Through life and round the world being the story of my life

Front matter

Through life and

ROUND THE WORLD

BEING THE STORY OF MY LIFE By RAYMOND BLATHWAYT

Preface

“ Never regret, never retract, never apologize ! ” said the Oxford don. Well, I don’t regret— yet ; I shan’t retract either ; but I do apologize for this book. And mainly for the handling of my celebrities. Celebrities are kittle - cattle to deal with. Sometimes there is so little to say about them, sometimes more than one can venture. For instance, a lady, very eager and intense, said to me the other day—

“ And so you did indeed once see Swinburne plain ? And, oh, do tell me what he said ! ”

“ I will,” I promptly replied. 11 He said : ‘ Do you like beer, Mr. Blathwayt ? ’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And then he said : ‘ Ah ! that’s right. Nothing like it !

“ Beer ! beer ! glorious beer !

Fill me a tankard of jolly good beer ! ”

That’s what you and I used to sing in our youthful days,, isn’t' it, Watts? ’ he added, turning to his fid us Achates, Theodore Watts -Dunton, who never left his side ; and then he plunged into his tankard, took a long, deep draught, put the pewter down with a sigh of perfect happiness, said 4 Hah ! ’ and then he got up, made me a profound bow, to which I responded with one even more profound ; and thus, having swum into my ken for ten unforgettable minutes, he swam out of it again — for ever.” ,

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

RAYMOND BLATHWAYT . ... • • Frontispiece

THE DESK IN THE LIMEHOUSE WINDOW WHERE CHARLES

DICKENS MADE HIS RIVER-SIDE NOTES

MUTUAL FRIEND ” ...

(From a painting by W. W. Collins, kindly lent by Dr.

FOR “ OUR Facing page 83

Frank Corner)

REV. R. i. CAMPBELL .

. Page 104

G. F. WATTS . • •

„ 166

LADY DOROTHY NEV1LL

CECIL RHODES .

„ 226

r

THE PICTURE GALLERY, DYRHAM PARK (By permission of Country Life)

Facing page 240

SIR HENRY IRVING •

,, 392

II

Chapter I

The housemaid danced with Pedro the murderer, the nursemaid footed it lightly enough with Godfrey the forger, 11 Cookie ” looked smilingly on from the kitchen door, I laboriously turned the handle of the barrel-organ, whilst my little brother played with the tiny red-jacketed monkey, and the wearied Italian organist slept the sleep of the just beneath the great oak-tree that so delight¬ fully overhung our lawn, and beneath the dancing shadows of which I used to lie and dream and weave the golden threads which lend such enchanting romance to the innocent days of childhood. lhat is almost the earliest incident that arises to my mind from ampng the dim and half -forgotten memories of an unusually crowded past.

For my dear father, who was a country clergyman*

had, some years before the occasion to which I refer,

been presented to1 a convict chaplaincy by my mother’s

cousin, Sir George Grey, a famous Victorian Secretaiy

of State and the grandfather of Viscount Grey of Fallodon,

who was, indeed, mainly brought up by him ; and hence

it was that all my earliest associations were connected

with that curious convict system with which, fortunately

for them, so few of the English people are in any way

acquainted whatever. And yet though my earliest n 13 memories are of long lines of grey-clad, broad-arrowstamped men, heavily tramping along the lovely sunlit roads of an unusually wild and beautiful part of England, they are not sorrowful memories, nor are they in the least soiled or tainted with suggestion of crime, or wickedness, or evil-mindedness. It is a remarkable fact that these convicts appeared to have realized for them¬ selves the old classic adjuration. Maxima honos pueris debctar ; for never once— though owing to the inevitable carelessness or- indifference of the ordinary nursemaid I was thrown into constant association with the men, specially chosen and well-conducted men, however, who formed what was known as the garden gang, and who were .assigned to the leading officers, such as the Governor, the Chaplain, the Deputy -Governor, and the two doctors, assigned to them in somewhat the same fashion as convicts were assigned to the earlier settlers in Australia I can never once remember any single one of those men making use of a bad word in my hearing. On the contrary, it was Godfrey the forger who taught me a little child’s prayer which I have never forgotten, and which ran as follows

And now I lay me down to sleep,

1 pray the Lord my soul to keep ;

And if 1 die before 1 wake I pray the Lord my soul to take.

