In 1883 my father became anxious to
give up teaching boys and to confine himself more
exclusively to the work of a clergyman. With this
in view he contemplated moving to London where he had
been offered the chaplaincy of the huge London Hospital.
I remember his talking it over with me, and then asking
if I had any idea what I wanted to do in life.
It came to me as a new conundrum. It had never
occurred to me to look forward to a profession; except
that I knew that the heads of tigers, deer, and all
sorts of trophies of the chase which adorned our house
came from soldier uncles and others who hunted them
in India, and I had always thought that their occupation
would suit my taste admirably. It never dawned
on me that I would have to earn my bread and butter that
had always come along. Moreover, I had never seen
real poverty in others, for all the fisher-folk in
our village seemed to have enough. I hated dress
and frills, and envied no one. At school, and
on the Riviera, and even in Wales, I had never noticed
any want. It is true that a number of dear old
ladies from the village came in the winter months
to our house once or twice a week to get soup.
They used to sit in the back hall, each with a round
tin can with a bucket handle. These were filled
with hot broth, and the old ladies were given a repast
as well before leaving. As a matter of fact I
very seldom actually saw them, for that part of the
house was cut off entirely by large double green-baize
covered doors. But I often knew that they must
have been there, because our Skye terrier, though
fed to overflowing, usually attended these séances,
and I presume, while the old ladies were occupied
with lunch, sampled the cans of soup that stood in
rows along the floor. He used to come along with
dripping whiskers which betrayed his excursion, and
the look of a connoisseur in his large round eyes as
if he were certifying that justice had been done once
more in the kitchen.
While I was in France the mother of
my best chum in school had been passing through Marseilles
on her way home from India, and had most kindly taken
me on a jolly trip to Arles, Avignon, and other historical
places. She was the wife of a famous missionary
in India. She spoke eight languages fluently,
including Arabic, and was a perfect “vade
mecum” of interesting information which she well
knew how to impart. She had known my mother’s
family all her life, they being Anglo-Indians in the
army service.
About the time of my father’s
question, my friend’s mother was staying in
Chester with her brother-in-law, the Lord Lieutenant
of Denbighshire. It was decided that as she was
a citizeness of the world, no one could suggest better
for what profession my peculiar talents fitted me.
The interview I have long ago forgotten, but I recall
coming home with a confused idea that tiger hunting
would not support me, and that she thought I ought
to become a clergyman, though it had no attraction
for me, and I decided against it.
None of our family on either side,
so far as I can find out, had ever practised medicine.
My own experience of doctors had been rather a chequered
one, but at my father’s suggestion I gladly went
up and discussed the matter with our country family
doctor. He was a fine man, and we boys were very
fond of him and his family, his daughter being our
best girl friend near by. He had an enormous practice,
in which he was eminently successful. The number
of horses he kept, and the miles he covered with them,
were phenomenal in my mind. He had always a kind
word for every one, and never gave us boys away, though
he must have known many of our pranks played in our
parents’ absence. The only remaining memory
of that visit was that the old doctor brought down
from one of his shelves a large jar, out of which he
produced a pickled human brain. I was thrilled
with entirely new emotions. I had never thought
of man’s body as a machine. That this weird,
white, puckered-up mass could be the producer or transmitter
of all that made man, that it controlled our physical
strength and growth, and our responses to life, that
it made one into “Mad G.” and another
into me why, it was absolutely marvellous.
It attracted me as did the gramophone, the camera,
the automobile.
My father saw at once on my return
that I had found my real interest, and put before
me two alternative plans, one to go to Oxford, where
my brother had just entered, or to join him in London
and take up work in the London Hospital and University,
preparatory to going in for medicine. I chose
the latter at once a decision I have never
regretted. I ought to say that business as a career
was not suggested. In England, especially in
those days, these things were more or less hereditary.
My forbears were all fighters or educators, except
for an occasional statesman or banker. Probably
there is some advantage in this plan.
The school had been leased for a period
of seven years to a very delightful successor, it
being rightly supposed that after that time my brother
would wish to assume the responsibility.
Some of the subjects for the London
matriculation were quite new to me, especially “English.”
But with the fresh incentive and new vision of responsibility
I set to work with a will, and soon had mastered the
ten required subjects sufficiently to pass the examination
with credit. But I must say here that Professor
Huxley’s criticisms of English public school
teaching of that period were none too stringent.
I wish with all my heart that others had spoken out
as bravely, for in those days that wonderful man was
held up to our scorn as an atheist and iconoclast.
He was, however, perfectly right. We spent years
of life and heaps of money on our education, and came
out knowing nothing to fit us for life, except that
which we picked up incidentally.
I now followed my father to London,
and found every subject except my chemistry entirely
new. I was not familiar with one word of botany,
zoology, physics, physiology, or comparative anatomy.
