—the gentle and loving spirit of James Leigh Strachan-Davidson passed away. During his early manhood his health had been so weak that he had been regularly compelled to winter abroad, and few would have anticipated that he would have exceeded by three years the Psalmist’s allotted span of threescore and ten; but his dauntless courage, serene patience, and strong sense of duty carried him through a long career of usefulness.
I had known and loved him for more than half a century, and when I saw the news in The Times of the following morning my thoughts went back to the last occasion when we met at a rather remarkable gathering of old Balliol contemporaries which had taken place annually during all that period, nothing but the sternest necessity keeping any of us away. We had dined together once every year since 1867, generally on the second day of the University cricket match, and we met for the last time under the presidency of Sir Horatio Shephard, long a distinguished Indian Judge, on July 6, 1914. Although there was a full attendance, two or three had dropped out of our ranks since the last meeting, when twenty-three out of a possible twenty-four had been present, but gaps were to be expected when the youngest of the gathering, myself, was on the verge of seventy, and I voiced a pretty general feeling when I proposed that after our next dinner (actually the 46th) we should wind up voluntarily, finishing in 1915 with a special Jubilee Festival. My resolution was carried unanimously, but, alas for the vanity of human wishes! in one short month Armageddon was upon us, and in 1915, when the day came round for the University match and our dinner, the rival blues, both sides one khaki-clad phalanx, were fighting side by side ‘somewhere in France’ or on the shrapnel-swept heights of Gallipoli; and we ourselves, with sons and grandsons at the front, had no heart for festivities. Our ‘Balliol dinner’ was fated to die a natural death, but it should not be allowed to come to an end ‘without the meed of a melodious tear.’ I typed a copy of the book in which all our meetings are recorded in the hands of the successive presidents, from the first dinner, under the presidency of Archer Clive, in 1867, at the Castle Hotel, Richmond, with all the names of those attending, excuses for absence, and comments upon the quality of the menu, the wine, and the waiting. We were forty-three in all from first to last, and the bright promise of that generation of Balliol undergraduates had in many cases ripened into fulfilment. Among politicians we numbered the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Earls of Morley and Jersey, Matt Ridley, afterwards the first Lord Ridley, and Sir William Anson, even more distinguished as an embodiment of the spirit of Oxford, Warden of All Souls, Vice-Chancellor, and historian of the Constitution, than as a member of Parliament, Privy Councillor, and Minister of Education. We had altogether three Heads of Colleges, Anson, our dear Master of Balliol, and Wright Henderson, Warden of Wadham; Wood was Head Master of Harrow, while Raper and Papillon held their place high among choicest representatives of Oxford scholarship. John Julius Hannah, Dean of Chichester, Canon Argles, and a round dozen of beloved Rectors and Vicars, doing excellent and unostentatious work in various country parishes, represented the Church. Then we had the head officials at the table of both Houses of Parliament; Sir Henry Graham, Clerk of the Parliaments, was and still is leading luminary in the House of Lords, and Sir Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert occupies a similar place as first Clerk in the House of Commons. Other lesser luminaries distinguished in the Civil Service were Sneyd Kynnersley, who has recorded his career as a School Inspector with rich humour in that amusing book ‘H.M.I.,’ and Charles Vertue and Hamilton Hoare, of the Education Office. Sir Francis Horner was a successful Commissioner of Woods, and the well loved ‘Mike,’ R. A. H. Mitchell, the mighty cricketer of the ’sixties, did useful work as one of the best and most popular of Eton House Masters. Truly a goodly company! And there were others of a promise as bright which never had time to ripen: Barratt, the Rugby Scholar who obtained the unprecedented number of five first classes, Classical and Mathematical ‘Mods’ and Greats, and Law and History, then the only other final school, and only stopped because, like Alexander, he could find no more worlds to conquer, and Archer Clive, the brilliant son of a distinguished Herefordshire family, who gained the highest honours at the University and a fellowship at Lincoln, but never attained that success at the Bar which his great intellect led his contemporaries to expect. He was chosen with Henry Northcote (the late Lord Northcote) to accompany Sir Stafford Northcote and his colleagues to America as Secretary to the Mission which negotiated the Alabama Treaty, and gained great credit from his chief in that capacity. A singular incident, now almost forgotten, occurred in the year when he took his degree at Oxford. After the examination some practical joker sent a forged ‘Greats’ Class List to The Times. It failed in its object of deceiving anyone who really knew anything about the prospects of Honour Candidates, for it placed Archer Clive in the Third Class, which, as Euclid would have put it, was absurd. He ‘devilled’ at the Bar for Lord James of Hereford, whose pupil he had been and who entertained the highest appreciation of his abilities, but soon after his return from America he developed symptoms of pulmonary disease, which shortly afterwards proved fatal.
To return to Strachan-Davidson, the appreciative notice printed in The Times of March 29 says that when he and his friends were disappointed at his being passed over for the Mastership of Balliol on Jowett’s death in 1893 he bore it ‘like an angel.’ The expression is by no means too strong; whatever were his personal feelings, he sank them altogether in the interest of the College he loved, and devoted all his energies to help to make Dr. Caird’s Mastership a success. He was incapable of envy, jealousy, or huffiness, and on the two occasions when I met him and Caird together he showed his fine appreciation of his old friend’s character and seemed to delight to do him honour. The first was that of our Balliol dinner in July 1898, when, for the only time in our half-century of existence, we entertained a guest in the person of our Master, Caird, who was brought and introduced by Strachan-Davidson. A notable gathering it was, under the presidency of Sir Courtenay Ilbert, twenty-six being present out of a possible thirty-one, three of the five absentees being ill, one in India, and one in Norway. The second was that memorable gathering in the Hall of the old College when we celebrated Lord Newlands’ princely gift; and fathers and sons met under the presidency of Caird.
Jowett, great man as he was, did not show a like spirit when Scott was appointed to the place he coveted, and thought he had earned Achilles sulked in his tent and chuckled over the difficulties of his predecessor as long as his reign continued. Certainly Scott, although ever a kindly and courteous gentleman, was rather a figurehead, and had no great influence in the College. There was a story of him—I will not vouch for its truth—that on a well-remembered occasion somewhere about 1865, when three undergraduates, two of them exhibitioners and distinguished and influential scholars, came to him to announce their conversion to Rome, he thought for a moment and then said ‘Have you considered, gentlemen, that the rash step you propose is not merely calculated to imperil your immortal souls, but also to do a great deal of harm to the College?’ Neither of these considerations availed to alter their determination, but the College, which now has many Roman Catholics among its fellows and members, still seems to manage to keep up its reputation, and maintains its high position. I give the story, but do not credit it. Scott, although inclined to be pompous, had a strong sense of humour, as I may evidence by his celebrated charade on ‘Toast-Rack,’ which I give from memory:
‘My first is found where wit and wine
Combine to grace the festive board;
My next, where captive wretches pine
In dungeons of some tyrant Lord.
My whole, alas! contains the doomed;
Twice tried by fire, ere once consumed.’