It was Pedro, the South American Spaniard, who had stabbed a man to death in London, but who .escaped the death penalty to which he had been sentenced owing to certain extenuating circumstances, who first revealed to me the fact that Mary was the Queen of Heaven, a piece of theology which much startled and horrified my father vyho was, of all Evangelicals that I have met, absolutely the most strict and undeviating, and it was that same occurrence which led to a much sterner supervision on the part of my pastors and masters than I had previously been subjected to. It is a curious and pleasant reflec¬ tion, however, that I can remember nothing but what was good and pure in my quite unavoidable association with those poor convicts. As a matter of fact, it was an association very much on a par with that of Eton and Harrow boys with their fathers’ grooms in the stables of a big country house, and really fraught with neither more nor less evil than that is. Many of this garden gang were quite elderly men, though Pedro and Godfrey, my special friends, were comparatively young men, and some of them had known a far different existence in the outside world.

One I remember was a famous baronet, of whom his friends— and they were legion — had nothing to say but what was wholly admirable ; another, a splendidly hand¬ some, white-haired old man, who used, as a special privilege, to act as clerk to my father in the chapel, and who, as a still further privilege, was allowed to wear his own pince-nez, had been mayor of a great city in the North, and had actually entertained Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort to luncheon at his own house ; whilst a third, who played the organ in chapel, was a Public School and University man. It will therefore be under¬ stood that such men could behave themselves, in a general way, quite as well as, if not better than, many free and happy men outside. O’Donovan Rossa — though he came many years later — was another of these unfortunates, and he, though a very convinced and resolute Fenian, was in many respects a really fine fellow ; whilst Michael Davitt, whom I met thirty years later at a Cabinet luncheon in Australia, was one of the most charming men I ever knew.

Pedro and Godfrey, between them, made me a beautiful little garden, “ al} to my very own self,” as Godfrey told me ; and he dug out a tiny little lake in it, and then went into the woods that lay so thick around the garden— a kind of primeval forest which was crammed with wild North American Indians, and centaurs, and lions, and South Sea' savages, and the most fearsome dragons — and cut me some bulrushes, out of which he fashioned some little boats, which he sailed upon the water for me. Godfrey was very good to me and »:eally one of the heroes of my childhood, and so what more natural than

that I should help him to escape when I was asked to do so !

He was quite innocent ! Lie told me so himself, so of course it was true ; and “ Cookie,” who had a very soft spot in her heart for the big, handsome, good-natured young man, whose real and undeniable good looks and natural charm of disposition no cropping or shaving or dressing up in hideous garb could possibly disguise or do away with, determined one day she would help him to escape. So, with her finger on her lips to ensure my silence, having previously conjured me by the most blood¬ curdling oaths to deathless secrecy, she flew ' upstairs one memorable November evening and returned with a long black clerical coat and a pair of old black trousers which my father had discarded, and flung them to Godfrey, with : “ Go into the pantry, Jem, me darlin,’ and put em on there, and look your sharpest.” And Godfrey disappeared for five of the longest minutes I lave ever known ; and then out came a tall, very hand¬ some curate, and I said, “ Oh, Godfrey, you do look nice ! And Godfrey crammed some bread and cheese the housemaid had got ready for him into his pocket and said, as he kissed us all one after the other : “ Good-bve Cookie, I am off. Good-bye, Master Raymond dear •

I 11 do the same for you one of these days, you see if I don t And don’t you forget to say that little prayer I taught you every night, and keep some salt- always m your pocket and let me know if you ever catch a bird with it And he was off into the dark night and down the dark, wet lull that led him to the canal and to the railway station, safe for London Town.

And I sat by the kitchen fire and read stories in the red-hot coals, and almost thought 1 saw a giant behind he pantiy door ; and then I nodded, and 1 think I must have fallen asleep, when suddenly 1 was wide awake and the housemaid said in a thrilling voice, “ Hark ! what’s that?” And my heart beat till 1 was nearly suffocated, and the great prison bell clashed and clanged in the foggy winter night, and I heard the warders dashing by ; and suddenly a gun went off, and “ Cookie ” began to cry hysterically. And then the nursemaid took me upstairs and brushed my hair, and I went down for the usual few minutes before dinner, and my bedtime, to look at picture-books in the drawing¬ room. And then my father came in. “ Godfrey’s escaped,” he said; “I’m afraid he’ll get the ‘cat,’ poor wretch, if they catch him.” And then I went up to bed, perfectly ill with excitement and anxiety. I was only six after all, and I cried myself to sleep ; and when nurse woke me in the morning she said : “ They ain’t

caught poor old Godfrey, Master Raymond, and pray they never will, nasty beasts ! ” But, alas ! a week after my' father opened The Times, and after a moment or two he read us out a piece which said that a youngpoliceman had met a man walking in a street in London, and he went up to him and said, “ You are James Godfrey— you’ve got to come with me.” And oh, how “ Cookie ” and all of us cried ! And “ Cookie ” said : “ There, Master Raymond, you ’aven’t caught your bird yet, but they caught poor old Godfrey.”

