HOME
It may be a hut with a thatch on
In a garden where roses grow,
Or built of bad bricks with a patch on
Of stucco, and twelve in a row;
It may be a palace of crystal,
With a splendid sparkling dome,
But what does it matter whatever it is,
It is Home.
“Pater’s Book of Rhymes.”
I do not want to anger my readers at the threshold with heraldic
learning of the couching lions and ramping cats to which the Parrys of
Nerquis are by right entitled, but I claim a Welshman’s privilege of
setting down so much of genealogy as is necessary to the understanding
of my story. And truly one of the temptations that lured me to this
task was a desire to write down what I could remember of my father,
John Humffreys Parry――Serjeant Parry――who died more than thirty years
ago, and left so fine a memory among his comrades in the battles of
old in Westminster Hall.
And I often heard my father talk of his Welsh ancestry, though he
himself was a Londoner born in 1816, and he would tell us what he
remembered of his father, John Humffreys Parry, the Welsh antiquary
and writer who was called to the Bar in 1811, and died when my father
was a boy of sixteen. He was the writer of the “Cambrian Plutarch” and
editor of the “Cambro Briton,” a journal of Celtic folk-lore and the
ancient literature and history of Wales. Nowadays he would probably
have been a professor at a Welsh University, but in those days people
cared for none of these things. I remember reading in some Welsh
account of his career――and among Welshmen he is far better known than
my father――how he was educated at Mold Grammar School and articled to
Mr. Wynne, solicitor, of that town, and married a daughter of John
Thomas, solicitor, of Llanfyllin, which is away down in the wilds of
Montgomeryshire. This biographer wound up his story with the
compendious statement that “he went to London, was called to the Bar,
took to literature and dissipated his estates.” But if he had any
estates, which is at least doubtful, he wasted them not in riotous
living, but in the printing and publishing of the Welsh literature he
loved. From the earliest he was an eager and ready writer. I have a
small brown scrapbook, the leaves of which are saffron-tinged with
age, in which are pasted with proud care the author’s letters and
verses contributed to the _Chester Courant_ in the early part of the
century, when he was a youth in Mr. Wynne’s office in Mold.
Some years ago curiosity led me into the land of my forefathers, and I
climbed the steep hill between Mold and Ruthin to reach Llanferres,
going past “The Three Loggerheads,” the sign of which Richard Wilson,
R.A., the landscape painter, is reputed to have painted. It is the old
jest of two heads grinning at you――the third you supply for yourself.
And if Wilson painted it, as they say he did, it was probably done in
his early days, for he came from Mold, and as he died in 1782 the sign
must have been there in my great-grandfather Edward Parry’s time, when
he became rector of the little hill village of Llanferres in 1790. And
doubtless he often saw it as he walked down the hill to visit his
wife’s relatives in Mold, or went across to Nerquis to see his father
Edward Parry, the tanner.
And at Llanferres I searched the church registers, and finding that
the rector was carried home to his native village of Nerquis, I turned
my steps along the narrow roads down the side of the hill where his
funeral must have passed and found a little village church at the
foot-hills on the English side, so much away from the bustle of the
world’s traffic that I think it must be much the same to-day as it was
when my great-grandfather was carried back to his early home. And when
the little churchyard of Nerquis gives up its collection of Parrys it
will relinquish a goodly number who lived and died in this quiet,
solitary place, and from what one reads on marble slabs and the like,
they were a godly, honest and well-doing people. But to my regret I
find that Edward the tanner’s father was the Rev. Canon Edward Parry,
M.A., Vicar of Oswestry in 1763, and his father was Thomas, an
attorney of Welshpool who lived near the bridge, so that as we reach
the seventeenth century it dawns upon me that I do not belong to North
Wales at all, and I cease my researches into the past, in dread that I
should discover after all that I am no better than a South Wales man,
a “Hwntw” in good northern speech, or “man from beyond.”
