I have never ceased to regret that
there was not more corporate life in our medical school,
but I believe that conditions have been greatly improved
since my day. Here and there two or three classmates
would “dig” together, but otherwise, except
at lectures or in hospitals, we seldom met unless
it was on the athletic teams. We had no playground
of our own, and so, unable to get other hospitals to
combine, when a now famous St. Thomas man and myself
hired part of the justly celebrated London Rowing
Club Headquarters at Putney for a united hospitals’
headquarters, we used to take our blazers and more
cherished possessions home with us at night for fear
of distraint of rent.
They were great days. Rowing
on the Thames about Putney is not like that at Oxford
on a mill-pond, or as at Cambridge on what we nicknamed
a drain that should be roofed over. Its turgid
waters were often rough enough to sink a rowing shell,
and its busy traffic was a thing with which to reckon.
But it offered associations with all kinds of interesting
places, historical and otherwise, from the Star and
Garter at Richmond and the famous Park away to Boulter’s
Lock and Cleveden Woods, to the bathing pools about
Taplow Court, the seat of the senior branch of our
family, and to Marlow and Goring where our annual club
outings were held. Twice I rowed in the inter-hospital
race from Putney to Mortlake, once as bow and again
as stroke. During those early days the “London”
frequently had the best boat on the river.
Having now finished my second year
at hospital and taken my preliminary examinations,
including the scientific preliminary, and my first
bachelor of medicine for the University of London degree,
I had advanced to the dignity of “walking the
hospitals,” carried a large shining stethoscope,
and spent much time following the famous physicians
and surgeons around the wards.
Our first appointment was clerking
in the medical wards. We had each so many beds
allotted to us, and it was our business to know everything
about the patients who occupied them, to keep accurate
“histories” of all developments, and to
be ready to be quizzed and queried by our resident
house physician, or our visiting consultant on the
afternoon when he made his rounds, followed by larger
or smaller crowds of students according to the value
which was placed upon his teaching. I was lucky
enough to work under the famous Sir Andrew Clark,
Mr. Gladstone’s great physician. He was
a Scotchman greatly beloved, and always with a huge
following to whom he imparted far more valuable truths
than even the medical science of thirty years ago
afforded. His constant message, repeated and repeated
at the risk of wearying, was: “Gentlemen,
you must observe for yourselves. It is your observation
and not your memory which counts. It is the patient
and not the disease whom you are treating.”
Compared with the methods of diagnosis
to-day those then were very limited, but Sir Andrew’s
message was the more important, showing the greatness
of the man, who, though at the very top of the tree,
never for a moment tried to convey to his followers
that his knowledge was final, but that any moment
he stood ready to abandon his position for a better
one. On one occasion, to illustrate this point,
while he was in one of the largest of our wards (one
with four divisions and twenty beds each) he was examining
a lung case, while a huge class of fifty young doctors
stood around.
“What about the sputum, Mr.
Jones?” he asked. “What have you observed
coming from these lungs?”
“There is not much quantity,
sir. It is greenish in colour.”
“But what about the microscope,
Mr. Jones? What does that show?”
“No examination has been made, sir.”
“Gentlemen,” he said,
“I will now go to the other ward, and you shall
choose a specimen of the sputum of some of these cases.
When I return we will examine it and see what we can
learn.”
When he returned, four specimens awaited
him, the history and diagnoses of the cases being
known only to the class. The class never forgot
how by dissolving and boiling, and with the microscope,
he told us almost more from his examination of each
case than we knew from all our other information.
His was real teaching, and reminds one of the Glasgow
professor who, in order to emphasize the same point
of the value of observation, prepared a little cupful
of kerosene, mustard, and castor oil, and calling
the attention of his class to it, dipped a finger
into the atrocious compound and then sucked his finger.
He then passed the mixture around to the students
who all did the same with most dire results.
When the cup returned and he observed the faces of
his students, he remarked: “Gentlemen, I
am afraid you did not use your powers of obsairvation.
The finger that I put into the cup was no the same
one that I stuck in my mouth afterwards.”
Sir Stephen Mackenzie, who operated
on the Emperor Frederick, was another excellent teacher
under whom we had the good fortune to study.
