Matters left untold--The results of improved communications--My
father's journey to Naples--Modern stereotyped uniformity--Changes in
customs--The faithful family retainer Some details--Samuel Pepys'
stupendous banquets--Persistence of idea--Ceremonial
incense--Patriarchal family life--The barn dances--My father's
habits--My mother--A son's tribute--Autumn days--Conclusion.
I had hoped to tell of reef-fishing in the West Indies; of surf-riding
on planks at Muizenberg in South Africa; of the extreme inconvenience
to which the inhabitants of Southern China are subjected owing to the
inconsiderate habits of their local devils; of sapphire seas where
coco-nut palms toss their fronds in the Trade wind over gleaming-white
coral beaches; of vast frozen tracts in the Far North where all animate
life seems suspended; of Japanese villages clinging to green hill-sides
where boiling springs gush out of the cliffs in clouds of steam, and of
many other things besides, for it has been my good fortune to have seen
most of the surface of this globe. But all these must wait until the
present preposterous price of paper has descended to more normal levels.
I consider myself exceptionally fortunate in having lived at a time
when modern conveniences of transport were already in existence, but
had not yet produced their inevitable results. It is quite sufficiently
obvious that national customs and national peculiarities are being
smoothed out of existence by facilities of travel. My father and
mother, early in their married life, drove from London to Naples in
their own carriage, the journey occupying over a month. They left their
own front door in London, had their carriage placed on the deck of the
Channel steamer, sat in it during the passage (what a singularly
uncomfortable resting-place it must have been should they have
encountered bad weather!), and continued their journey on the other
side. During their leisurely progress through France and Italy, they
must have enjoyed opportunities of studying the real life of these
countries which are denied the passengers in a rapide, jammed in
amongst a cosmopolitan crew in the prosaic atmosphere of dining and
sleeping cars, and scarcely bestowing a passing glance on the country
through which they are being whirled. Even in my time I have seen
marked changes, and have witnessed the gradual disappearance of
national costumes, and of national types of architecture. Every capital
in Europe seems to adopt in its modern buildings a standardised type of
architecture. No sojourner in any of the big modern hotels, which bear
such a wearisome family likeness to each other, could tell in which
particular country he might happen to find himself, were it not for the
scraps of conversation which reach his ears, for the externals all look
alike, and even the cooking has, with a greater or less degree of
success, been standardised to the requisite note of monotony.
Travellers may be divided into two categories: those who wish to find
on foreign soil the identical conditions to which they have been
accustomed at home, and those searching for novelty of outlook and
novelty of surroundings. The former will welcome the process of planing
down national idiosyncrasies into one dead level of uniformity of type,
the latter will deplore it; but this, like many other things, is a
matter of individual taste.
The ousting of the splendid full-rigged ships by stumpy, unlovely
tramp-steamers in the Hooghly River, to which I have already referred,
is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque.
In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a
drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and
every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I
am lucky in having seen some of it.
I have also witnessed great changes in social habits. I do not refer so
much to the removal of the rigid lines of demarcation formerly
prevailing in English Society, as to the disappearance of certain
accepted standards. For instance, in my young days the possibility of
appearing in Piccadilly in anything but a high hat and a tail coat was
unthinkable, as was the idea of sitting down to dinner in anything but
a white tie. Modern usage has common sense distinctly on its side.
Again, in my youth the old drinking customs lingered, especially at the
Universities. Though personally I have never been able to extract the
faintest gratification from the undue consumption of alcohol, my
friends do not seem to have invariably shared my tastes. I am certain
of one thing: it is to the cigarette that the temperate habits of the
twentieth century are due. Nicotine knocked port and claret out in the
second round. The acclimatisation of the cigarette in England only
dates from the "seventies." As a child I remember that the only form of
tobacco indulged in by the people that I knew was the cigar. A
cigarette was considered an effeminate foreign importation; a pipe was
unspeakably vulgar.
In my mother's young days before her marriage, the old hard-drinking
habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still persisted. At
Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old family butler to
make his nightly report to my grandmother in the drawing-room. "The
gentlemen have had a good deal to-night; it might be as well for the
young ladies to retire," or "The gentlemen have had very little
to-night," was announced according to circumstances by this faithful
family retainer. Should the young girls be packed off upstairs, they
liked standing on an upper gallery of the staircase to watch the
shouting, riotous crowd issuing from the dining-room. My father very
rarely touched wine, and I believe that it was the fact that he, then
an Oxford undergraduate, was the only sober young man amongst the rowdy
troop of roysterers that first drew my mother to him, though he had
already proposed marriage to her at a children's party given by the
Prince Regent at Carlton House, when they were respectively seven and
six years old. My father had succeeded to the title at the age of six,
and they were married as soon as he came of age. They lived to
celebrate their golden wedding, which two of my sisters, the late
Duchess of Buccleuch and Lady Lansdowne, were also fortunate enough to
do, and I can say with perfect truth that in all three instances my
mother and her daughters celebrated fifty years of perfect happiness,
unclouded save for the gaps which death had made amongst their children.