My very earliest personal recollection of my father was in the days of
my childhood, when we lived at No. 1, Upper Gloucester Place,
overlooking Dorset Square. In the interests of the committee of the
society that busies itself placing decorative lozenges on the
birth-places of the famous it is well to record that I have it on
hearsay evidence that this is where I was born.
I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that
house, but only on one day of the week――the Sunday. On other days I
cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details
of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked
on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an
evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the
glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull
faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at
its hands.
My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early
sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it
contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw
Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly shrunk. Those giant shrubs
that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted
nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or,
rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The
Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not
know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence
of happiness in those days that our good nurse _ex abundanti cautela_
carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I
contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park
retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the
illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its
snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we
envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across
the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were
drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of
“The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the
drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling,
and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from
the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge
pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief
engineer himself.
But in all these childhood’s scenes I do not recall that my father had
any part. He was, of course, at this time a very hard-worked man, but
Sunday morning he always devoted to his children. I can picture his
solid, kindly face and see his commanding figure wrapped in a
dressing-gown of many colours――an old friend――as he sat at the end of
the breakfast-table when we were brought down from the nursery. The
only other member of the party was Tiger, a favourite tabby cat of
whom my father was very proud. He had a great love of cats, and at one
time possessed three, which he named Hic, Hæc, and Hoc. The
appositeness of the names came to me with the Latin grammar and years
of discretion. Two journals were his Sabbath reading――_The Spectator_
and _Athenæum_, but he laid down his paper when we arrived, and took
that real interest in our affairs which is the only key to children’s
hearts. One great task was the skilful arrangement of all the animals
of Noah’s Ark on the breakfast-table, which was rewarded with buttered
toast. In a spirit of fairness Tiger was requested to walk among the
animals. This if he did without mishap earned him the guerdon of
cream. Then there was a careful examination on our weekly studies of
the pages of _Punch_, which my father held rightly to be the earliest
nursery text-book of history and sociology for the English child. This
was followed by dramatic recitals of Mr. Southey’s “Three Bears” and
some of Jane and Ann Taylor’s original poems, and other childhood’s
sagas. And then when the nurse’s fateful knock was heard at the door
to take the young gentlemen for a walk, off went my father’s huge
dressing-gown, two wildly excited urchins sprang into the limitless
depths of the arm-chair and were covered up by the garment, and my
father with dramatic breathlessness shouted “Come in!” and was
“discovered”――to use a phrase of the theatre――calmly reading the paper
at the table. The same dialogue was always maintained. The nurse
inquired where the children were; the father expressed his
astonishment at their disappearance; Tiger was asked if he had seen
them, and remained silent. Then an elaborate search with hopeless
ejaculations of the searchers was received with ill-concealed shrieks
of amusement by the hiders. At last they are discovered, and the
curtain falls on the most glorious hour in the whole week. For just as
men and women love the old plays and the old ideas of drama, so
children will have the same game of hide-and-seek or what not, and
play it in the same way with the same absurd ritual religiously
carried out, and he alone is worthy of fatherhood who can take an
honourable part in such affairs with real solemnity and enthusiasm.
But these baby days departed, and the Sunday mornings had to be passed
in Christ Church, Marylebone, surely the most unsociable church I have
ever entered. I used to shudder for fear that after all heaven might
turn out to be something like Christ Church, Marylebone. It still
haunts me in dyspeptic dreams. It was a huge classical building, as
cheerful as a family vault, with one painting over the altar――how many
hours have I spent gazing at it――and no other memorable decoration.
The congregation were penned apart in high boxes. Our box had tall red
hassocks. I used to be allowed to stand on one of these, until I fell
off it into the bottom of the pen audibly and demonstratively. After
that I was consigned to the floor, from which you could not see even
bonnets, and from this limbo I only emerged by gradual growth. The
preacher wore a black gown. My earliest meeting with him must, I
think, have been at the font. I remember his grave tones, clear voice
and dignified presence. I know now he must have preached excellent
sermons, for he was the Rev. Llewelyn Davies. But in those days my
brother and I fully believed he was the anonymous “righteous man” in
the Psalms whose doings and sayings are so carefully chronicled.