Indeed, whatever could be said against the teaching
of our college, in this much more important field
of learning, the London Hospital was most signally
fortunate, and, moreover, was famed not only in London,
but all the world over. Our “walking class”
used to number men from the United States to Australia,
insomuch that the crowds became so large that the
teachers could not get room to pass along. It
was this fact which led to the practice, now almost
universal, of carrying the patient in his bed with
a nurse in attendance into the theatre for observation
as more comfortable and profitable for all concerned.
On changing over to the surgical side
in the hospital, we were employed in a very similar
manner, only we were called “dressers,”
and under the house surgeon had all the care of a
number of surgical patients. My good fortune
now brought me under the chieftaincy of Sir Frederick
Treves, the doyen of teachers. His great message
was self-reliance. He taught dogmatically as
one having authority, and always insisted that we
should make up our minds, have a clear idea of what
we were doing, and then do it. His ritual was
always thought out, no detail being omitted, and each
person had exactly his share of work and his share
of responsibility. It used greatly to impress
patients, and he never underestimated the psychical
value of having their complete confidence. Thus,
on one occasion asking a dresser for his diagnosis,
the student replied:
“It might be a fracture, sir,
or it might be only sprained.”
“The patient is not interested
to know that it might be measles, or it might be toothache.
The patient wants to know what is the matter, and
it is your business to tell it to him or he will go
to a quack who will inform him at once.”
All his teachings were, like Mark
Twain’s, enhanced by such over-emphasis or exaggeration.
He could make an article in the “British Medical
Journal” on Cholecystenterostomy amusing to a
general reader, and make an ordinary remark as cutting
as an amputation knife. He never permitted laxity
of any kind in personal appearance or dress, or any
imposing on the patients. His habit of saying
openly exactly what he meant made many people fear,
as much as they respected, him. However, he was
always, in spite of it, the most popular of all the
chiefs because he was so worth while.
One incident recurs to my mind which
I must recount as an example when psychology failed.
A Whitechapel “lady,” suffering with a
very violent form of delirium tremens, was lying screeching
in a strait-jacket on the cushioned floor of the padded
room. With the usual huge queue of students following,
he had gone in to see her, as I had been unable to
get the results desired with a reasonable quantity
of sedatives and soporifics. It was a very rare
occasion, for cases which did not involve active surgery
he left strictly alone. After giving a talk on
psychical influence he had the jacket removed as “a
relic of barbarism,” and in a very impressive
way looking into her glaring eyes and shaking his
forefinger at her, he said: “Now, you are
comfortable, my good woman, and will sleep. You
will make no more disturbance whatever.”
There was an unusual silence. The woman remained
absolutely passive, and we all turned to follow the
chief out. Suddenly the “lady” called
out, “Hi, hi,” and some perverse
spirit induced Sir Frederick to return. Looking
back with defiant eyes she screamed out, “You!
You with a faice! You do think yerself
clever, don’t yer?”
The strange situation was only relieved by his bursting
into a genuine fit of laughter.
Among other celebrated men who were
admired and revered was Mr. Harry Fenwick on the surgical
side, for whom I had the honour of illustrating in
colours his prize Jacksonian essay. Any talent
for sketching, especially in colours, is of great
value to the student of medicine. Once you have
sketched a case from nature, with the object of showing
the peculiarity of the abnormality, it remains permanently
in your mind. Besides this, it forces you to note
small differences; in other words, it teaches you
to “obsairve.” Thus, in the skin
department I was sent to reproduce a case of anthrax
of the neck, a rare disease in England, though all
men handling raw hides are liable to contract it.
The area had to be immediately excised; yet one never
could forget the picture on one’s mind.
On another occasion a case of genuine leprosy was
brought in, with all the dreadful signs of the disease.
The macula rash was entirely unique so far as I knew,
but a sketch greatly helped to fix it on one’s
memory. The poor patient proved to be one of
the men who was handling the meat in London’s
greatest market at Smithfield. A tremendous hue
and cry spread over London when somehow the news got
into the paper, and vegetarianism received a temporary
boost which in my opinion it still badly needs for
the benefit of the popular welfare.