Students of Pepys' Diary must have gasped with amazement at learning of
the prodigious quantities of food considered necessary in the
seventeenth century for a dinner of a dozen people. Samuel Pepys gives
us several accounts of his entertainments, varying, with a nice sense
of discrimination, the epithet with which he labels his dinners. Here
is one which he gave to ten people, in 1660, which he proudly terms "a
very fine dinner." "A dish of marrow-bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of
veal; a dish of fowl; three pullets, and two dozen of larks, all in a
dish; a great tart; a neat's tongue; a dish of anchovies; a dish of
prawns, and cheese." On another occasion, in 1662, Pepys having four
guests only, merely gave them what he modestly describes as "a pretty
dinner." "A brace of stewed carps; six roasted chickens; a jowl of
salmon; a tanzy; two neats' tongues, and cheese." For six distinguished
guests in 1663 he provided "a noble dinner." (I like this careful
grading of epithets.) "Oysters; a hash of rabbits; a lamb, and a rare
chine of beef, Next a great dish of roasted fowl cost me about thirty
shillings; a tart, fruit and cheese." Pepys anxiously hopes that this
was enough! One is pleased to learn that on all three occasions his
guests enjoyed themselves, and that they were "very merry," but however
did they manage to hold one quarter of this prodigious amount of food?
The curious idea that hospitality entailed the proffering of four times
the amount of food that an average person could assimilate, persisted
throughout the eighteenth century and well into the "seventies" of the
nineteenth century. I remember as a child, on the rare occasion when I
was allowed to "sit up" for dinner, how interminable that repast
seemed. That may have been due to the fact that my brother and I were
forbidden to eat anything except a biscuit or two. The idea that human
beings required perpetual nourishment was so deep-grounded that, to the
end of my father's life, the "wine and water tray" was brought in
nightly before the ladies went to bed. This tray contained port, sherry
and claret, a silver kettle of hot water, sugar, lemons and nutmeg, as
well as two large plates of sandwiches. All the ladies devoured wholly
superfluous sandwiches, and took a glass of wine and hot water before
retiring. I think people would be surprised to find how excellent a
beverage the obsolete "negus" is. Let them try a glass of either port,
sherry, or claret, with hot water, sugar, a squeeze of lemon, and a
dusting of nutmeg, and I think that they will agree with me.
A custom, I believe, peculiar to our family, was the burning of church
incense in the rooms after dinner. At the conclusion of dinner, the
groom-of-the-chambers walked round the dining-room, solemnly swinging a
large silver censer. This dignified thurifer then made the circuit of
the other rooms, plying his censer. From the conscientious manner in
which he fulfilled his task, I fear that an Ecclesiastical Court might
have found that this came under the heading of "incense used
ceremonially."
My father had one peculiarity; he never altered his manner of living,
whether the house was full of visitors, or he were alone with my
mother, after his children had married and left him. At Baron's Court,
when quite by themselves, they used the large rooms, and had them all
lighted up at night, exactly as though the house was full of guests.
There was to my mind something very touching in seeing an aged couple,
after more than fifty years of married life together, still preserving
the affectionate relations of lovers with each other. They played their
chess together nightly in a room ninety-eight feet long, and delighted
in still singing together, in the quavering tones of old age, the
simple little Italian duets that they had sung in the far-off days of
their courtship. As his years increased, my father did not care to
venture much beyond the circle of his own family, though as thirteen of
his children had grown up, and he had seven married daughters, the two
elder of whom had each thirteen children of her own, the number of his
immediate descendants afforded him a fairly wide field of selection. In
his old age he liked to have his five sons round him all the winter,
together with their wives and children. Accordingly, every October my
three married brothers arrived at Baron's Court with their entire
families, and remained there till January, so that the house
persistently rang with children's laughter. What with governesses,
children, nurses and servants, this meant thirty-three extra people all
through the winter, so it was fortunate that Baron's Court was a large
house, and that there was plenty of room left for other visitors. It
entailed no great hardship on the sons, for the autumn salmon-fishing
in the turbulent Mourne is excellent, there was abundance of shooting,
and M. Gouffe, the cook, was a noted artist.
Both my father and mother detested publicity, or anything in the nature
of self-advertisement, which only shows how hopelessly out of touch
they would have been with modern conditions.