About the universe which I inhabited I knew as little
as I did about cuneiform writings. Except for
my mathematics and a mere modicum of chemistry I had
nothing on which to base my new work; and students
coming from Government free schools, or almost anywhere,
had a great advantage over men of my previous education;
I did not even know how to study wisely. Again,
as Huxley showed, medical education in London was so
divided, there being no teaching university, that the
curriculum was ridiculously inadequate. There
were still being foisted upon the world far too many
medical men of the type of Bob Sawyer.
There were fourteen hospitals in London
to which medical schools were attached. Our hospital
was the largest in the British Isles, and in the midst
of the poorest population in England, being located
in the famous Whitechapel Road, and surrounded by
all the purlieus of the East End of the great city.
Patients came from Tilbury Docks to Billingsgate Market,
and all the river haunts between; from Shadwell, Deptford,
Wapping, Poplar, from Petticoat Lane and Radcliffe
Highway, made famous by crime and by Charles Dickens.
They came from Bethnal Green, where once queens had
their courts, now the squalid and crowded home of
poverty; from Stratford and Bow, and a hundred other
slums.
The hospital had some nine hundred
beds, which were always so full that the last surgeon
admitting to his wards constantly found himself with
extra beds poked in between the regulation number through
sheer necessity. It afforded an unrivalled field
for clinical experience and practical teaching.
In my day, however, owing to its position in London,
and the fact that its school was only just emerging
from primeval chaos, it attracted very few indeed
of the medical students from Oxford and Cambridge,
who are obliged to come to London for their last two
or three years’ hospital work the
scope in those small university towns being decidedly
limited.
Looking back I am grateful to my alma
mater, and have that real affection for her that every
loyal son should have. But even that does not
conceal from me how poor a teaching establishment it
was. Those who had natural genius, and the advantages
of previous scientific training, who were sons of
medical men, or had served apprenticeships to them,
need not have suffered so much through its utter inefficiency.
But men in my position suffered quite unconsciously
a terrible handicap, and it was only the influences
for which I had nothing whatever to thank the hospital
that saved me from the catastrophes which overtook
so many who started with me.
To begin with, there was no supervision
of our lives whatever. We were flung into a coarse
and evil environment, among men who too often took
pride in their shame, just to sink or swim. Not
one soul cared which you did. I can still remember
numerous cases where it simply meant that men paid
quite large sums for the privilege of sending the
sons they loved direct to the devil. I recall
one lad whom I had known at school. His father
lavished money upon him, and sincerely believed that
his son was doing him credit and would soon return
to share his large practice, and bring to it all the
many new advances he had learned. The reports
of examinations successfully passed he fully accepted;
and the non-return of his son at vacation times he
put down to professional zeal. It was not till
the time came for the boy to get his degree and return
that the father discovered that he had lived exactly
the life of the prodigal in the parable, and had neither
attended college nor attempted a single examination
of any kind whatever. It broke the father’s
heart and he died.
Examinations for degrees were held
by the London University, or the Royal College of
Physicians and Surgeons, never by the hospital schools.
These were practically race committees; they did no
teaching, but when you had done certain things, they
allowed you to come up and be examined, and if you
got through a written and “viva voce”
examination you were inflicted on an unsuspecting public
“qualified to kill” often only
too literally so.
It is obvious on the face of it that
this could be no proper criterion for so important
a decision as to qualifications; special crammers
studied the examiners, their questions, and their teachings,
and luck had a great deal to do with success.
While some men never did themselves justice in examinations,
others were exactly the reverse. Thus I can remember
one resident accoucheur being “ploughed,”
as we called it, in his special subject, obstetrics and
men to whom you wouldn’t trust your cat getting
through with flying colours.
Of the things to be done: First
you had to be signed up for attending courses of lectures
on certain subjects. This was simply a matter
of tipping the beadle, who marked you off. I
personally attended only two botany lectures during
the whole course. At the first some practical
joker had spilled a solution of carbon bisulphide all
over the professor’s platform, and the smell
was so intolerable that the lecture was prorogued.
At the second, some wag let loose a couple of pigeons,
whereupon every one started either to capture them
or stir them up with pea-shooters. The professor
said, “Gentlemen, if you do not wish to learn,
you are at liberty to leave.” The entire
class walked out. The insignificant sum of two
and sixpence secured me my sign-up for the remainder
of the course.
Materia medica was almost
identical; and while we had better fortune with physiology,
no experience and no apparatus for verifying its teachings
were ever shown us.
Our chemistry professor was a very
clever man, but extremely eccentric, and his class
was pandemonium. I have seen him so frequently
pelted with peas, when his head was turned, as to force
him to leave the amphitheatre in despair. I well
remember also an unpopular student being pushed down
from the top row almost on to the experiment table.
There was practically no histology
taught, and little or no pathology. Almost every
bit of the microscope which I did was learned on my
own instrument at home. Anatomy, however, we
were well taught in the dissecting-room, where we
could easily obtain all the work we needed. But
not till Sir Frederick Treves became our lecturer in
anatomy and surgery was it worth while doing more
than pay the necessary sum to get signed up.
