THE JOKER
THERE are jokers and jokers. Professors of the art of practical joking
are disappearing before an advancing civilization like the Red Indian of
the Far West. The evanishment of the verbal joker is due to a deplorable
shrinkage in the national sense of humour. There will soon be left to us
the joker which is the fifty-third card in the pack, and is incapable of
any sense or emotion whatever.
But in the days of my vanity grown men carried with them into a
tun-bellied middle-age the fine flow of animal spirits and inordinate
capacity for fun which nowadays would be deprecated by the well-regulated
schoolboy. In Fleet Street one would have thought that there would have
been no time for any joking beyond an occasional interchange of verbal
pleasantries. But even in that busy thoroughfare the practical joker
found—or made—occasions for the exercise of his fearsome talents.
It is something of a truism to say that the real man is very seldom the
man as he is observed in his public appearances. Who, for instance, who
only knew Edmund O’Donovan as the learned writer of travel articles in
the _Quarterly Review_, the accomplished special correspondent of a
one-time influential daily, the honoured guest of savants, the respected
lecturer before Royal Societies—who, I say, who saw O’Donovan with his
Society war-paint on could have imagined the wild, undisciplined,
half-mad, but wholly delightful creature that was exhibited at intervals
to Society in conventional garb. He was the maddest and the most modest
Irishman I ever met. When he returned from his extraordinary adventures
in Merv, he did not put up at some swagger hotel in London, where he
would be easily accessible to Society intent on making him the lion of a
season. He lodged at a public-house in Holborn kept by a
fellow-countryman of his, named Peter Cowell. This house was at the time
known to the police in connection with the visits of Irish patriots of
the physical force party in national politics. It was the resort of the
scattered remnants of a disintegrated Fenianism.
Cowell revered his strange guest, and when customers heard the sounds of
revolver practice in the upper part of the house, you may be sure that he
did not give his patrons the true explanation of the noise. The fact was
that O’Donovan, in bed at midday, had grown greatly annoyed at the crude
art evinced in the engravings that Cowell had hung upon his walls, and
that he was engaged in shooting those masterpieces into smithereens.
This revolver practice in his bedroom only ceased when there was nothing
breakable left to fire at. “Glory be to God!” said Peter Cowell, in
relating the circumstance to a correspondent, “there’s not a pictur’ nor
a frame nor a utinshill of anny kyoind that Misther O’Donovan hasn’t bruk
_an’ ped for_!”
Two foreign gentlemen who refused to give their names, but who had some
important intelligence to convey, called at my office. I signalled down
that I would see them. I expected men in European garb. But the two
weird creatures who shuffled into my sanctum were clothed in undressed
animal skins reaching almost to their feet. They were shod in the same
material. And their head-dress was also a fur so fashioned that only the
eyes and nose of the individuals were visible. The curious part of the
equipment was that the visitors carried pistols in their skin belts. I
think that it was this little circumstance that “gave the show away.” I
looked very hard at the taller of the two men, and then, feeling sure in
my surmise, I said cheerily:
“My dear O’Donovan, how are you? I’m delighted to see you.”
“Faith, I knew you’d know me!” he declared, in a tone that entirely
disguised his disappointment. “Come out and have a drink.”
Now, this hospitable invitation placed me in something of a dilemma. For
in the first place I did not wish to offend O’Donovan by refusing, and in
the second I had no desire to walk up Fleet Street in the company of
companions so strangely clad. I suggested that, if O’Donovan and his
friend would go on to the “Cheese,” I would follow when I had finished
writing the letter on which I was then busy.
“That’s a beastly picture of Dizzy,” said O’Donovan quietly. He had
taken his revolver from his belt, and was pointing with it to “Ape’s”
cartoon of Beaconsfield which hung opposite my desk.
