The career of Montagu Williams was the most varied of any man I have known. Both his father and his grandfather were barristers. After he left Eton, Montagu was for a time a schoolmaster; then fired, I suppose, by the outbreak of the Crimean War, he entered the Army. After peace was declared he resigned his commission and became a member of a theatrical touring company with a well-known amateur of those days, Captain Disney Roebuck. Next, on the advice, I believe, of his godfather, Montagu Chambers, he resolved to go to the Bar. During his studies he wrote for the Press, including Dickens's Household Words. He also wrote plays, chiefly in collaboration with his old friend and school companion at Eton, Frank Burnand. The best of them was The Isle of St. Tropez, a really good drama, in which Alfred Wigan played.
From the time Montagu was called by the Inner Temple there were few important criminal cases in which he did not take a part—and very quickly a prominent one. His great knowledge of every side of life and quick grasp of things resulted in a large practice, and he defended more scoundrels than any man of his day. Later on, he was grievously afflicted by throat mischief, which ended in the saving of his life at the cost of his voice, through a serious operation; he could afterwards only speak in a whisper. He was, however, appointed a London police magistrate, in which work he again distinguished himself, and soon became known as "the poor man's beak."
It was during the theatrical episode in his varied career that he came across, and married, Louise, a daughter of two prominent and respected early Victorian players, Mr. and Mrs. Keeley, whom I remember seeing act so long ago as 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, when Robert Keeley was the partner of Charles Kean at the old Princess's Theatre.
Louise Williams was gifted with a sweet voice and sang with charm. I still seem to hear her exquisite rendering of Edgar Allan Poe's words, which I can trust my memory to recall:
"And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee."
I can recall no man who enjoyed more universal popularity than Douglas Straight; it began at Harrow and followed him throughout his life. He never allowed his interests to become cramped: they embraced the law, politics, journalism, sport, the drama and society. He began as a journalist, was Conservative M.P. for Shrewsbury, and had a successful career at the Bar, which ended in a judgeship of the High Court in India.
He had great social gifts, nowhere better proved than by my friend Pett Ridge, who tells a story of his popularity with the fair sex, that twelve ladies agreed to give a dinner at a fashionable restaurant, the novelty on the occasion being that each of them was to be responsible for one male guest. The whole dozen invited Douglas!
"Willie" Mathews
I lost a close and affectionate friend in Charles Mathews, the Public Prosecutor, whom I first knew in the sixties, when he was a little chap at Eton and wore a turn-down collar. My next remembrance of him is as the "baby" member of the Garrick Club, where, from the date of his election, he was beloved. In those days "Willie" Mathews was "devil" to Montagu Williams and working hard in his company and that of Douglas Straight at the criminal bar, the scene of many triumphs in his successful career. He was persona grata wherever he went, and in widely different circles, from Balmoral to Bohemia.
Charles Gill was another old friend. We saw more of him at his beloved Birchington than in London. He was known in his Kentish home as "The Mayor"—so christened, I think, by his neighbour, that modern Colossus who seems to be always striding between New York and Leicester Square, the successful and erratic Frederick Lonsdale.