice.

At eight o’clock I and the rest of the newly appointed officers went on board; the men were marched on board from the barracks or receiving ship, with their bags and hammocks. Provisions were at once drawn, and by noon the entire ship’s company had been stationed as regards Fire, Action, Boats and Watches, and had been piped to dinner. Chatham was the parent port of the Theseus, and before nightfall, the Captain having arrived on board during the day, the ship had been unberthed and moved into the river, all ready to receive her ammunition the next day. By the following evening we were anchored at the Nore and reported ready for service. It is true that a ship commissioned in this way could not really compare in efficiency with one that had been on service for some time, but every day saw an improvement in general smartness and discipline, and in a week’s time a mobilised ship could, if necessary, have fought a very respectable action.

It was now some nine years since I had served in a real man-of-war at sea, and I remember being greatly impressed with the great improvement that had taken place in the acquirements of the officers and men during that period. The Captain, Charles Campbell, was an old friend, he having been Flag-Lieutenant to his relative, Rear-Admiral F. Campbell, in the old flying-squadron days; but, barring the Captain, the rest of the officers were absolute strangers to me, as, indeed, I was to them. I, however, found them to be, without exception, thoroughly competent, and one and all gave the same loyal and devoted service to me, that they could have given to a superior officer whom they had known and served under for years. Before joining up with the rest of the Fleet for manœuvring purposes the Theseus was ordered to escort a small squadron of torpedo-boats that had been ordered to Gibraltar. These boats were towed in turn, as they were unable to keep the sea under their own steam for more than a few hours. We had a good deal of bad weather on our way out, which necessitated our going into Vigo, and incidentally a good deal of trouble with our small craft; but eventually we delivered them safely at their destination, and rejoined the Fleet for a month’s exercise.

The manœuvres having come to an end, the Theseus, after being inspected by the Admiralty, was paid off into the First Class Reserve again, and so ended my last term of service afloat. Having left the Britannia at the end of 1870, I had served at sea, on and off, for some twenty-five years, and before taking leave of the Navy, so far as these Reminiscences are concerned, I must write a few lines about the state it was in in those days.

My service was performed during a period of comparative slackness, if such a term can ever be applied to the Royal Navy. The fact is, it was a time of profound peace. Since 1815 the Navy had seen no active service on a large scale. In the middle period of the nineteenth century there had been good work to do in the suppression of piracy and the slave trade. There had been bombardments, such as those of Acre, Algiers, Sveaborg, Sevastopol, Cronstadt and Alexandria,—more or less futile, as all bombardments of land forts by ships must be. There had even been a Naval action at Navarino. Small numbers of men had been landed as Naval Brigades all over the world in all the great and small wars that we waged in places as far apart as the Crimea, India and New Zealand. Later on there had been a small modicum of active service to be seen by a fortunate few in Egypt, and in South Africa during the Zulu campaign. At the time of the South African War in 1889, there were again small Naval Brigades landed, and when there was a danger of European complications, in view of the number of troops that we had to send to Africa, the sea route was efficiently, if very quietly, patrolled. The fact was that during the greater part of the time that I was serving there was no great competition possible. The German Navy hardly existed. For some years after 1870, the French Navy had been allowed to decrease. The Russians only used to build spasmodically. It was only shortly before 1890 that the Admiralty had seriously to consider their building programme against the possible combination of the French and Russian Navies, which was then a formidable possibility: and it was owing to that possibility mainly that the great improvement in general efficiency that I noticed when I joined the Theseus had taken place. From that time onwards the Navy has never looked back. Successive Governments may not have supplied it with anything approaching the necessary ships and stores, but the senior officers of the Navy have trained the officers and men under them, and brought them to that high state of efficiency and discipline which has been so apparent to the whole world during the war which has just come to a conclusion; and that same efficiency and devotion to duty has,—I think as an old sailor,—been handsomely acknowledged, not only by the country at large, but by those who are privileged to speak for their country, from the Sovereign downwards. Personally, I am full of pride at having, at one time, had the honour to belong to that noble Service, and of having served with what is, perhaps, the best corps of officers, with the best lot of men under them, in the world.