From Regent’s Park we moved away to Kensington, and thence to Holland
Park. Here it was that in the seventies, during the last few years of
my father’s life, I heard in snatches from himself and his older
friends something of the story of his career. I was then at King’s
College School, which at that time was situated below Somerset House,
and as I travelled up and down in the Underground――often with my
father――and did my home-lessons in his library and dined with him
nearly every night, and often went to the play with him of an evening,
I had the good fortune to see more of him than I should have done had
I been away at school.
He must have had a keen struggle in his early days to reach the
position he did at the Bar. Born in London in 1816, he was only
sixteen years old when the sudden death of his father made it
necessary for him to earn his own living. He was then being educated
at the Philological School, an old foundation in Marylebone, but he
left school at once and went into a merchant’s office. Edwin Abbott,
the head-master of the Philological School, continued his firm friend,
and years afterwards his daughter Elizabeth married my father, who was
then a Serjeant. But I do not propose to write of my mother in these
pages, since I could not do justice to the grace of her memory, and
the dim vision of it is my own affair.
The Abbotts were, as I understand, an old family of yeomen and farmers
in Dorsetshire. I have seen a pamphlet concerning the great George
Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bravely withstood James I. in
the matter of the Essex divorce, showing that he was of the same
family. I hope it may be so. My father used to laugh at genealogy, but
for my part I rather like to speculate on pedigrees and family
history. It is pleasant to trace one’s line back to tanners and
farmers and attorneys, even with a dash of the Church thrown in. The
ancestry of the horse and the greyhound is a study for every gambler
on the course, and why should not a student of eugenics be interested
in the evolution of the entries for the human race?
Whilst he was in a merchant’s office my father attended classes at the
Aldersgate Institution, a valuable educational society promoted by
Lord Brougham, and he became a constant attendant at a debating club
held there. He was a great believer in orderly debate as a method of
education, and was always ready to discuss with me the subject of
debate in my School Society. The art of speaking he thought should be
equally a part of elementary education with reading and writing, and
his view was that if such were the case the charlatan and the windbag
would have less chance of capturing the ear of the public.
From the merchant’s stool he found his way to the British Museum,
where he was an assistant for some years, and formed a lasting
friendship with Anthony Panizzi, who was then keeper of the printed
books. I remember Richard Garnett showing me one of the slips in the
catalogue in my father’s handwriting in the days before that great
work was printed. All this time he was reading for the Bar and taking
an active interest in the political movements of the day. George Jacob
Holyoake remembers him as a young law-student at No. 5, Gray’s Inn
Road. He describes him as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker, and
notes that he ultimately acquired two styles like O’Connell, the more
gaseous of which he retained solely to illuminate electors.
In 1842, the year before he was called, he was one of the most active
members of the Moral Force Chartists. Hanging on my walls in a dark,
old-fashioned veneered frame is a large print in many colours of the
famous Charter――a harmless exploded torpedo nowadays no doubt――but in
1842 the symbol of a grave reality. For Chartism, as Carlyle pointed
out, was “the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong
condition therefore, or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes
of England.” With the ring of the true prophet in his words he foresaw
in 1842 that Chartism “did not begin yesterday; will by no means end
this day or to-morrow … new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder
or less mad have to continue.”
My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the
_National Associations Gazette_. The problem it set itself out to deal
with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected
the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and
unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so
to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and
women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in
argument with other reformers laying down――too dogmatically as I
thought――that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before
the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of
practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national
action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall
say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not
much good sense in his reasoning.
From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and
Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all,
remains with us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday
afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington
to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable,
white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making
models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the
National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to
inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle
upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others
assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and
affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in
great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for
refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered
imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the
unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham.
This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint
models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest
of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a
revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I
liked the mystery of him.
The energy my father displayed in his early years at the Bar must have
been considerable. He was much in demand as a lecturer, and as he told
me, for a year or two his main source of income was the delivery
throughout England of his lectures on the Oratory of the Bar, the
Pulpit and the Stage, and another interesting series on the French
Revolution, a subject in which he was deeply read.