I understood the hint. I rose and accompanied my remorseless friend. My
worst anticipations were realized when I reached the office door. Quite
a large crowd of Fleet Street loafers—and I think that in the Street of
Adventure we could have boasted of as many loafers to the square yard as
any thoroughfare in London—pressed round the door. The Fleet Street
loafer is often exhilarated by the sight of strange visitors; but he had
never yet seen visitors quite so strange as these. The crowd did not
make any demonstration. But Cockney criticisms of the general appearance
of my companions were freely bandied about. We had to cross the street
and encounter the jibes of cab-drivers and omnibus cads. The crowd
followed us right up to the doors of the tavern to which I had been
invited. Here was another assembly. For O’Donovan had already visited
the Cheshire Cheese, and had announced his intention of returning to
lunch. I believe that old Moore had during that afternoon the most
anxious time of his life. The fun waxed fast and furious. But there is
safety in a multitude of any kind, and the intrepid traveller had so many
friends and admirers in this gathering that I was soon able to slip away
unnoticed.
The man who accompanied O’Donovan on this occasion was Frank Power—one of
the most accomplished humbugs that ever made a way in life by means of a
glib tongue, a vivid imagination, and an entire absence of scruple of any
kind. O’Donovan subsequently engaged him as secretary, and he was to
have accompanied his employer during the march with Hicks Pasha. It was
characteristic of Power that when the march was made Power remained
behind in Khartoum. He was once mentioned in the House of Commons. A
question was asked by an Irish Member as to the qualifications of Mr.
Frank Power, who had contrived to get himself made British Consul at
Khartoum. Mr. Gladstone, whose imagination was at times as vivid as that
of Power himself, replied promptly that the gentleman in question was an
“esteemed merchant” of that city.
In letters home, O’Donovan freely expressed his belief that the chances
of his ever returning to England alive were extremely small. It is
inconceivable that he should not have communicated this opinion to Power.
That young gentleman, holding that discretion is the better part of
valour, had an attack of dysentery at the very moment when his services
should have—under ordinary circumstances—become of any value to his
chief. He did not accompany the intrepid column that marched across the
sands to inevitable and complete annihilation. As to O’Donovan, I know
that he died as he would have wished to die. No survivor of that
ill-fated expedition was allowed to escape with the story of the fight.
But I can picture O’Donovan in the midst of the mêlée, his eyes bright
with the fury of battle, his wild Irish “Whirroo!” appalling even his
frantic assailants, his desperate play with revolver, his final collapse
on the hot bosom of Mother Earth, his warm Irish blood reddening the
sands of the African desert.
John Augustus O’Shea, of the _Standard_, was another war-correspondent
who was very much given to practical joking, and disguise generally
played a prominent part in his plans. On one occasion he was
commissioned by his editor to describe a certain Lord Mayor’s Show.
Elephants were to play a part in this particular pageant; and it occurred
to the accomplished correspondent that from the back of an elephant he
might obtain an unrivalled view of the rivals of the route. George
Sanger was providing the elephants, and O’Shea experienced no difficulty
in obtaining permission to ride in a howdah and illustrate the fidelity
of Indian Princes to the Empire. Sanger was also able to provide the
Oriental costume essential to the part, together with the stage diamonds
without which no self-respecting Prince ever goes out elephant-riding.
His face was made up to the proper tint; his turban was a triumph of
millinery; and as O’Shea passed through Fleet Street in the character of
an Eastern potentate, and in the train of a London Lord Mayor, not a soul
recognized him.
Indeed, the completeness of the disguise led to some inconvenience. For
when the show was at an end, and O’Shea went on his elephant to Sanger’s
stables in the Westminster Bridge Road, he found himself pressed for
time, and unable, therefore, to abandon his disguise. He got into a
hansom just as he was, and drove off to Shoe Lane to write his
descriptive article for the _Evening Standard_. He was about to pass the
commissionaire who stood sentry at the office door. But that old soldier
did not recognize a member of the staff in the garb of a pious Hindu, and
O’Shea, unable to curb his love of practical joking, soundly rated the
old soldier in an improvised gibberish which the warrior, no doubt,
thought he recognized as something he had been acquainted with in the
East. O’Shea endeavoured to push past. The man “on the door” barred his
progress. The war of strange words between them grew loud and furious.