In my experience, the only time when Naval Officers are ever likely to fail is when they are working at the Admiralty. The fact is that constant service at sea is apt to narrow their outlook from a most important point of view,—I mean that of a man of the world. Brought up in a profession where a rigid discipline has to be, and is, maintained, they are too apt to be rather obsessed by the First Lords of the Admiralty, and the other functionaries with whom they are brought into contact, and are inclined to treat them all with a good deal too much subservience. It is rather instinctive for an officer who has served all his time at sea to look, with a certain amount of veneration, on his superior officers, and consequently to be inclined to be overawed by a name that is placed in the Navy List as being, after the Sovereign, the Head of the Navy. The post of First Lord of the Admiralty was always a much coveted one, and on the whole it is only just to say that it has been generally held by politicians of considerable weight and experience. A certain amount of glamour of sentiment is supposed to surround it, vividly enhanced by the temporary possession of an extremely well-appointed yacht, on board of which the female relations and friends of the various First Lords could take up their abode in the summer, and cruise at their own sweet will, at the expense of the long-suffering British tax-payer.

The year 1896 was a very important year’s racing for those who were interested in the Sandringham Stud, for it was in 1896 that the Prince of Wales had his first really successful year on the Turf—that great horse Persimmon accounting for the Derby and St. Leger and Jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket, while Thais won the One Thousand Guineas. I saw the Derby from what used to be known as the Paget Stand, of which institution I was a member for many years, and for those who do not know Epsom, it is as well to mention that the actual winning-post touches the edge of that stand, and the horses are often within an arm’s length of the “Booth” (as it used to be called), when they passed the post. It is exciting enough at any time to see the finish for the Derby from that point of vantage, but when, as in 1896, there is a desperate race between two really first-class horses, as were Persimmon and St. Frusquin, and the race is eventually won by the Prince’s horse all out by a neck, the excitement really becomes indescribable. I cannot truthfully say that I have never heard such cheering, for I am glad to say that I was to hear it again when Minoru won the Derby in 1909. But Minoru was, after all, only a leased horse, whereas Persimmon was a Sandringham-bred colt, and an own brother to Florizel, a winner of good races. Anyhow, the enthusiasm of the public knew no bounds, and the Prince’s Derby achieved the greatest popular success that ever was seen on a race-course.

In August of that year I was on duty as usual at Cowes, and about the middle of the month I was ordered to attend the Princess on a journey to the Continent. Her Royal Highness, with Miss Charlotte Knollys who was Lady in attendance, went to visit her brother-in-law and her sister, the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, at their beautiful Castle of Gmunden, which is not far from Ischl, and is surrounded by magnificent scenery. Personally, never having seen that part of Europe before, I was delighted with the beauty of the surroundings. After a week’s stay there the Princess went to Bayreuth, when her party was completed by the appearance on the scene of the late Lady Ripon, Miss Yznaga (the sister of the Duchess of Manchester) and the late Sir Reginald Lister. The Ring was being given as usual there, and in some respects very beautifully given; but I still think, as I have mentioned before, that the artists, as a lot, were very inferior to those I heard a few years later at Covent Garden. None the less, Bayreuth has a certain atmosphere of its own. Unlike London, there are no distractions of any kind in that funny little town, so absolutely undivided attention can be given to the music. After the Bayreuth week was over, I attended the Princess to Copenhagen, visiting en route Nuremberg and the Chiem See, where the palace,—that extraordinary freak imitation of Versailles, built by the late King of Bavaria,—was the objective of the visit. After spending one night at Copenhagen, I travelled straight through to Wemmergill, where I was the guest of a very old friend, Lord Westbury, for a week’s grouse-driving. Wemmergill, as all shooting men know, is one of the very best of the Yorkshire and Westmoreland moors, and there, with a very cheery shooting party, I had an excellent week’s sport.