My father was also old-fashioned enough to read family prayers every
morning and every Sunday evening; he was very particular, too, about
Sunday observance, now almost fallen into desuetude, so neither the
thud of lawn-tennis racquets nor the click of billiard-balls were ever
heard on that day, and no one would have dreamed of playing cards on
Sunday.
It would be difficult to convey any idea of the pleasant family life in
that isolated spot tucked away amongst the Tyrone mountains; of the
long tramps over the bogs after duck and snipe; of the struggles with
big salmon; of the sailing-matches on the lakes; of the grouse and the
woodcocks; of the theatrical performances, the fun and jollity, and all
the varied incidents which make country life so fascinating to those
brought up to it.
It was the custom at Baron's Court to have two annual dances in the
barn to celebrate "Harvest Home" and Christmas, and to these dances my
father, and my brother after him, invited every single person in their
employ, and all the neighbouring farmers and their wives. Any one
hoping to shine at a barn-dance required exceptionally sound muscles,
for the dancing was quite a serious business. The so-called barn was
really a long granary, elaborately decorated with wreaths of
evergreens, flags, and mottoes. The proceedings invariably commenced
with a dance (peculiar, I think, to the north of Ireland) known as
"Haste to the Wedding." It is a country dance, but its peculiarity lies
in the fact that instead of the couples standing motionless opposite to
one another, they are expected to "set to each other," and to keep on
doing steps without intermission; all this being, I imagine, typical of
the intense eagerness every one was supposed to express to reach the
scene of the wedding festivities as quickly as possible. Twenty minutes
of "Haste to the Wedding" are warranted to exhaust the stoutest
leg-muscles. My mother always led off with the farm-bailiff as partner,
my father at the other end dancing with the bailiff's wife. Both my
father, and my brother after him, were very careful always to wear
their Garter as well as their other Orders on these occasions, in order
to show respect to their guests. Scotch reels and Irish jigs alternated
with "The Triumph," "Flowers of Edinburgh," and other country dances,
until feet and legs refused their office; and still the fiddles
scraped, and feet, light or heavy, belaboured the floor till 6 a.m. The
supper would hardly have come up to London standards, for instead of
light airy nothings, huge joints of roast and boiled were aligned down
the tables. Some of the stricter Presbyterians, though fond of a dance,
experienced conscientious qualms about it. So they struck an ingenious
compromise with their consciences by dancing vigorously whilst assuming
an air of intense misery, as though they were undergoing some terrible
penance. Every one present enjoyed these barn-dances enormously.
My father was an admirable speaker of the old-fashioned school, with
calculated pauses, an unusual felicity in the choice of his epithets,
and a considerable amount of gesticulation. The veteran Lord Chaplin is
the last living exponent of this type of oratory. Although my father
prepared his speeches very carefully indeed, he never made a single
written note. He had a beautiful speaking voice and a prodigious
memory; this memory, he knew from experience, would not fail him. An
excellent shot himself both with gun and rifle, and a good fisherman,
to the end of his life he maintained his interest in sport and in all
the pursuits of the younger life around him, for he was very human.
It is difficult for a son to write impartially of his mother. My
mother's character was a blend of extreme simplicity and great dignity,
with a limitless gift of sympathy for others. I can say with perfect
truth that, throughout her life, she succeeded in winning the deep love
of all those who were brought into constant contact with her. Very
early in life she fell under the influence of the Evangelical movement,
which was then stirring England to its depths, and she throughout her
days remained faithful to its tenets. It could be said of her that,
though, in the world, she was not of the world. Owing to force of
circumstances, she had at times to take her position in the world, and
no one could do it with greater dignity, or more winning grace; but the
atmosphere of London, both physical and social, was distasteful to her.