The commissionaire called to a member of the crowd that was gathering
round the door to go for the police, and upstairs the sub-editor was
anxiously waiting for O’Shea’s copy.
Before the police could arrive Gilbert Venables came on the scene,
recognized the correspondent under the disguise of the dusky Indian, and
explained matters to the faithful doorkeeper. The anxiety of the
sub-editor was soon appeased, and O’Shea sat down to reel off a column of
humorous descriptive copy such as he alone on that staff could produce.
“The Giniral”—as O’Shea was called in Fleet Street—was one of those
strange men who think that it is never time to go to bed. Even when he
got home in the small-hours he never felt inclined to “turn in.” And as
he never could do without company of some sort, he bought an owl. This
bird he installed in his “study,” and when he went home in the morning he
related some of the more piquant experiences of the day to the
wise-looking fowl. When the owl exhibited any signs of inattention or
betrayed symptoms of sleepiness, O’Shea would recall him to a sense of
his responsibilities by throwing a slipper or any other handy missile at
his feathered companion. As some of these missiles hit their mark, the
life of the sagacious bird was neither peaceful nor protracted.
On one occasion the festive little correspondent was sent into the
country to describe a two-day function, the exact nature of which I
forget. On the morning of the second day another representative of the
London Press gave a breakfast at his hotel to some of his colleagues.
Those invited were of the swagger order of pressmen—Bernard Becker, Harry
Pearse, Godfrey Turner, Edmund Yates, and some others. O’Shea heard of
this social function, and, I dare say, rather resented the fact that he
had not been invited. He got there, however, for in the middle of the
meal O’Shea’s card was brought in to the founder of the feast. The host
did the only thing he could do under the circumstance: he desired the
visitor to be shown in. After a few minutes something was heard rumbling
along the hotel passage. The door of the sitting-room in which O’Shea’s
distinguished contemporaries were breakfasting was thrown open, a
Bath-chair was trundled into the apartment by a couple of men, and in the
Bath-chair sat O’Shea, a red Gibus on his head, a churchwarden pipe in
his mouth, and on his wrists a pair of handcuffs. These he held up to us
appealingly. But it suited him to pretend to be a deaf-mute, and his
companions explained that the gentleman was a little mad, that they were
his keepers, and that, as it was dangerous to thwart him, they were bound
to accede to his request to be shown in to the present distinguished
party.
O’Shea kept the game up for a long time. He resisted all efforts to
induce him to appear _in propria persona_ and sit down at table. He
shook his head, he made queer guttural noises, and when he felt that he
had entirely upset everybody he made signs to his companions to wheel him
away. He was taken from the hotel to the public promenade, and was
driven up and down that select area, still in red Gibus, handcuffs, and
long clay pipe, followed everywhere by an interested crowd. Eventually
the police interfered, and in the afternoon “the Giniral” appeared before
the scandalized breakfast-party of the morning clothed and in his right
mind.
A powerful practical joke of a double-barrelled kind was played by a
Fleet Street artist, and got into the papers of the time. There were two
black-and-white artists in the Street of Adventure. One was H. Furniss
with an “i”; the other was H. Furness with an “e.” The one was an
Irishman; the other was a Yorkshireman. The latter was the perpetrator
of the joke. Joseph Biggar, the well-known Parliamentary obstructionist,
was so unfortunate as to have been made the defendant in an action for
breach of promise of marriage. What was still more unfortunate was that
he lost his case, and was cast in heavy damages. Furness (with an “e”)
herein saw an opening. He drew a cheque for the amount of the damages
incurred, and forwarded it to Jo Biggar in a letter glowing with
expressions of sympathy and admiration. Biggar attributed this act of
princely generosity to Furniss (with an “i”), and sent to that gentleman
an acknowledgment of his great indebtedness. Meanwhile the joker had
stopped his cheque at the bank, and Jo Biggar had given the
correspondence—the donor’s letter and his own reply—to the Press. Biggar
was covered with shame, Furniss (with an “i”) was aroused to indignation,
and Furness (with an “e”) had proved himself—as is the nature of
furnaces, however spelt—to be very hot stuff.