Among the prophets of that day certainly
should be numbered another of our teachers, Dr. Sutton,
an author, and very much of a personality. For
while being one of the consulting physicians of the
largest of London hospitals, he was naturally scientific
and strictly professional. He was very far, however,
from being the conventionalist of those days, and
the younger students used to look greatly askance
at him. His message always was: “Drugs
are very little use whatever. Nature is the source
of healing. Give her a chance.” Thus,
a careful history would be read over to him; all the
certain signs of typhoid would be noted and
his comment almost always was: “This case
won’t benefit by drugs. We will have the
bed wheeled out into the sunshine.” The
next case would be acute lobar pneumonia and the same
treatment would be adopted. “This patient
needs air, gentlemen. We must wheel him out into
the sunshine” and so on. How
near we are coming to his teaching in these days is
already impressing itself upon our minds. Unfortunately
the fact that the doctors realize that medicines are
not so potent as our forbears thought has not left
the public with the increased confidence in the profession
which the infinitely more rational treatment of to-day
justifies, and valuable time is wasted and fatal delays
incurred, by a return of the more impressionable public
to quacks with high-sounding titles, or to cults where
faith is almost credulity.
Truly one has lived through wonderful
days in the history of the healing art. The first
operations which I saw performed at our hospitals
were before Lord Lister’s teaching was practised;
though even in my boyhood I remember getting leave
to run up from Marlborough to London to see my brother,
on whom Sir Joseph Lister had operated for osteomyelitis
of the leg. Our most famous surgeon in 1880 was
Sir Walter Rivington; and to-day there rises in memory
the picture of him removing a leg at the thigh, clad
in a blood-stained, black velvet coat, and without
any attempt at or idea of asepsis. The main thing
was speed, although the patient was under ether, and
in quickly turning round the tip of the sword-like
amputation knife, he made a gash in the patient’s
other leg. The whole thing seemed horrible enough
to us students, but the surgeon smiled, saying, “Fortunately
it is of no importance, gentlemen. The man will
not live.”
The day came when every one worked
under clouds of carbolic steam which fizzed and spouted
from large brass boilers over everything; and then
the time when every one was criticizing the new, young
surgeon, Treves, who was daring to discard it, and
getting as good results by scrupulous cleanliness.
His aphorism was, “Gentlemen, the secret of
surgery is the nailbrush.” Now with blood
examinations, germ cultures, sera tests, X-rays, and
a hundred added improvements, one can say to a fisherman
in far-off Labrador arriving on a mail steamer, and
to whom every hour lost in the fishing season spells
calamity, “Yes, brother, you can be operated
on and the wound will be healed and you will be ready
to go back by the next steamer, unless some utterly
unforeseen circumstance arises.”
The fallibility of diagnosis was at
this very impressionable time fixed upon my mind a
fact that has since served me in good stead. For
what can be more reactionary in human life than the
man who thinks he knows it all, whether it be in science,
philosophy, or religion?
During my Christmas vacation I was
asked to go north and visit my father’s brother,
a well-known captain in Her Majesty’s Navy, who
was also an inventor in gun machinery and sighting
apparatus, and who had been appointed the naval head
of Lord Armstrong’s great works at Yarrow-on-the-Tyne.
All that I was told was that he had been taken with
such severe pains in the back that he needed some one
with him, and my new-fledged dignity of “walking
the hospitals” was supposed to qualify me especially
for the post. Already my uncle had seen many
doctors in London and had been ordered to the Continent
for rest. After some months, not a bit improved,
he had again returned to London. This time the
doctor told his wife that it was a mental trouble,
and that he should be sent to an asylum. This
she most indignantly denied, and yet desired my company
as the only medical Grenfell, who at such a crisis
could stay in the house without being looked upon
as a warder or keeper. Meantime they had consulted
Sir C.P., who had told my uncle that he had an aneurism
of his aorta, and that he must be prepared to have
it break and kill him any minute. His preparations
were accordingly all made, and personally I fully
anticipated that he would fall dead before I left.
