"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.
"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.
"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you know."
So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopædic intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.
Some sides of his character—his disillusionment, independence and far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred—were attributable to early struggles and later disappointments. After leaving Trinity College he saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and well-trodden road.
Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr. Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and—I am afraid—a love of mischief-making for its own sake.
His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the Houses of Parliament, he would—by his own standards of justice—be the sole survivor.
Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man. His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly—by some curious irony—ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence he kept to himself.
Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management. His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes "an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis Rœderer per man.