But it was among my theatrical friends that I found the most patient,
enterprising, and scientific prosecutors of humour in action. J. L.
Toole was very fond of the practical joke. But he did not carry his
schemes out on the generous scale that seemed the proper proportions to
certain of his colleagues. His jokes were small personal affairs, never
calculated to give pain or annoyance, and invariably described in some
paper or another. “How _do_ these things get into the papers?” Sothern
was a past-master in the fine art of practical joking. Some of his most
notorious successes in that line have been narrated in works of biography
or autobiography by other men. But I was a witness of two of his efforts
in this way which I have never seen described in print. They indicate
the time, thought, and pains, which Sothern was always prepared to spend
over the elaboration of a practical joke in order that it might
eventually be presented complete and perfect. He possessed a true
actor’s faith in efficient rehearsal.
The breakfasts of Sam Rogers, the banker-poet, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, may have been very interesting reunions; but they
could not have been half as amusing as the breakfasts of Sothern given
during the closing years of that century. No one was invited to these
gatherings who was not either odd or interesting or witty. The
conversation was kept up to the mark by a host who could play on the
faculties of his guests as a musician on the strings of an instrument.
One Sunday forenoon at Sothern’s London _pied-à-terre_ in Vere Street,
John Maclean, of the Gaiety Theatre, was present. Maclean was what was
called in those days a “useful actor.” He was a wonderfully fine mimic,
and was particularly good at reproducing the different shades of Irish
and Scotch dialects in all their varying enormity. He used to tell a
story about George Cordery, the property-master at the Theatre Royal,
Dublin, and Barry Sullivan, the tragedian, which introduced admirable
imitations of both those worthies. The story itself would lose most of
its point by translation into cold print. It described an altercation
between the tragedian and the property-master as to the correct cue for
the lowering of the cauldron in “Macbeth,” Cordery insisting that “filthy
’ags” was the cue, because he had been so taught by his “old mawster,
Mister Phellups—an’ ’e was a man as knew ’ow to play Macbeth.” Sullivan
insisted on the cue being, “May eternal curses light upon you!” At the
last rehearsal of the Witch scene, Barry Sullivan stalked over to the
trap through which the cauldron was to disappear, and called down to the
property-master:
“Do you know the cue _now_, Mr. Cordery?”
“S’wulp me, Goad!” came back the voice of the exasperated George, “I
shall never forgit it. It’s ‘May etarnal cusses light upon
you!’—_meanin’ nothing personal to you_, _Mr. Barry Soolivan_!”
The breakfast at an end and cigars lighted, there was always experienced
a feeling of suspense and expectancy. Sothern requested Maclean to give
his famous imitation of the tragedian and the property-master. After the
usual amount of demur, Johnny rose to do as he had been bidden. Sothern
placed his victim on the hearthrug, where, with his back to the fire, he
could command the entire company, and where he was at the farthest point
from the entrance to the room. The gifted imitator launched into his
narrative, and soon had the assembly in a roar. But just when he had
come to the height of the colloquy between the tragedian and his
subordinate, the door of the room was suddenly opened, and Sothern’s man
announced:
“Mr. Barry Sullivan!”
The tragedian entered, bowing right and left, and shaking hands with his
host.
“Go on with your recitation, Johnny!” cried Sothern.
But Maclean had collapsed and taken refuge behind the chair of a friend.
Nor was he greatly reconciled to the situation when it was discovered
that the new-comer was not Sullivan at all, but a brother comedian made
up for the part.