I came across a gentleman in Manchester who well remembered his
lecturing at the Athenæum in 1844, and gave him great praise for his
dramatic recitals on the Oratory of the Stage. But his practice at the
Bar must soon have made lecturing tours unnecessary and impossible.
When he was called he said in fun to some friends he was entertaining,
that as soon as he was earning a thousand a year he would give them
all a far better feast. The banquet took place within four years of
the invitation.
His interest in politics never diminished. But when he had made his
great name as an advocate, all invitations to contest a seat in
Parliament were refused. In 1847 he contested Norwich unsuccessfully
against Lord Douro and Sir Samuel Peto, and in 1857 stood for Finsbury
against Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was returned by a large
majority. In this election he used to say his chances were seriously
interfered with by a charge――not true, in fact――that he had signed a
petition to open the Crystal Palace and British Museum on Sunday. As
he explained, the only reason he had not signed such a petition was
that he had never been asked.
I have often heard my father speaking in Court, but it was at a time
when I could understand very little of the merits of the dispute or
the quality of the advocacy. He was one of the leaders of the Home
Circuit, a veritable nest of giants, with Bovill, Ballantine, Hawkins,
Lush and Shee. In those days the Home Circuit was a reality. It was
before the abolition of local venue, and every case had to be set down
in the assize town of the county in which it arose. Thus at Guildford,
Kingston or Croydon, all Surrey cases had to be tried, and the lists
took a fortnight or more to finish. My father sometimes took a
furnished house at Guildford in the summer, and we all moved down
there, and on occasion I was taken into Court to hear him speak. In
later years I heard him in several cases, but in no speech of
first-rate importance, and I never heard him defend a prisoner, at
which, I have been told by good judges, he had few equals. I should
say his great asset as an advocate was his honesty and openness. There
is no such thing as first-rate advocacy without a large measure of
frankness. He was very smooth and good-natured in cross-examination,
recognising that to make your way through the defences of the enemy
requires, if the enemy is alert, more strategy than force. He never
indulged in those snappy interjections and quarrelsome interferences
which are but too common, and which, to my mind, are the very badge
and stamp of incompetent advocacy. I fancy to-day his speeches to the
jury would be too ornate, too eloquent and too full of oratory, but in
his own day, and among the juries he had to address, it was more true
of him than of any other that “persuasion hung upon his lips.” Nor can
I be very clear that his style was really too flamboyant, for I was
brought up myself in the school of Russell and Holker on the Northern
Circuit, where there was a passion for business methods, and curt
address and the use of the bludgeon, rather than the rapier, in
cross-examination, which has not even to this day penetrated to the
more leisurely south. For I find that even in southern county courts
advocates are known not only to demand the presence of juries, but to
address them with great complacency on any subject at any distance
from that subject. County court juries are nearly unknown in the
North, where a trial is regarded more as a matter of business than an
affair of display.
When my late brother Judge Willis, K.C., was a junior he was a
constant visitor at my father’s house at Holland Park, and I well
remember him telling a capital story of Holker’s wit as an advocate.
Holker was cross-examining a big, vulgar Jew jeweller in a
money-lending case, and began by looking him up and down in a sleepy,
dismal way, and drawled out, “Well, Mr. Moselwein, and what are you?”
“A genschelman,” replied the jeweller with emphasis.
“Just so, just so,” ejaculated Holker with a dreary yawn, “but what
were you, Mr. Moselwein, before you were a gentleman?”
The answer was drowned in a roar of laughter.
“Capital story, Willis, and very clever,” said my father as he
finished laughing, “always supposing Holker didn’t want to get any
admissions out of the fellow afterwards.”
It is a pleasant and fairly easy thing for an advocate to score off a
witness, but it does not always mean business, and nothing is nearer
to the gospel of the matter than this, that every unnecessary question
in cross-examination is a blunder and every question the answer to
which you have not foreseen is unnecessary.