In the second place we had to attend
in the dispensary, actually to handle drugs and learn
about them an admirable rule. Personally
I went once, fooled around making egg-nogg, and arranged
with a considerate druggist to do the rest that was
necessary. Yet I satisfied the examiners at the
College of Physicians and Surgeons, those of the London
University at the examinations for Bachelor of Medicine the
only ones which they gave which carried questions in
any of these subjects.
In the athletic life of the University,
however, I took great interest, and was secretary
in succession of the cricket, football, and rowing
clubs. I helped remove the latter from the old
river Lea to the Thames, to raise the inter-hospital
rowing championship and start the united hospitals’
rowing club. I found time to row in the inter-hospital
race for two years and to play on the football team
in the two years of which we won the inter-hospital
football cup. A few times I played with the united
hospitals’ team; but I found that their ways
were not mine, as I had been taught to despise alcohol
as a beverage and to respect all kinds of womanhood.
For three years I played regularly for Richmond the
best of the London clubs at the time and
subsequently for Oxford, being put on the team the
only term I was in residence. I also threw the
hammer for the hospital in the united hospitals’
sports, winning second place for two years. Indeed,
athletics in some form occupied every moment of my
spare time.
It was in my second year, 1885, that
returning from an out-patient case one night, I turned
into a large tent erected in a purlieu of Shadwell,
the district to which I happened to have been called.
It proved to be an evangelistic meeting of the then
famous Moody and Sankey. It was so new to me
that when a tedious prayer-bore began with a long
oration, I started to leave. Suddenly the leader,
whom I learned afterwards was D.L. Moody, called
out to the audience, “Let us sing a hymn while
our brother finishes his prayer.” His practicality
interested me, and I stayed the service out. When
eventually I left, it was with a determination either
to make religion a real effort to do as I thought
Christ would do in my place as a doctor, or frankly
abandon it. That could only have one issue while
I still lived with a mother like mine. For she
had always been my ideal of unselfish love. So
I decided to make the attempt, and later went down
to hear the brothers J.E. and C.T. Studd speak
at some subsidiary meeting of the Moody campaign.
They were natural athletes, and I felt that I could
listen to them. I could not have listened to a
sensuous-looking man, a man who was not a master of
his own body, any more than I could to a precentor,
who coming to sing the prayers at college chapel dedication,
I saw get drunk on sherry which he abstracted from
the banquet table just before the service. Never
shall I forget, at the meeting of the Studd brothers,
the audience being asked to stand up if they intended
to try and follow Christ. It appeared a very sensible
question to me, but I was amazed how hard I found it
to stand up. At last one boy, out of a hundred
or more in sailor rig, from an industrial or reformatory
ship on the Thames, suddenly rose. It seemed
to me such a wonderfully courageous act for
I knew perfectly what it would mean to him that
I immediately found myself on my feet, and went out
feeling that I had crossed the Rubicon, and must do
something to prove it.
We were Church of England people,
and I always attended service with my mother at an
Episcopal church of the evangelical type. At her
suggestion I asked the minister if I could in any way
help. He offered me a class of small boys in
his Sunday School, which I accepted with much hesitation.
The boys, derived from houses in the neighbourhood,
were as smart as any I have known. With every
faculty sharpened by the competition of the street,
they so tried my patience with their pranks that I
often wondered what strange attraction induced them
to come at all. The school and church were the
property of a society known by the uninviting title
of the “Episcopal Society for the promotion of
Christianity among the Jews.” It owned a
large court, shut off from the road by high gates,
around which stood about a dozen houses with
the church facing the gates at one end of a pretty
avenue of trees. It was an oasis in the desert
of that dismal region. It possessed also an industrial
institution for helping its converts to make a living,
when driven out of their own homes; and its main work
was carried on for the most part by superannuated
missionaries. One was from Bagdad, I remember,
and one from Palestine, both themselves Jews by extraction.
These missionaries were paid such miserable salaries
that in their old age they were always left very poor.
One instance of a baptism I have never
forgotten. I was then living in the court, having
hired a nice separate house under the trees after my
father had died and my mother had moved to Hampstead.
In such a district the house was a Godsend. One
Sunday I was strolling in the court when the clergyman
came rushing out of the church and called to me in
great excitement, “The church is full of Jews.
They are going to carry off Abraham. Can’t
you go in and help while I fetch the police?”
My friend and I therefore rushed in as directed to
a narrow alleyway between high box pews which led
into the vestry, into which “Abraham”
had been spirited. The door being shut and our
backs put to it, it was a very easy matter to hold
back the crowd, who probably supposed at first that
we were leading the abduction party. There being
only room for two to come on at once, “those
behind cried forward, and those in front back,”
till after very little blood spilt, we heard the police
in the church, and the crowd at once took to flight.
I regret to say that we expedited the rear-guard by
football rather than strictly Christian methods.