Another of Sothern’s practical jokes was carried out with the assistance
of Sir Charles Wyndham—in those days innocent of any pretensions to the
accolade. This particular experiment was six months in the working, and
by the elaborate means adopted its victim was kept on the tenterhooks of
suspense during all that time. The late Mr. Edgar Bruce, then lately
joined to the ranks of “the profession,” was the unfortunate dupe. Bruce
was an ambitious young gentleman, and the joke was so contrived as to
play on this characteristic. It commenced in this way: Sothern had it
put about that he had been approached by the Russian Minister on the
possibility of getting together a company of English comedians to play in
St. Petersburg. He personally could not accept the flattering command.
He pretended to offer it to Wyndham, and Wyndham handed the proposal on
to Bruce. Bruce jumped at it, and then, and for a period of six months,
the fun waxed fast and furious. Bruce was invited to meet the Minister.
An old nobleman smothered in orders, but having no language but French
and his native tongue, was introduced to Bruce at a luncheon given for
the purpose. At that time Bruce had no French, and the conversation was
carried on with Wyndham as interpreter. Preliminaries were settled. An
agreement was signed. There remained nothing now but to engage a
company. Here again his good friends Wyndham and Sothern came to the
rescue. They made a careful selection of actors and actresses who were
let into the secret.
Eventually the affair got paragraphed in the newspapers. The public was
as greatly duped as Bruce himself, and those interested in theatrical
matters gossiped knowingly about the visit of the English comedians to
Russia. Constant devices were adopted to raise, and sometimes to dash,
the hopes of the victim. Once Sothern borrowed a thousand pounds’ worth
of diamonds from his jeweller, and lent them to Miss Edith Chalice—one of
the supposed Bruce Company—who exhibited them to the deluded victim as a
gift from the Minister, asking him to name any little souvenir he would
desire for himself from the same potentates. Bruce made his desires
known; but that was as far as the matter ever went in that particular
direction.
I was at a Bohemian party given by Val Bromley one night at his studios
in Bloomsbury Square, when there was an amusing exhibition of the system
adopted by Sothern and Wyndham to arouse the anxiety of poor Bruce. All
three of them happened to be at this jolly function. At about one
o’clock in the morning a sudden altercation broke out between Sothern and
Wyndham; they stood in the middle of the studio in attitudes of menace,
their voices were raised. “Never dare to speak to me again!” shouted one
of the angry men. “You are a contemptible scoundrel, sir!” roared the
other. The war of words grew hot, the gestures more threatening, and
Bruce ran from friend to friend in the room, crying: “For Heaven’s sake
pacify them! My whole future is ruined if those two men quarrel!” He
spoke with the greatest emotion, and his face was deadly pale. At length
one of the disputants cried out: “A friend of mine will wait upon you in
the morning, sir!” and strode out of the room, speedily followed by his
brother-conspirator. Soon after this the whole thing was “given away” by
one or other, or by both, of the authors of the joke. But the curious
part of the thing is that Edgar Bruce had for six months so convinced
himself that he was a manager that he could not rid himself of the
character. He had achieved the reputation. He had, moreover, made
openings for himself among performers, costumiers, authors, and
musicians. In six months he had gained experience of the managerial
methods, and, being a manager in imagination, he crystallized into a
manager in reality. His first managerial experiment was, I think, at the
Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho. Here he engaged as his
representative in front of the house a comparatively unknown young man
called Augustus Harris, little imagining that he was employing an
Augustus Druriolanus in the making. He subsequently built the Lyric
Theatre, and he died a comparatively rich man. The theatrical career of
Edgar Bruce is the only practically good thing that I have known to
result from the playing of a practical joke.
These carefully-devised experiments on a large scale, becoming known,
naturally fired the ambition of imitators and a number of gabies, whose
only indication of humour consisted in the fatuous smirk with which they
greeted one in season and out of season, set up as professors of the
game. Certain of these misguided young men formed themselves into a
nomadic club called “The Who-bodies.” But a better name for them was
invented by Wallis Mackay, who lashed them unmercifully in his “Captious
Critic” under the name of “Theodore Hooklings.”