Affairs of conscience at the Bar and the duty of the advocate were
often discussed between my father and his legal friends, and in the
late seventies, when I was at King’s College School, I heard many
interesting conversations on these themes.
As an illustration of his argument someone told a story of an old
special pleader whose name I forget. Special pleaders, I may remind
the reader, did not address the Court, but drafted the “pleadings,” as
they are called――that is to say, the documents in which the parties
state their respective cases and endeavour to settle the issue. In the
old days these pleas were very technical, and special pleaders who
signed and settled the claim, defence, rejoinder, sur-rejoinder,
rebutter and sur-rebutter made good incomes out of constant but small
fees.
The Pleader was in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk, when late one
night a young Hebrew clerk of a firm of City solicitors rushed in, and
throwing down half a guinea and some papers said, “I vant a plea.”
“But what sort of a plea――what is the defence?” asked the Pleader.
“There is no defence,” said the candid clerk, “but the governor says
he vould like a set-off. He vants to gain time.”
“Hm!” said the Pleader, “a merely dilatory plea to gain time. I don’t
approve of such a thing; but still――――”
He drew out his “Bullen and Leake” and copied out the first plea he
came to, which was to the effect that by agreement made by and between
the plaintiff and defendant, the defendant bargained and sold to the
plaintiff certain Russian hemp, to arrive by and be delivered by the
ship _Sarcophagus_, at the price of £15 per ton, and after further
formalities the defendant sought to set-off the price of this Russian
hemp against the plaintiff’s claim. This he handed to the boy, who
took it away.
A year afterwards the same lad returned with another set of
defenceless papers and another half-guinea, and asked for a similar
plea to be drawn. The Pleader looked at him doubtfully.
“What became of that last case?” he asked.
“Ve proved your plea! Ve proved it!” cried the young clerk in triumph.
“It vos magnificent! Ve vant another. Ve cannot prove the same plea
twice.”
The moral verdict seemed to go against the special pleader, who had
not, it appeared, been properly instructed in the Russian hemp affair,
and it led my father to a curious story of a case in which he had
recently appeared in an inquiry _de lunatico_. I had driven down with
him one Saturday some time before to Dr. Tuke’s private asylum, where
he went to interview his client. The gentleman had great wealth and
was very eccentric, and had recently announced in public that he was
our Saviour. He was certified as a lunatic and had demanded an
inquiry. When we arrived at the house he was playing a game of
billiards with his coat off, but he shook hands very amicably with my
father and put his coat on, and he and the solicitor went along for a
conference whilst I had a hundred up with a young doctor. I had never
seen anyone who was supposed to be insane before and could not
understand, how such a thing could possibly be suggested of the
gentleman I had just met. My father told me on our way home that he
had asked him all manner of questions, which he answered in the most
businesslike manner, and then he said, “I found I must ask him a
question, about his mania. ‘Have you or have you not,’ I asked,
‘maintained that you are our Saviour?’”
“I have,” he said, “and I can give you proofs,” and he proceeded to
ramble incoherently and foolishly. “When he had finished,” continued
my father, “all I said was ‘Well, Mr. X., no doubt you believe in it,
and if you are asked about it you must speak the truth, but in my
humble opinion it is not a strong point in our case.’
“‘You think not?’ asked Mr. X. eagerly.
“‘I am sure of it,’ said my father. ‘Absolutely convinced of it.’ Mr.
X. nodded his head thoughtfully, and so the conference ended.”
When the case came on, Ballantine for the relatives cross-examined Mr.
X., who gave him very admirable, straightforward answers, until the
jury shifted about uneasily and wondered why the man’s liberty had
been interfered with. At last Ballantine came to the conclusion he
must get to grips with him, and suddenly asked him very sternly: “I
put it to you, that on several occasions you have proclaimed yourself
to be our Saviour? Is that so? Yes or no.”
Mr. X. smiled.
“I have consulted my legal advisers on that point,” he replied in a
firm, quiet voice, “and they are all clearly of opinion that it is not
a strong point in my case, and under those circumstances I must
decline to answer any questions about the matter.”