One curious and really rather dreadful part of it was that my aunt, Mrs. Charles Blathwayt, who was staying in the house with us at the time, was the sister of the then Secretary of State for the Home Department, Mr. Gatliorne -Hardy, afterwards Earl of Cranbrook, who was actually, ex officio, the head of the whole Convict Department ! This momentous fact I was, of course, too young to realize at the time, but the servants and I kept . our dark secret so well that it was not till I told my dear father the whole story in 1901 that he realized to the full the appalling but not vUiolly unhumorous significance of the occasion.

I have said that we lived amidst beautiful surroundings, and I rather desire to emphasize that fact, for no one can estimate to their fullest extent the value and import¬ ance of early associations and surroundings. My childish memories are of wonderful summer days, when never a cloud dimmed the sky and the scent of the pine-woods was always in the air, and the sun used to set behind a vast range of dark blue hills, which were frequently dotted with the white tents of soldiers engaged in the great summer and autumn manoeuvres which began to be so popular in those far-off days. We were a singu¬ larly happy family, though we were always very poor, and I never even went to a pantomime until I was well over twenty years of age. Our greatest treat, on our very rare expeditions to town, was a visit to the British Museum, the National Gallery, Madame Tussaud’s, or the Christy Minstrels. I don’t suppose my father ever had more than £500 a year at any time of his career, and 1 am quite sure he had never dined in a smart restaurant in all his life— for one thing, I don’t think they existed for anybody in those days, and for another, he would have loathed them - and all their associations and their inherent vulgarity. For he was a great gentleman, in the most splendid meaning of that ridiculously wrongly used and absurdly abused word to-day. He was so aloof from, and, to Iny childish idea — and, indeed, to the idea I hold almost as strongly to-day as I did then — so far above, the ordinary run of people that I cannot imagine him in connection with them at all ; he was simply a scholar, an omnivorous reader, an artist, an exceedingly fine preacher, and, with his brothers, a certain Captain Jennings -Bramley, who was Governor of the prison, and the late Lord Leconfield,-»whom we knew in later years, far and away the most distinguished -looking man 1 have ever seen — and that in a day when “ distinction ” was a much commoner thing in the streets of London than it is to-day. It is a curious thing that whilst women .have enormously advanced and improved, physically as well as mentally, men as a rule have just as curiously deteriorated. But my father and his brothers were extra¬ ordinarily distinguished to look at. People always turned to look after them in the street. I remember once, when 1 was about ten years of age, I had come up to town as a special treat with my father, and I walked down Piccadilly with him and my Uncle Charles, and we' suddenly met Mr. Disraeli, as he was then, and my father whispered to me, “ Look, Raymond, here’s Mr. Disraeli.”

And as the great man passed us, with a very scrutinizing gaze at the two tall and stately clergymen, I turned to look at him, and lo ! he had turned also and was gazing hard at us. That was my one. and only glimpse of that splendidly picturesque Victorian figure, and a glimpse I shall never forget.

I was walking the other day with Captain Harry de Windt and Miss Elaine Inescort, the charming actress, and as we crossed St. James’s Square we passed a singularly distinguished -looking man — all of the- olden time — and our fair friend said — '

“ What a splendid -looking person ! He’s a regular Colonel Newcome ! ”

“There, Harry,” I said, “isn’t that true? He is exactly the type of man we used to see by the dozen in the sixties and the seventies, and that you never see nowadays save and except as a sort of dim survival.”

I hope no one will laugh at me for saying all this, though if a son may not admire his own father, I don’t know whom he may admire.

Of my mother I will say no more — at present, at all events — than that she is the greatest memory I have. There are people and memories too sacred for' words, and nry memory and thoughts of her are of that nature. With my father, of course, it is somewhat different. He stands, and will stand for all time, so far as I am concerned, as quite one of the most remarkable men I have ever known. I have known far cleverer men, of course, and in certain respects much more lovable men, but I have never known, among all the wonderful and remarkable at%$l distinguished men I have met — and I have met more than most- — I have never known one who stood so strikingly apart from his fellows as he always did. Very cold and proud and very aloof and reserved — so reserved that I hardly ever knew him to lunch or dine out with a single living soul in all my life, and so proud that he would never ask a favour of any of our relations, several of whom held very high office in the country — he nevertheless was characterized by perfect simplicity of manner and address. Either he or his brother Charles