The humour which is not of a practical kind appears to have died away out
of our literature, our legislature and our judicature alike. Nay, it is
fading out of our street life with the disappearance of the omnibus cad
and the driver of the hansom. Even the gamin is losing his
characteristic gaiety in the solving of puzzles in his favourite
publications or in calculating the odds in turf handicaps. The last of
the Parliamentary wits was Bernal Osborne. He scintillated before I
entered on a journalistic career, but I well remember the stimulation
which the newspaper reports of his utterances afforded me in my younger
days. In contesting Waterford at a General Election, he was opposed by
Sir Patrick O’Brien, a very old man whose enunciation was not of the
clearest. Following the revered Baronet on the hustings, Osborne,
exactly mimicking the tones of his rival, commenced: “Pity the sorrows of
a poor old man whose trembling limbs have borne him to these hustings!”
Then, addressing himself to one of the nasty points of the other
candidate’s attack, he said: “But when the honourable Baronet describes
me as the rejected of seven constituencies, I hurl the accusation back in
his teeth—_if he has any_!” In the House he was equally ready. Liskeard
was among the constituencies that had rejected him. A question arising
regarding that now happily disfranchised borough, it was referred to
Bernal Osborne. He immediately rose and said: “I regret, sir, that I am
unable to recall any particulars respecting _that highly respectable
street_!” Viscount Amberley was a small, baby-faced man. When he sat in
Parliament, and when Bernal Osborne was at the Admiralty, Amberley asked
some inconvenient question regarding that Department. Osborne smilingly
informed the House: “That is a matter which was settled when the
honourable Viscount was in his—er—perambulator!”
Bernal Osborne’s patronymic was Bernal. He was a Jew and the son of Mr.
Ralph Bernal, who was for many years Chairman of Committees in the House
of Commons. He added the name Osborne to his own on marrying Lady
Osborne, with whom he did not always agree. When he married he was a
dashing young officer and Aide-de-Camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
I suppose he was not quite so successful in the dull domestic round, for
he and his wife led a cat-and-dog life. They soon separated, and during
the period of this first grass-widowhood the lady wrote a novel in which
her husband was depicted, under a thin disguise and in very lurid
colours. Society was greatly diverted. Bernal begged his wife’s
forgiveness. A reconciliation was effected, the novel was withdrawn from
circulation, and Bernal settled down once more as the model married man.
The vivacity of his disposition, however, and his great extravagance,
occasioned fresh quarrels. There was another separation, succeeded
shortly after by a reissue of the wife’s literary caricature of her
refractory husband.
Bernal Osborne was what, in more heroic times than these, was known as a
“diner-out”—that is to say, a man who was asked to dinner entirely on
account of the sparkle of his conversation. Nowadays the sparkle is the
monopoly of the champagne. The very last of the “diners-out” was Father
Healy of Bray, in County Wicklow. For some years before his death, that
wittiest of Irishmen was invited to London during the season, and was to
be met night after night at the tables of the leaders of Society. He was
a wit of parts, and the curious thing about him was that he never for a
moment supposed that he owed his acceptance in Society to his wit and
humour. He always believed that the great ones of the earth inviting him
to their tables were anxious to ascertain his views on Irish politics.
Dining one night at the table of Lord Ardilaun, he met a prelate of the
Church of England. Healy by no means appreciated the tone of easy
condescension adopted by the Bishop. His lordship was patronizing, and
Healy bitterly resented anything of the kind. He bided his time. It
came, as all things do to him who knows how—and how long—to wait.
“I’ve lived sixty years in this wicked world,” at length said the Bishop,
smiling and expansive, “and I have never yet been able to see the
difference between a good Catholic and a good Protestant.”