Ballantine could not get him to move from his resolution, and he was
restored to his liberty and his estates.
My father and Ballantine were great rivals at Westminster and on
Circuit, and I remember my father coming home with a capital story
against himself which he used to tell with much glee. He and
Ballantine were engaged in a case before Baron Martin, and he heard a
Scots clerk in whispered tones pointing out to a friend from beyond
Tweed the various celebrities.
“Who is yon?” whispered the visitor, pointing to the judge.
“Martin! Baron Martin,” replied the cicerone. “He’s a grand mon, a
great mon!”
“And the mon that’s speakin’ the noo!”
“That’s Ballantine. He’s a great advocate. He’s a grand mon!”
“And the big mon sitting next him?”
My father pricked up his ears intently. The guide’s voice fell a
semitone to a minor key. “That! Oh, that’s Porry! Serjeant Porry. He’s
a highly over-r-rated mon.”
I wish my father could have lived long enough for me to have heard him
at his best at one of those Garrick dinners, where he loved to get two
or three gathered together in the right place and enjoy pleasant
discourse over the walnuts and wine. Good port and good stories were
his hobbies. There may be better ones, but I doubt it. And anyhow “so
long as a man rides his hobby-horse peacefully and quietly along the
King’s highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind
him――pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” But if I had
had the sense or foresight to play the Boswell, what a collection of
good stories even I might have chronicled. Years after he was gone I
was brought up to a London county court to fight an employers’
liability case, and the counsel against me was Mr. Wildy Wright.
Good-natured, obtrusive and antique were his methods of advocacy, but
I was glad to have met him in the flesh, for he recalled to my mind my
father returning from Croydon Assizes bubbling over with delight about
a story of a “certain judge” recently appointed and Mr. Wildy Wright.
The judge had been puzzled by a fierce objection to evidence made by
Mr. Wildy Wright, and reserved his ruling on this point until he had
consulted his brother judge at the adjournment.
During the luncheon interval he put the point to his brother, who was
deeply puzzled.
“And who raised the point?” he asked after a few moments of
complicated thought.
“Wildy Wright.”
“Oh!” replied his brother with a sigh of relief, “Wildy Wright!
Overrule it. And if he makes any other objections, overrule them too.”
The learned judge, much relieved, went back to Court, and in
courteous, silvern tones said, “Mr. Wright, I have carefully
considered the objection you raised before the adjournment and
consulted my learned brother, and we are both agreed that I ought to
overrule it. And I may say for your assistance that if in the course
of the case you make any other objections, I shall feel it my duty to
overrule those also.”
Now I begin to remember those old days and that very happy home, I
feel I should like to try and paint many pictures of its happiness,
but it would be far from my purpose. All I wish to set down is that
from the very first, like Mr. Vincent Crummles’s pony, who, you will
remember, went on circuit all his life, I was brought up among briefs
and the talk of law shop and the traditions of the profession. It was
always one of my ambitions to go to the Bar, but I had very little
hope then that it would be realised. My elder brother, John Humffreys
Parry, who chose afterwards to go on the stage and, after playing in
America with Richard Mansfield, died at the beginning of a brilliant
career, was far better equipped than I was to wear my father’s robes
when he should lay them down. Moreover, in early life, to use a
north-country phrase, I “enjoyed” bad health. I had nearly every fever
known to physicians and fell into the surgeon’s hands twice, breaking
a collar-bone and nearly losing my left hand with an accident arising
out of and in the course of my employment by running a chisel through
it whilst building a toy theatre. In these and other ways my
school-days were often interfered with, and I have been “backward” as
the phrase is ever since.
And how things might have shaped themselves had my father lived, I
cannot say. But that was not to be. For in January, 1880, with little
warning, a tragedy swept away the home that in my young seeming was
the one beautifully permanent, solid fact in the whole world. My
father and mother died within a day of one another and were buried on
the same morning. And there was no home, only a memory.