She had an idea that the smoke-laden London air affected her lungs,
and, apart from the pleasure of seeing the survivors of the very
intimate circle of friends of her young days, London had few
attractions for her; all her interests were centred in the country, in
country people, and country things. Although deeply religious, her
religion had no gloom about it, for her inextinguishable love of a
joke, and irrepressible sense of fun, remained with her to the end of
her life, and kept her young in spite of her ninety-three years. From
the commencement of her married life, my mother had been in the habit
of "visiting" in the village twice a week, and in every cottage she was
welcomed as a friend, for in addition to her gift of sympathy, she had
a memory almost as tenacious as my father's, and remembered the names
of every one of the cottagers' children, knew where they were employed,
and whom they had married. With the help of her maid, my mother used to
compound a cordial, bottles of which she distributed amongst the
cottagers, a cordial which gained an immense local reputation. The
ingredients of this panacea were one part of strong iron-water to five
parts of old whisky, to which sal-volatile, red lavender, cardamoms,
ginger, and other warming drugs were added. "Her Grace's bottle," as it
was invariably termed, achieved astonishing popularity, and the most
marvellous cures were ascribed to it. I have sometimes wondered whether
its vogue would have been as great had the whisky been eliminated from
its composition. In her home under the Sussex downs, amidst the broad
stretches of heather-clad common, the beautiful Tudor stone-built old
farm-houses, and the undulating woodlands of that most lovable and
typically English county, she continued, to the end of her life,
visiting amongst her less fortunate neighbours, and finding friends in
every house. Her immense vitality and power of entering into the
sorrows and enjoyments of others, led at times to developments very
unexpected in the case of one so aged. For instance, a small
great-nephew of mine had had a pair of stilts given him. The boy was
clumsy at learning to use them, and my mother, who in her youth, could
perform every species of trick upon stilts, was discovered by her
trained nurse mounted on stilts and perambulating the garden on them,
in her eighty-sixth year, for the better instruction of her little
great-grandson. Again, during a great rat-hunt we had organised, the
nurse missed her ninety-year-old charge, to discover her later, in
company with the stable-boy, behind a barn, both of them armed with
sticks, intently watching a rat-hole into which the stable-boy had just
inserted a ferret.
My mother travelled up to London on one occasion to consult a
celebrated oculist, and confided to him that she was growing
apprehensive about her eyesight, as she began to find it difficult to
read small print by lamplight. The man of Harley Street, after a
careful examination of his patient's eyes, asked whether he might
inquire what her age was. On receiving the reply that she had been
ninety on her last birthday, the specialist assured her that his
experience led him to believe that cases of failing eyesight were by no
means unusual at that age.
My mother had known all the great characters that had flitted across
the European stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
Talleyrand, Metternich, the great Duke of Wellington, and many others.
With her wonderful memory, she was a treasure-house of anecdotes of
these and other well-known personages, which she narrated with all the
skill of the born reconteuse. She belonged, too, to an age in which
letter-writing was cultivated as an art, and was regarded as an
intellectual relaxation. At the time of her death she had one hundred
and sixty-nine direct living descendants: children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, in addition to
thirty-seven grandchildren and great-grandchildren by marriage. She
kept in touch with all her descendants by habitually corresponding with
them, and the advice given by this shrewd, wise old counsellor, with
her ninety years of experience, was invariably followed by its
recipients. She made a point of travelling to London to attend the
weddings of every one of her descendants, and even journeyed up to be
present at the Coronation of King Edward in her ninetieth year. It is
given to but few to see their GRANDSON'S GRANDSON; it is granted to
fewer to live ninety-three years with the full use of every
intellectual faculty, and the retention of but slightly impaired bodily
powers; and seldom is it possible to live to so great an age with the
powers of enjoyment and of unabated interest in the lives of others
still retained.
She never returned to Ireland after her widowhood, but was able, up to
the end of her life, to pay a yearly autumn visit to her beloved
Scotland. And so, under the rolling Sussex downs, amidst familiar
woodlands and villages, full of years, and surrounded by the lore of
all those who knew her, the long day closed.
I think that there is a passage in the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs
which says: "Her children rise up and call her blessed."
I have reached my appointed limits, leaving unsaid one-half of the
things I had wished to narrate. Reminiscences come crowding in
unbidden, and, like the flickering lights of the Will-o'-the-wisp, they
tend to lead the wayfarer far astray from the path he had originally
traced out for himself. "Jack-o'-lanthorn" is proverbially a fickle
guide to follow, and should I have succumbed to his lure, I can only
proffer my excuses, and plead in extenuation that sixty years is such a
long road to re-travel that an occasional deviation into a by-path by
elderly feet may perhaps be forgiven.
Charles Kingsley, in the "Water-Babies", has put some very touching
lines into the mouth of the old school-dame in Vendale, lines which
come home with pathetic force to persons of my time of life.
"When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad
And every dog his day.
"When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The old and spent among:
God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young."
I protest indignantly against the idea that all the wheels are run
down; nor are the trees yet brown, for kindly autumn, to soften us to
the inevitable passing of summer, touches the trees with her magic
wand, and forthwith they blaze with crimson and russet-gold, pale-gold
and flaming copper-red.
In the mellow golden sunshine of the still October days it is sometimes
difficult to realise that the glory of the year has passed beyond
recall, though the sunshine has no longer the genial warmth of July,
and the more delicate flowers are already shrivelled by the first
furtive touches of winter's finger-tips. Experience has taught us that
the many-hued glory of autumn is short-lived; the faintest breeze
brings the leaves fluttering to the ground in golden showers. Soon the
few that remain will patter gently down to earth, their mother. Winter
comes.