“Faith, me lord,” answered Healy, “you won’t be sixty seconds in the next
before you’ll know all about it!”
Dowse is a name utterly forgotten by the present generation. Yet Dowse
afforded a great deal of occupation to the pressmen of his day in
reporting his sayings. He was a rough-looking Irishman, red-headed and
rotund. Originally, as a boy, he had herded goats about the mountains
near Dungannon. He contrived, however, to get an education, read for the
Irish Bar, was duly called, became Solicitor-General for Ireland, and, in
the fulness of time, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. He was famous
for his “bulls,” and when in the House of Commons succeeded in
introducing one at least before which those of Sir Boyle Roche are simply
negligible. A question was put to him, while he was Solicitor-General,
respecting certain religious riots that had broken out in Londonderry.
Dowse explained that the riots had been occasioned by the ceremony
connected with the “shutting of the gates.”
“And that,” he continued, “is an anniversary that takes place twice a
year in Derry!”
Bernal Osborne has been, I confess, rather irrelevantly introduced into
this chapter, for I never knew him. But I had the honour of knowing
Baron Dowse. And I enjoyed the still greater privilege of dining at the
table of Father Healy, to whom I was introduced by Mr. John Gunn, of the
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Healy was one of the handsomest as Dowse was one
of the ugliest of men.
The illustration of the science of humour on the judicial bench is now
the province of ermined jokers. Perhaps nothing could give a more vivid
idea of the decadence of the bench in this respect than a comparison of
the Ally Sloperian japes of certain living judges with the polished
shafts of the late Lord Justice Bowen. Lord Bowen’s was the true Attic
salt. And because he knew its quality, he never offered it to either the
groundlings or the gallery. The reappearance of his shafts—bright and
polished as they were—only caused him to shudder, even when followed in
the newspaper by the reportorial “(laughter).” To some of our Judges,
the constant appearance in the columns of their jokes, followed by
“laughter” in brackets, would appear to be a chief end of their
existence. Indeed, a Judge, quite recently dead, has occasionally
supplied me, what time I sat in an editorial chair, with little
impromptus which he has let off in the course of the day. For verily all
is vanity.
Two examples of Lord Bowen’s wit may be recorded here. Bowen was a
Liberal in politics, but, like a great many other thinking men, he
deserted his party when Mr. Gladstone introduced his Home Rule Bill.
Tackled by one who regarded him as guilty of political apostasy, and
challenged as to his then opinion of Mr. Gladstone, he replied, in those
mincing, modulated tones which he had acquired at Balliol:
“Mr. Gladstone’s is one of the greatest and most complex minds of our
time. He possesses all the apostolic fervour of St. Paul with all the
moral obliquity of Ananias.”
On the occasion of the Jubilee of Her late Majesty Queen Victoria, the
Judges met to decide on an address from their body to be presented to
their Sovereign. A draft was submitted by one of their number. It
commenced with the words:
“Madam, conscious as we are of our own infirmities.” But immediate
objection was taken by their lordships to this opening, and suggestions
were invited. The measured calculated drawl of Bowen made itself heard:
“Suppose we substitute for the paragraph this: ‘Conscious as we are of
one another’s infirmities!’”
Mr. Commissioner Kerr was a Judge whose rasping voice and strong Glasgow
accent issued from the bench of my time utterances both strange and
strong. The old gentleman was, in effect, brutally rude, and that’s a
fact. He was particularly hard on solicitors. On one occasion I heard
him open a charge in this way:
“There are a number of hairpies who infest this coort. An’ when I use
the words ‘hairpies,’ I do not wish to be meesunderstood. I refer to the
soleecitors who lie in wait about the corridors of the coort.”
I was present also when the following colloquy took place between the
bench and a perfectly respectable witness to whom Kerr had evidently
taken an instinctive dislike:
KERR: “What air you?”
WITNESS: “I’m a merchant.”
KERR: “What’s your mairchandise?”