2o THROUGH LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD could easily have been bishops had they chosen to exert themselves but ever so little, for they possessed excep¬ tional qualifications for high dignity ; but they were simply too proud and too indifferent and too unambitious ever to move a finger to help themselves or any of their family. And I like to think of it, even though we were in our family so really poor that sometimes, with one son at Oxford and another at Cambridge, it was hard work to make both ends meet. My uncle Charles had married Jmoney, and, with some other of my more Iworldlywise relatives, represented what was to our simple ideas the really wealthy side of life ; indeed, I believe one ol my aunt s brothers was one of the few millionaires England had produced before the American and South African Croesuses had begun to flood our shores. So we grew up in a world of simplicity of which the modern day knows little or nothing, and which, I suppose, it would heartily despise. My father began teaching us Greek and Latin at an age when the modern boy hasn’t even begun to tackle his English Grammar, and I was caned for a false quantity before I was eight. And it did me all the good in the world too. And another thing : my father was never what is known as a “ pal ” to his children, and that, too, in my estimation, was all to the good. I don t believe one bit in the modern system of calling your father “ old chap.” Heavens !

I wonder what would have happened to me if I had so appallingly forgotten myself ! I don’t wish to bear unduly hard upon the present system ; I am sure it has its good points, just as I am equally certain it has its bad, but 1 simply neither like it nor believe in it. Some¬ times, indeed, it is nothing less than disastrous in its , results.

A year or two ago, I was lunching with some friends and their son, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, home from a. very famous Public School for the holidays.

‘‘ Let me have some champagne, mother,” he said.

“ no, darling, I can’t ; it’s too early.”

‘‘ Oh, don’t be a fool, mother ; let me have some.”

“ No, darling ; I really don’t think it’s good for you.”

“ You filthy swine! ” he cried, his face black -with passion .

There was a dead silence. I looked at his father, earnestly hoping that he would then and there break every bone in his body. Oh no, not the “ pal ” father ! Not a bit of it 1

“ Oh, Harry, you shouldn’t talk like that to your mother, you know.” That was all he said.

I leaned over towards the brute and I said, “ My father would have killed me if I had said that to my mother ! ”

Some of my modern readers will marvel at my emotion on this occasion. Well, they may. I can only say that there are times when one could commit murder and be justified in committing it. That was one of them for me.

I don’t pretend for a moment that all the youths of to-day are like that — the very reverse is the case. I cannot emphasize this fact too strongly, and not to do so would be grossly unfair. Nor would I suggest that the “ pal ” father is always so criminally forbearing. But at the same time there is far too much of that kind of thing about. Twice within the last three years 1 have seen supposedly well-bred children, in a towering passion, fling a pack ,of cards in their parents’ faces — one a boy who actually cut his mother’s lip open with the violence of his passion, and the other a girl who dashed all her cards full into the face of her father. And in each case the children, each of whom was over fourteen years of age and who ought to have been most severely punished, were not even reprimanded !

Well, all this is to say that though my father was very severe, very often too harsh with us, and sometimes hardly just in his punishments, yet he always commanded and merited and retained for life our admiration and respect, and this to his dying day, . which occurred only a few days before the death of King Edward ; and it must indeed be rare to find a large family of children which was so proud of, and so devoted to the very last to, a father who never in the best sense of the word failed them when they required him most.

And in a way — though I am ignorant enough now.

Heaven knows ! — he and my dear mother educated us so splendidly . Our Latin and Greek lessons never bored us, because we learned the story and the romance and the history and the geography of them at one and the same time ; and when I was only seven years old my mother used to read to me such a book as Motley’s “ History of the Dutch Republic,” or Prescott’s histories of the Mexicans and the Peruvians. But it was not so much the actual lessons or the subjects she chose as the whole tone and spirit of her instruction, and the refine¬ ment which, like a halo, encircled it all, leaving behind an undying memory of indefinable charm and the most deiicate romance. And it was she who used to read to me that wonderful Dream, that classic of English literature, though I was too young to appreciate any¬ thing more than its stories of the giants, Bunyan’s Pilgrim s Progress ” ; it was she who initiated me, later on in my childhood, into the delicate beauties of George Iderbert’s “Temple” and Shakespeare’s “Tem¬ pest and Spensers l'aerie Queene.” I can never hear of Clovis, or Charlemagne, or St.. Louis of France without thinking of mother’s lessons to me from Mrs. Markham’s famous French histories, with their pretty steel and wood engravings ; nor can I even to-day witness Martin Harvey’s beautiful performance in “ The Only Way ” without recalling her simple recital of Dickens’s famous Tale of Two Cities, with which she accompanied Mrs. Markham’s account of the French Revolution. And when she read me the Tales of a Grandfather,” she would also give me her own personal memories of Sir Walter Scott, whom she knew when she was a very small child, and she would try and adapt his Scottish stories, where they fitted in with the particular piece of history she was reading, to my childish understanding.