His friends then charged Abraham with theft, expecting
to get him out of his place of refuge and then trap
him, as we were told they had a previous convert.
We therefore accompanied him personally through the
mean streets, both to and fro, spoiling for more fun.
But they displayed more discretion than valour, and
to the best of my belief he escaped their machinations.
My Sunday-School efforts did not satisfy
me. The boys were few, and I failed to see any
progress. But I had resolved that I would do no
work on Sundays except for others, so I joined a young
Australian of my class in hospital in holding services
on Sunday nights in half a dozen of the underground
lodging-houses along the Radcliffe Highway. He
was a good musician, so he purchased a fine little
portable harmonium, and whatever else the lodgers
thought of us, they always liked the music. We
used to meet for evening tea at a place in the famous
Highway known as “The Stranger’s Rest,”
outside of which an open-air service was always held
for the sailors wandering up and down the docks.
At these a number of ladies would sing; and after
the meetings a certain number of the sailors were
asked to come in and have refreshments. There
were always some who had spent their money on drink,
or been robbed, or were out of ships, and many of
them were very fine men. Some were foreigners so
much so that a bit farther down the road a Norwegian
lady carried on another similar work, especially for
Scandinavians.
A single story will illustrate the
good points which some of these men displayed.
My hospital chief, Sir Frederick Treves, had operated
on a great big Norwegian, and the man had left the
hospital cured. As a rule such patients do not
even know the name of their surgeon. Some three
weeks later, however, this man called at Sir Frederick
Treves’s house late one dark night. Having
asked if he were the surgeon who had operated on him
and getting a reply in the affirmative, he said he
had come to return thanks, that since he left hospital
he had been wandering about without a penny to his
name, waiting for a ship, but had secured a place
on that day. He proceeded to cut out from the
upper edge of his trousers a gold Norwegian five-krönen
piece which his wife had sewed in there to be his
stand-by in case of absolute need. He had been
so hungry that he had been tempted to use it, but
now had come to present it as a token of gratitude upon
which he bowed and disappeared. Sir Frederick
said that he was so utterly taken aback that he found
himself standing in the hall, holding the coin, and
bowing his visitor out. He said he could no more
return it than you could offer your teacher a “tip,”
and he has preserved it as a much-prized possession.
The underground lodging-house work
did me lots of good. It brought me into touch
with real poverty a very graveyard of life
I had never surmised. The denizens of those miserable
haunts were men from almost every rank of life.
They were shipwrecks from the ocean of humanity, drifted
up on the last beach. There were large open fireplaces
in the dens, over which those who had any food cooked
it. Often while the other doctor or I was holding
services, one of us would have to sit down on some
drunken man to keep him from making the proceedings
impossible; but there was always a modicum who gathered
around and really enjoyed the singing.
We soon found that there were no depths
of contemptible treachery which some among these new
acquaintances would not attempt. We became gradually
hardened to the piteous tales of ill luck, of malignant
persecution, and of purely temporary embarrassments,
and learned soon to leave behind us purses, and watches,
and anything else of value, and to keep some specially
worn clothing for this service.
There was always a narrow passage
from the front door to the staircase which led down
into those huge underground basements. The guardians
had a room inside the door, with a ticket window, where
they took five or possibly eight cents from the boarders
for their night’s lodging. At about eleven
o’clock a “chucker out” would go
down and clear out all the gentlemen who had not paid
in advance for the night. This was always a very
melancholy period of the evening, and in spite of our
hardened hearts, we always had a score against us there.
That, however, had to be given in person, for there
were plenty among our audiences who had taken special
courses in imitative calligraphy. I.O.U.’s
on odd bits of paper were a menace to our banking accounts
till we sorrowfully abandoned that convenient way of
helping often a really deserving case.
In those houses, somewhat to my astonishment,
we never once received any physical opposition.
We knew that some considered us harmless and gullible
imbéciles; but the great majority were still able
to see that it was an attempt, however poor, to help
them. Drink, of course, was the chief cause of
the downfall of most; but as I have already said,
there were cases of genuine, undeserved poverty like
our sailor friend, overtaken with sickness in a foreign
port. We induced some to sign the pledge and
to keep it, if only temporarily, but I think that
we ourselves got most out of the work, both in pleasure
and uplift. I recall one clergyman, one doctor,
and many men from the business world and clerk’s
life in the flotsam and jetsam.
One poor creature, in the last stage
of poverty and dirt, proved to be an honours man in
Oxford. We looked up his record in the University.
He assured us that he intended to begin again a new
life, and we agreed to help start him. We took
him to a respectable, temperance lodging-house, paid
for a bed, a bath, and a supper, and purchased a good
second-hand outfit of clothing for him. We were
wise enough only to give this to him after we had
taken away his own while he was having a bath in the
tub. We did not give him a penny of money, fearing
his lack of control. Next morning, however, when
we went for him, he was gone no one knew
where. We had the neighbouring saloons searched,
and soon got track of him. Some “friend”
in the temperance house had given him sixpence.