WITNESS: “I’m an importer of lemons.”
KERR: “An importher of lemons! Why, ye ken you’re naething mair nor less
than a huckster!”
Lewis Glyn the barrister, whom Kerr hated to see come into his court,
once got very much the better of the learned Commissioner. Glyn, in
addressing the court, had indulged in a French expression.
“Talk the Queen’s English, Misther Glyn. We don’t want anny of your bad
French in this coort,” snapped out the Commissioner.
“I beg your Honour’s pardon, but I thought that by this time the court
had become so accustomed to strange dialects that one more or less would
not matter,” answered Glyn sweetly.
But though rude and brusque in the extreme, Kerr was a sound lawyer and a
strong Judge. It must be recalled to his credit, also, that he was
invariably the champion of the poor and oppressed who appeared before
him. He was down on usurers, and his constant attacks on the immunity of
those plunderers of the poor, under the law as it existed, did much to
hasten the reform in the legislature—small as it is—under which
money-lenders now ply their calling.
Undoubtedly the most colossal joker of my time was that huge mountain of
flesh who came from the antipodes to claim the title and estates of the
Tichborne family. When that obese impostor copied from Miss Braddon’s
novel the inspiring sentence, “Them as has money and no branes was made
for them as has branes and no money,” he declared the spirit in which he
played the game. He must have enjoyed the joke immensely—while it
lasted. And it lasted long enough, unfortunately, to ruin the twelve
jurymen who sat for the greater part of a year on the second trial.
Whether the Claimant was really Arthur Orton or Castro I never troubled
myself to determine. That he was not Tichborne, or, indeed, a gentleman
of any degree whatever, I satisfied myself at my first interview with
him. It was during the trial before the Lord Chief Justice, Sir
Alexander Cockburn, and I was as yet a novice in Fleet Street. Mr. G. W.
Whalley, the eccentric Member for Peterborough, was an acquaintance of
mine, and he believed that were I to meet the Claimant I would be
convinced that he was Roger Tichborne, and that I would do my little
utmost for him on the Press. Whalley was a tremendous Protestant,
anti-Ritualist, and “no Popery” man, and I believe that he espoused the
cause of the Wapping butcher from Wagga-Wagga, not because he was in any
degree attracted by him but because he believed him to be the victim of a
gigantic Jesuitical intrigue in which Parliament, the Judicial Bench, and
the British Press, were all concerned to keep the man out of his own.
Whalley took me to visit his adipose protégé in a street in Pimlico. I
think it was called Bessborough Street; I recollect that it was a
continuation of Tachbrook Street. Here “Sir Roger” had installed Miss
Norrie Jordan, a member of the chorus at the Globe Theatre, in control of
his domestic arrangements, “Lady Tichborne” being provided for elsewhere.
This was quite characteristic of the Claimant. He had not the slightest
affection for Miss Jordan, and appeared to feel uncomfortable in her
presence. But it was the fashion for gentlemen of title to run
“side-shows,” as they were called; and “Sir Roger” was determined to
stand by his order, and show himself a man sensitive to the slightest
movements of Society, however personally unpleasant to himself the
experiments involved might be.
My subsequent meetings with the fellow proved to me that the sum of his
so-called accomplishments might be set down in a line or two. He had an
unbounded capacity for swallowing gin-and-soda; he had a good eye and a
steady hand as a pigeon-shot; and he possessed an unrivalled faculty for
exploiting “mugs.” In dealing with possible subscribers to the Tichborne
“stock,” it was a favourite ruse of his to ask the intended victim to try
on the Claimant’s gloves. This trial proved that the hands of the
Claimant were small, whereas those of Orton were _said_ to have been
large. When the “unfortunate nobleman” went to Dartmoor to “languish”
for a term of years, it was a great relief to the Press and an infinite
advantage to the community at large.
He had indeed proved himself the very Prince of Jokers, but his joke had
begun to pall.