In those days life on a P. and O. was a mass of enjoyment: youngsters joining their regiments, old officers—naval and military—returning from leave, the ship’s officers, all joined nightly in harmless jokes, and as lights were put out and the steward’s room closed, each roysterer ascended to the upper deck and songs and what-not ensued. No one entered into the revelry more than Count Gleichen, as, with a tumbler of contraband grog, he quaffed and laughed as only a British sailor can.
Years later, when the Duke of Edinburgh commanded the Galatea, he still remembered his musical colleague, and a pretty snake ring with a turquoise in the head that he presented to me was lost in an accident that nearly cost me my life.
Boating has never been my forte, and in endeavouring on one occasion to enter a boat, it drifted with the impact, and, with one leg on the jetty and another in the boat, I soused into six feet of the muddiest “old Mole” water. Eventually I was hooked out, more “mud than alive,” but the ring was gone, and still reposes in the turgid waters of the Mediterranean.
Amongst the ship’s officers was Lord Charles Beresford, at the time the most inveterate Fourth Lieutenant of practical jokers. After a function at which the Duke and the ship’s company were on one occasion present, the local Inspector-General of Police, who had deemed his presence necessary, was staggered next morning by shouts of laughter as he peacefully slumbered in his bungalow.
Rushing to the window, conceive his horror on seeing Charlie Beresford, in his full uniform, strutting about and giving words of command in imitation of the original. But he was a bumptious buckeen, and no one sympathised with his discomfiture.
When the King was doing his goose-step at the Curragh, it was my high reflexed privilege to be doing mine in the next lines.
It was during this season that a march for the whole division was ordered to Maryborough, twenty-two miles distant.
The Prince, who was attached to the Grenadiers, accompanied us to and fro, and even after the fatiguing march might later on have been seen in the streets of Maryborough, accompanied by “his governor,” General Bruce, as if nothing unusual had occurred. It was lamentable the effect it had on those splendid types of humanity, the 1st Grenadiers, and their superb “Queen’s Company,” every man six feet and upwards. But the misfortune can hardly be laid to their charge; suddenly transferred from their sweet pastures in London, what wonder that the good things they had revelled in should seek an outlet on the dusty plains of Kildare! And so it came to pass that every ditch contained a guardsman, and long before the twenty-two miles had been covered every ambulance in the division was filled by the warriors.
The Vansittart family in those long-ago days were represented by some interesting scions.
“The Croc,” in many ways perhaps the most unique, was a remnant of a past generation who adapted surroundings to modern requirements, and was the terror of gouty old members who dined before four when “table money” came into force, consumed a loaf in a sixpenny bowl of soup, and drank their beer for nothing.