The barman offered him the whiskey; his hands trembled
so that he could not lift the glass to his mouth, and
the barman kindly poured it down his throat. We
never saw him again.
In this lodging-house work a friend,
now a well-known artist and successful business man,
often joined us two doctors.
My growing experience had shown me
that there was a better way to the hearts of my Sunday-School
boys than merely talking to them. Like myself,
they worshipped the athlete, whether he were a prize-fighter
or a big football player. There were no Y.M.C.A.’s
or other places for them to get any physical culture,
so we arranged to clear our dining-room every Saturday
evening, and give boxing lessons and parallel-bar
work: the ceiling was too low for the horizontal.
The transformation of the room was easily accomplished.
The furniture was very primitive, largely our own
construction, and we could throw out through the window
every scrap of it except the table, which was soon
“adapted.” We also put up a quoit
pitch in our garden.
This is no place to discuss the spiritual
influences of the “noble art of boxing.”
Personally I have always believed in its value; and
my Sunday-School class soon learned the graces of
fair play, how to take defeat and to be generous in
victory. They began at once bringing “pals”
whom my exegesis on Scripture would never have lured
within my reach. We ourselves began to look forward
to Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with an entirely
new joy. We all learned to respect and so to
love one another more indeed, lifelong friendships
were developed and that irrespective of our hereditary
credal affiliations. The well-meaning clergyman,
however, could not see the situation in that light,
and declining all invitations to come and sample an
evening’s fun instead of condemning it unheard,
or I should say, unseen, he delivered an ultimatum
which I accepted and resigned from his school.
My Australian friend was at that time
wrestling with a real ragged school on the Highway
on Sunday afternoons. The poor children there
were street waifs and as wild as untamed animals.
So, being temporarily out of a Sunday job, I consented
to join him.
Our school-room this time owed no
allegiance to any one but ourselves, and the work
certainly proved a real labour of love. If the
boys were allowed in a minute before there was a force
to cope with them, the room would be wrecked.
Everything movable was stolen immediately opportunity
arose. Boys turned out or locked out during session
would climb to the windows, and triumphantly wave stolen
articles. On one occasion when I had “chucked
out” a specially obstreperous youth, I was met
with a shower of mud and stones as I passed through
a narrow alley on my return home. The police were
always at war with the boys, who annoyed them in similar
and many other ways. I remember two scholars
whose eyes were blacked and badly beaten by a “cop”
who happened to catch them in our doorway, as they
declared, “only waiting for Sunday School to
open.” Old scores were paid off by both
parties whenever possible. My own boys did not
stay in the old school long after I left, but came
and asked me to keep a class on Sunday in our dining-room an
arrangement in which I gladly acquiesced, though it
involved my eventually abandoning the ragged school,
which was at least two miles distant.
With the night work at the lodging-houses,
we used to combine a very aggressive total abstinence
campaign. The saloon-keepers as a rule looked
upon us as harmless cranks, and I have no doubt were
grateful for the leaflets we used to distribute to
their customers. These served admirably for kindling
purposes. At times, however, they got ugly, and
once my friend, who was in a saloon talking to a customer,
was trapped and whiskey poured into his mouth.
On another occasion I noticed that the outer doors
were shut and a couple of men backed up against them
while I was talking to the bartender over the counter,
and that a few other customers were closing in to repeat
the same experiment on me. However, they greatly
overrated their own stock of fitness and equally underrated
my good training, for the scrimmage went all my own
way in a very short time.
If ever I told my football chums (for
in those days I was playing hard) of these adventures
in a nether world, they always wanted to come and
cooperate; but I have always felt that reliance on
physical strength alone is only a menace when the
odds are so universally in favour of our friend the
enemy. At this time also at St. Andrew’s
Church, just across the Whitechapel Road from the hospital,
the clergyman was a fine athlete and good boxer.
He was a brother of Lord Wenlock, and was one night
returning from a mission service in the Highway when
he was set upon by footpads and robbed of everything,
including the boots off his feet. Meantime “Jack
the Ripper” was also giving our residential
section a most unsavoury reputation.
My long vacations at this time were
always taken on the sea. My brother and I used
to hire an old fishing smack called the “Oyster,”
which we rechristened the “Roysterer.”
This we fitted out, provisioned, and put to sea in
with an entirely untrained crew, and without even
the convention of caring where we were bound so long
as the winds bore us cheerily along. My brother
was always cook and never was there a better.
We believed that he would have made a mark in the
world as a chef, from his ability to satisfy our appetites
and cater to our desires out of so ill-supplied a
galley. We always took our departure from the
north coast of Anglesea a beautiful spot,
and to us especially attractive as being so entirely
out of the run of traffic that we could do exactly
as we pleased. We invariably took our fishing
gear with us, and thus never wanted for fresh food.