And talking of Scott reminds me I may as well break olf for a moment to enlarge upon what I can recall of her memories of the greatest man Scotland has ever produced. 1 recall the wonderful enthusiasm that Sir Herbert Tree aroused in Edinburgh one night at a grand dinner which was given to him by the Pen and Pencil

Club ten or twelve years ago, when I sat next to him, and he, at the end of his speech, which was quoted in full in all the Scottish papers next morning, read them an extract from my mother’s letter which she had written me, all unconscious that it would ever reach others’ eyes or ears than mine, though, of course, she had not the' slightest objection to my dear old mend thus making use of her stories, which came in with extra¬ ordinary appropriateness in a speech dealing so charm¬ ingly and sympathetically with Edinburgh’s literary and artistic associations and reminiscences.

“ You must let me bring that into my speech to-night, Blathwayt,” said Tree. “ Wire to your mother and ask

her permission.” : i

“ No,” I replied ; “ that would frighten her into a

fit. There’s no earthly harm in your doing so, and 1 11 send her the Scotsman the morn’s morn ’’—Tree and 5 always speak broad Scots in Edinburgh and with the most violent brogue when we are in Dublin, as we some¬ times are together. My mother, in begging me to go to a certain square in Edinburgh where my grandfather had lived, and where Scott often dined with him and such Scottish celebrities of that day as the Duke of Buccleuch, the eccentric Earl of Buchan, and the Con¬ stables, re -told, and told it accurately, the famous story of Mrs. Siddons at my grandfather’s dinner -table. ihe footman had brought her a glass of water, and, looking at him very solemnly, the great queen of tragedy said, in her most impressive style, “ I said ‘ porter, young man, not ‘ water 1 ”

There is a well-known engraving which depicts Sir Walter Scott giving a reading of one of his new books at Abbotsford, with, amongst other Scottish worthies of the day, the Etterick Shepherd, James Hogg, seated at Scott’s feet, and John Gibson Lockhart and my grand¬ father seated at the end of the table.

A few years ago I was staying in Cardiff with that delightful Scotsman Sir John Duncan, the proprietor of ■ the South Wales News^- alas ! that he has quitted a world that was always the happier and better for his

24 THROyGFI LIFE AND ROUND THE WORLD

genial and noble presence— and he told me of an aged “ brither Scot,” wellnigh a century old, who was living out at Roath, and advised me to go and see him, as he was full of stories of Sir Walter, who had been his father’s friend and whom he himself also remembered distinctly. So I went to see the dear old man, and I am glad now I did. I had no sooner told him who I was than he said : “ Yes, I remember now. And I

remember I was walking out to Abbotsford when I was a big boy one day and your grandfather passed me driving in his phaeton and he gave me a lift out to Sir Walter’s,, and when we got there we found Sir Walter reading in the library, with your dear mother and her sister playing with the dog: on the hearthrug — they couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time.”

Piercing through that wonderful golden mist of memories and romance which always enshrouds the far-off past of my childhood’s days, it seems to me that every¬ thing centres round that beautiful old oak which dominated our whole garden. The sound of its leaves fluttering in the breeze was the first sound that greeted me on waking in the morning, and it was beneath its shadow that I first realized the golden arrows shot by the early sun, and after my lessons I used to fall asleep to the eternal music of the wind among its branches. Shadowed by its protecting care, I read the first book I ever read all by myself— Marryatt’s “ Masterman Ready,” a book that not only coloured all my after-life, but that added tenfold to the interest of those wanderings of mine through the after-years all over the world. To this hour I can never behold the palms bending to the strong sea breeze on the scented shores of Ceylon or in some little West Indian forest without recalling the delightful pictures in “ Masterman Ready,” any more than I can behold the magnificent architectural glories of a sunset in the Indian Ocean, with all its marvellous outline and its exquisite translucency of atmosphere and its gorgeous colouring, without thinking of that other favourite of my childhood, R. M. Ballantyne’s “Coral Island.” So extraordinarily vivid and powerful are one’s earliest memories and associations that one can never get wholly rid of childhood’s past, and if you are fortunate enough to have had such a childhood as mine you never want to. And then it was under that tree that I read my first two novels— surreptitiously, of course — Mrs. Radclyffe’s famous “ Mysteries of Udolpho,” with that thrilling and delightful sentence which has lingered with me all my life, “ The castle clock struck one! ” and the other was “ Lady Audley’s Secret,” by Miss Braddon, all of whose books were my joy for years and years of my early life.