George Frederick Pollock, formerly senior Master of the King’s Bench and King’s Remembrancer, was born on June 1, 1821, and died on May 20, 1915, just before his ninety-fourth birthday. His faculties, his interests, and his affections remained as fresh as ever up to the last. Apart from his unusual personal charm as a human being, his range of reminiscences was extraordinary, not only by reason of his great age and retentive memory, but also of his native and characteristic versatility. I often urged him to collect them, and indeed a publisher offered to send a shorthand writer for as long as was necessary to dictate a volume. But he said that what he wanted was a ‘Boswell,’ and even if such a prodigy had been found George Pollock would most probably have been too tired or bored to go on for many days continuously.
In more recent years I made notes of most conversations that I had with him, but I fear that a full harvest could only have been achieved by everyone following my example, and even my own jottings were sadly casual.
I remember being startled by his remarking one day how delighted he was to see G.R. on the mail-carts. It made him feel ‘quite a boy again.’ He had not seen any of the Georges, but had been astonished, walking down Whitehall as a youth, to see a genial gentleman suddenly look out of his carriage window and put out his tongue. This turned out to be His Majesty King William IV, who wished to indicate to some old naval friends on the pavement that his elevation to the throne had not made him too proud. No wonder that my eldest daughter, on being taken to see him, promptly asked him for his impressions of the execution of Charles I, and was sadly disappointed to find that her great-great-uncle had not attended the ceremony.
George Pollock was no mere lawyer. He was, as his father, the Chief Baron, used proudly to announce to his friends, a first-rate mechanic, and had made a complete study and hobby of clocks and watches.[11] The family watches were always chosen by him and are still going as no other watches go, though they were always a little erratic at first. His accurate observation was never at fault, as when he took up a silver teapot at a wedding reception from among the presents and remarked that it had a hole in it. He told me that when he was leaving Wimbledon he saw his old plumber and said ‘I wish you could explain how it was that I always had to get my pipes put right once a year until ten years ago, when you were too busy and I had to attend to them myself, since when they have never gone wrong.’ The plumber smiled significantly and replied ‘Well, sir, we must live somehow.’ Members of the family who had mishaps with bicycles used to find that the mere mention of the name of Pollock evoked kindly welcome and sometimes even an offer to repair the machine free of charge. This was no doubt partly due to his own ungrudging benevolence. In an age when we are all being exhorted to economise it is refreshing to remember that an official in the Law Courts not so very long ago penetrated a large crowd on a London pavement and discovered George Pollock extended over a grating from which he was trying with an umbrella to extract a penny which an urchin in tears professed to have dropped down the abyss. He was a well-known arbitrator in patent cases. He had some knowledge of astronomy, and counted Sir George Airey and Sir Norman Lockyer among his friends, not to mention other scientific men such as Faraday, Owen, and Hooker.
The John Murray of his day consulted him as to publishing 500 copies of the ‘Origin of Species.’ Murray was extremely sceptical as to the soundness of the work, and thought 500 copies as large a number as it was prudent to print. He remarked that the Darwinian theory was as absurd as though one should contemplate a fruitful union between a poker and a rabbit. George Pollock read the book and remarked that the contents were probably beyond the comprehension of any scientific man then living. But he advised publishing 1000 copies, because Mr. Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the formidable obstacles which he was honest enough to put in his own path. This is an interesting example of the way in which a man of good general ability, accustomed as a lawyer is to apply broad principles of reason to different kinds of subject-matter, may arrive at sounder conclusions than a specialist.
Talks with him were always a liberal education, because they gave first-hand impressions of an excellent observer in regard to many characters whose biographies are often written by persons who have not even seen the subject of the biography. It was thus thrilling for me, who had always admired the career of Mrs. Norton and read a recent account of her life, to hear that at a time when the differences between Mr. and Mrs. George Norton were most acute the Chief Baron put his house at the disposal of both so that Mrs. Norton should see her children there. She was accustomed to meet them in a room at one end of which George Pollock (on at least one occasion) sat and read the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ while she played with them at the other end. Usually his sister Mary was there. The heroines of history are not always wholly approved by their contemporaries. An old man, long since dead, told me that the advent of Florence Nightingale was not at first popular with the soldiers in the Crimea, because they felt embarrassed by the idea of female nursing. Similarly, Mrs. Norton was thought by some to be ‘playing to the gallery,’ and in the opinion of Baron Martin ‘talked to too many men’ on one occasion when crossing the Atlantic. But George Pollock nevertheless sympathised, as his father did, with her position as regards her children.
His talk, as might be expected, shed light on social usages of the past. One night the Duchess of Somerset was driving near Wimbledon and her carriage fell into a ditch. George Pollock was passing and assisted her and the coachman to get the vehicle out of the ditch and collect various toys and pieces of china back into the carriage. The next morning the Duchess, ‘in a refined manner,’ sent a military friend to convey her acknowledgments but did not come herself, since, for aught she knew, her benefactor might have had a ‘vulgar wife who would return the call.’
He mentioned that baths first came into fashion in the ’fifties, and caused much annoyance to a certain old colonel because they encumbered the officers’ luggage. ‘These young men,’ he complained, ‘keep washing themselves till there is not a bit of natural smell about them.’ The only unpardonable smell was of course tobacco. Even onions were preferable. Though the late King Edward introduced smoking as far as he could, even when his hosts drove him into the stable-room, George Pollock, despite his respect for the Church, felt it his duty, even in 1883, to remonstrate with a curate who smoked a cigar at a garden party.
His attitude to the divorce question interested me. He mentioned that all the lawyers of the time strongly supported the Act of 1857 in spite of ecclesiastical opposition. But he felt himself ‘incompetent to form an opinion’ on the question, which curiously illustrated the survival of the old Catholic tradition that marriage should be an institution entirely subject to ecclesiastical control and jurisdiction.
He naturally told many stories of his father and the law. One of his earliest memories was of mischievously abstracting Scarlett’s spectacles from the back of his coat just as he was about to read an important letter to the jury. This was in 1833, when he was a boy of twelve. He mentioned how his brother judges would give way to Maule for fear of his ability and sharp tongue till on one occasion Maule, after delivering judgment and then hearing all the other judgments, suddenly remarked: ‘After mature consideration, I differ from my learned brothers. I have come to the conclusion that my judgment was wrong, and the first misgivings that occurred to me about it were due to the fact that my brothers agreed with it.’