We could replenish our bread, milk, butter, and egg
supply at the numerous small ports at which we called.
The first year the crew consisted of my brother and
me skipper, mate, and cook between us and
an Oxford boating friend as second mate. For
a deckhand we had a young East London parson, whom
we always knew as “the Puffin,” because
he so closely resembled that particular bird when
he had his vestments on. We sailed first for
Ireland, but the wind coming ahead we ran instead
for the Isle of Man. The first night at sea the
very tall undergraduate as second mate had the 12
P.M. to 4 A.M. night watch. The tiller handle
was very low, and when I gave him his course at midnight
before turning in myself, he asked me if it would be
a breach of nautical etiquette to sit down to steer,
as that was the only alternative to directing the
ship’s course with his ankles. No land
was in sight, and the wind had died out when I came
on deck for my 4 A.M. to 8 A.M. watch. I found
the second mate sitting up rubbing his eyes as I emerged
from the companion hatch.
“Well, where are we now?
How is her head? What’s my course?”
“Don’t worry about such
commonplace details,” he replied. “I
have made an original discovery about these parts
that I have never seen mentioned before.”
“What’s that?” I asked innocently.
“Well,” he replied, “when
I sat down to steer the course you gave brought a
bright star right over the topmast head and that’s
what I started to steer by. It’s a perfect
marvel what a game these heavenly bodies play.
We must be in some place like Alice in Wonderland.
I just shut my eyes for a second and when next I opened
them the sun was exactly where I had left that star ”
and he fled for shelter.
It is a wonder that we ever got anywhere,
for we had not so much as a chronometer watch, and
so in spite of a decrepit sextant even our latitude
was often an uncertain quantity. However, we made
the port of Douglas, whence we visited quite a part
of the historic island. As our parson was called
home from there, we wired for and secured another
chum to share our labours. Our generally unconventional
attire in fashionable summer resorts was at times
quite embarrassing. Barelegged, bareheaded, and
“tanned to a chip,” I was carrying my
friend’s bag along the fashionable pier to see
him off on his homeward journey, when a lady stopped
me and asked me if I were an Eskimo, offering me a
job if I needed one. I have wondered sometimes
if it were a seat in a sideshow which she had designed
for me.
We spent that holiday cruising around
the island. It included getting ashore off the
north point of land and nearly losing the craft; and
also in Ramsey Harbour a fracas with the harbour authorities.
We had run that night on top of the full spring tide.
Not knowing the harbour, we had tied up to the first
bollard, and gone incontinently to sleep. We
were awakened by the sound of water thundering on top
of us, and rushing up found to our dismay that we
were lying in the mud, and a large sewer was discharging
right on to our decks. Before we had time to
get away or clean up, the harbour master, coming alongside,
called on us to pay harbour duties. We stoutly
protested that as a pleasure yacht we were not liable
and intended to resist to the death any such insult
being put upon us. He was really able to see at
once that we were just young fellows out for a holiday,
but he had the last word before a crowd of sight-seers
who had gathered on the quay above us.
“Pleasure yacht, pleasure yacht,
indeed!” he shouted as he rode away, “I
can prove to any man with half an eye that you are
nothing but one of them old coal or mud barges.”
The following year the wind suited
better the other way. We were practically all
young doctors this time, the cook being a very athletic
chum in whose rooms were collected as trophies, in
almost every branch of athletics, over seventy of
what we called silver “pots.” As
a cook he proved a failure except in zeal. It
didn’t really interest him, especially when
the weather was lively. On one occasion I reported
to the galley, though I was the skipper that year,
in search of the rice-pudding for dinner Dennis,
our cook, being temporarily indisposed. Such
a sight as met my view! Had I been superstitious
I should have fled. A great black column the
circumference of the boiler had risen not less than
a foot above the top rim, and was wearing the iron
cover jauntily on one side as a helmet. It proved
to be rice. He had filled the saucepan with dry
rice, crowded in a little water, forced the lid on
very tight and left it to its own devices!
Nor, in his subsequent capacity as
deckhand, did he redeem in our eyes the high qualities
of seamanship which we had anticipated from him.
Our tour took us this time through
the Menai Straits, via Carnarvon and the Welsh
coast, down the Irish Channel to Milford Haven.
In the region of very heavy tides and dangerous rocks
near the south Welsh coast, we doubled our watch at
night. One night the wind fell very light, and
we had stood close inshore in order to pass inside
the Bishop Rocks. The wind died out at that very
moment, and the heavy current driving us down on the
rocky islands threatened prematurely to terminate
our cruise. The cook was asleep, as usual when
called, and at last aroused to the nature of the alarm,
was found leaning forward over the ship’s bows
with a lighted candle. When asked what he was
doing, he explained, “Why, looking for those
bishops, of course.”
No holiday anywhere could be better
sport than those cruises. There was responsibility,
yet rest, mutual dependence, and a charming, unconventional
way of getting acquainted with one’s own country.
We visited Carnarvon, Harlech, and other castles,
lost our boat in a breeze of wind off Dynllyn, climbed
Snowden from Pwllheli Harbour, and visited a dozen
little out-of-the-world harbours that one would otherwise
never see. Fishing and shooting for the pot, bathing
and rowing, and every kind of healthy out-of-doors
pleasure was indulged in along the road of travel.
Moreover, it was all made to cost just as much or
as little as you liked.
Another amusing memory which still
remains with me was at one little seaport where a
very small man not over five feet high had married
a woman considerably over six. He was an idle,
drunken little rascal, and I met her one day striding
down the street with her intoxicated little spouse
wrapped up in her apron and feebly protesting.
One result of these holidays was that
I told my London boys about them, using one’s
experiences as illustrations; till suddenly it struck
me that this was shabby Christianity. Why shouldn’t
these town cagelings share our holidays? Thirteen
accompanied me the following summer. We had three
tents, an old deserted factory, and an uninhabited
gorge by the sea, all to ourselves on the Anglesea
coast, among people who spoke only Welsh. Thus
we had all the joys of foreign travel at very little
cost.
Among the many tricks the boys “got
away with” was one at the big railway junction
at Bangor, where we had an hour to wait. They
apparently got into the baggage-room and stole a varied
assortment of labels, which they industriously pasted
over those on a large pile of luggage stacked on the
platform. The subsequent tangle of destinations
can better be imagined than described.
Camp rules were simple no
clothing allowed except short blue knickers and gray
flannel shirts, no shoes, stockings, or caps except
on Sundays. The uniform was provided and was
as a rule the amateur production of numerous friends,
for our finances were strictly limited. The knickers
were not particularly successful, the legs frequently
being carried so high up that there was no space into
which the body could be inserted. Every one had
to bathe in the sea before he got any breakfast.
I can still see ravenous boys staving off the evil
hour till as near midday as possible. No one was
allowed in the boats who couldn’t swim, an art
which they all quickly acquired. There was, of
course, a regular fatigue party each day for the household
duties. We had no beds sleeping on
long, burlap bags stuffed with hay. A very favourite
pastime was afforded by our big lifeboat, an old one
hired from the National Lifeboat Society. The
tides flowed very strongly alongshore, east on the
flood tide and west on the ebb. Food, fishing
lines, and a skipper for the day being provided, the
old boat would go off with the tide in the morning,
the boys had a picnic somewhere during the slack-water
interim, and came back with the return tide.
When our numbers grew, as they did
to thirty the second year, and nearly a hundred in
subsequent seasons, thirty or more boys would be packed
off daily in that way and yet we never lost
one of them. If they had not had as many lives
as cats it would have been quite another story.
The boat had sufficient sails to give the appearance
to their unfamiliar eyes of being a sailing vessel,
but the real work was done with twelve huge oars,
two boys to an oar being the rule. At nights
they used to come drifting homeward on the returning
tides singing their dirges, like some historic barge
of old. There was one familiar hymn called “Bringing
in the Sheaves,” which like everything else
these rascals adapted for the use of the moment; and
many a time the returning barge would be announced
to us cooking supper in the old factory or in the
silent gorge, by the ringing echoes of many voices
beating with their oars as they came on to the words:
“Pulling at the sweeps,
Pulling at the sweeps;
Here we come rejoicing,
Pulling at the sweeps.”
As soon as the old boat’s keel
slid up upon the beach, there would be a rush of as
appreciative a supper party as ever a cook had the
pleasure of catering for.
An annual expedition was to the top
of Mount Snowdon, the highest in England or Wales.
It was attempted by land and water. Half of us
tramped overland in forced marches to the beautiful
Menai Straits, crossed the suspension bridge, and
were given splendid hospitality and good beds on the
straw of the large stables at the beautiful country
seat of a friend at Treborth. Here the boat section
who came around the island were to meet us, anchoring
their craft on the south side of the Straits.
Our second year the naval division did not turn up,
and some had qualms of conscience that evil might
have overtaken them. Nor did they arrive until
we by land had conquered the summit, travelling by
Bethesda and the famous slate quarries, and returning
for the second evening at Treborth. We then found
that they had been stranded on the sands in Red Wharf
Bay, so far from shore that they could neither go
forward nor back; had thus spent their first night
in a somewhat chilly manner in old bathing machines
by the land wash, and supped off the superfluous hard
biscuit which they had been reserving for the return
voyage. They were none the worse, however, our
genial host making it up to them in an extra generous
provision and a special evening entertainment.
One of my smartest boys (a Jew by nationality, for
we made no distinctions in election to our class),
in recounting his adventures to me next day, said:
“My! Doctor, I did have some fun kidding
that waiter in the white choker. He took a liking
to me so I let him pal up. I told him my name
was Lord Shaftesbury when I was home, but I asked
him not to let it out, and the old bloke promised he
wouldn’t.” The “old bloke”
happened to be our host, who was always in dress-clothes
in the evening, the only time we were at his house.
These holidays were the best lessons
of love I could show my boys. It drew us very
closely together; and to make the boys feel it less
a charitable affair, every one was encouraged to save
up his railway fare and as much more as possible.
By special arrangement with the railway and other
friends, and by very simple living, the per caput
charges were so much reduced that many of the boys
not only paid their own expenses, but even helped
their friends. The start was always attended
by a crowd of relatives, all helping with the baggage.
The father of one of my boys was a costermonger, and
had a horse that he had obtained very cheap because
it had a disease of the legs. He always kept
it in the downstairs portion of his house, which it
entered by the front door. It was a great pleasure
to him to come and cart our things free to the station.
The boys used to load his cart at our house, and I
remember one time that they made him haul unconsciously
all the way to the big London terminal at Euston half
our furniture, including our coal boxes. His son,
a most charming boy, made good in life in Australia
and bought a nice house in one of the suburbs for
his father and mother. I had the pleasure one
night of meeting them all there. The father was
terribly uneasy, for he said he just could not get
accustomed to it. All his old “pals”
were gone, and his neighbours’ tastes and interests
were a great gulf between them. I heard later
that as soon as his son left England again the old
man sold the house, and returned to the more congenial
associations of a costermonger’s life, where
I believe he died in harness.
The last two years of my stay in London
being occupied with resident work at hospital, I could
not find time for such far-off holidays, and at the
suggestion of my chief, Sir Frederick Treves, himself
a Dorsetshire man, we camped by permission of our
friends, the owners, in the grounds of Lulworth Castle,
close by the sea. The class had now developed
into a semi-military organization. We had acquired
real rifles old-timers from the Tower of
London and our athletic clubs were portions
of the Anglesey Boys’ Brigade, which antedated
the Boys’ Brigade of Glasgow, forerunner of
the Church Lads’ Brigade, and the Boy Scouts.
One of the great attractions of the
new camping-ground was the exquisite country and the
splendid coast, with chalk cliffs over which almost
any one could fall with impunity. Lulworth Cove,
one of the most picturesque in England, was the summer
resort of my chief, and he being an expert mariner
and swimmer used not only very often to join us at
camp, but always gave the boys a fine regatta and picnic
at his cottage. Our water polo games were also
a great feature here, the water being warm and enabling
us easily to play out the games. There are also
numerous beautiful castles and country houses all the
way between Swanage and Weymouth, and we had such
kindness extended to us wherever we went that every
day was a dream of joy to the lads. Without any
question they acquired new visions and ideals through
these experiences.
We always struck camp at the end of
a fortnight, having sometimes arranged with other
friends with classes of their own to step into our
shoes. The present head master of Shrewsbury and
many other distinguished persons shared with us some
of the educative joys of those days. Among the
many other more selfish portions of the holidays none
stand out more clearly in my memory than the August
days when partridge and grouse shooting used to open.
Most of my shooting was done over the delightful highlands
around Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, on the
outskirts of the Welsh hills, in Clun Forest, and
on the heather-covered Longmynds. How I loved
those days, and the friends who made them possible the
sound of the beaters, the intelligent setters and
retrievers, the keepers in velveteens, the lunches
under the shade of the great hedges or in lovely cottages,
where the ladies used to meet us at midday, and every
one used to jolly you about not shooting straight,
and you had to take refuge in a thousand “ifs.”
As one looks back on it all from Labrador,
it breathes the aroma of an old civilization and ancient
customs. Much of the shooting was over the old
lands of the Walcotts of Walcott Hall, a family estate
that had been bought up by Earl Clive on his return
from India, and was now in the hands of his descendant,
an old bachelor who shot very little, riding from
one good stand to another on a steady old pony.
There were many such estates, another close by being
that of the Oakovers of Oakover, a family that has
since sold their heritage.
A thousand time-honoured old customs,
only made acceptable by their hoary age, added, and
still continue to add in the pleasures of memory,
to the joys of those days, with which golf and tennis
and all the wonderful luxury of the modern summer
hotel seem never able to compete. It is right,
however, that such eras should pass.
The beautiful forest of Savernake,
that in my school days I had loved so well, and which
meant so much to us boys, spoke only too loudly of
the evil heirloom of the laws of entail. Spendthrift
and dissolute heirs had made it impossible for the
land to be utilized for the benefit of the people,
and yet kept it in the hands of utterly undeserving
persons. Being of royal descent they still bore
a royal name even in my day; but it was told of them
that the last, who had been asked to withdraw from
the school, on one occasion when, half drunk, he was
defending himself from the gibes and jeers of grooms
and ’ostlers whom he had made his companions,
rose with ill-assumed dignity and with an oath declared
that he was their king by divine right if only he
had his dues. Looking back it seems to me that
the germs of democratic tendencies were sown in me
by just those very incidents.