He put up a wonderful fight against excruciating pain,
of which I was frequently a witness. But the
days went by and nothing happened, so I returned to
town and another young doctor took my place. He
also got tired of waiting and suggested it might be
some spinal trouble. He induced them once more
to visit London and see Sir Victor Horsley, whose work
on the brains of animals and men had marked an epoch
in our knowledge of the central nervous system.
Some new symptoms had now supervened, and the famous
neurologist at once diagnosed a tumour in the spinal
canal. Such a case had never previously been
operated on successfully, but there was no alternative.
The operation was brilliantly performed and a wonderful
success obtained. The case was quoted in the next
edition of our surgical textbooks.
A little later my father’s health
began to fail in London, the worries and troubles
of a clergyman’s work among the poor creatures
who were constantly passing under his care utterly
overwhelming him. We had agreed that a long change
of thought was necessary and he and I started for
a fishing and sight-seeing tour in Norway. Our
steamer was to sail from the Tyne, and we went up
to Newcastle to catch it. There some evil fiend
persuaded my father to go and consult a doctor about
his illness, for Newcastle has produced some well-known
names in medicine. Thus, while I waited at the
hotel to start, my father became persuaded that he
had some occult disease of the liver, and must remain
in Newcastle for treatment. I, however, happened
to be treasurer of the voyage, and for the first time
asserting my professional powers, insisted that I
was family physician for the time, and turned up in
the evening with all our round-trip tickets and reservations
taken and paid for. In the morning I had the trunks
packed and conveyed aboard, and we sailed together
for one of the most enjoyable holidays I ever spent.
We travelled much afoot and in the little native carriages
called “stolkjaerre,” just jogging along,
staying anywhere, fishing in streams, and living an
open-air life which the increasing flood of tourists
in after years have made much less possible.
We both came back fitter in body and soul for our
winter’s work.
My father’s death a year later
made a great difference to me, my mother removing
to live with my grandmother at Hampstead, it being
too lonely and not safe for her to live alone in East
London. Twice our house had been broken into
by burglars, though both times fruitlessly. The
second occasion was in open daylight during the hour
of evening service on a Sunday. Only a couple
of maids would have been in the house had I not been
suffering from two black eyes contracted during the
Saturday’s football game. Though I had accompanied
the others out, decidedly my appearance might have
led to misinterpretations in church, and I had returned
unnoticed. The men escaped by some method which
they had discovered of scaling a high fence, but I
was close behind following them through the window
by which they had entered. Shortly afterward
I happened to be giving evidence at the Old Bailey
on one of the many cases of assault and even murder
where the victims were brought into hospital as patients.
London was ringing with the tale of a barefaced murder
at Murray Hill in North London, where an exceedingly
clever piece of detective work, an old lantern discovered
in a pawnbroker’s shop in Whitechapel miles
away from the scene of the crime was the
means of bringing to trial four of the most rascally
looking villains I ever saw. The trial preceded
ours and we had to witness it. One of the gang
had turned “Queen’s evidence” to
save his own neck. So great was the hatred of
the others for him and the desire for revenge that
even in the court they were hand-cuffed and in separate
stands. Fresh from my own little fracas I learned
what a fool I had been, for in this case also the
deed was done in open daylight, and the lawn had tight
wires stretched across it. The young son, giving
chase as I did, had been tripped up and shot through
his abdomen for his pains. He had, however, crawled
back, made his will, and was subsequently only saved
by a big operation. He looked in terrible shape
when giving evidence at the trial.
The giving of expert evidence on such
occasions was the only opportunity which the young
sawbones had of earning money. True we only got
a guinea a day and expenses, but there were no other
movie shows in those days, and we learned a lot about
medical jurisprudence, a subject which always greatly
interested me. It was no uncommon sight either
at the “London” or the “Poplar,”
at both of which I did interne work, to see a policeman
always sitting behind the screen at the foot of the
patient’s bed. One man, quite a nice fellow
when not occupied in crime, had when furiously drunk
killed his wife and cut his own throat. By the
curious custom of society all the skill and money that
the hospital could offer to save a most valuable life
was as usual devoted to restoring this man to health.
He was weaned slowly back from the grave by special
nurses and treatment, till it began to dawn upon him
that he might have to stand his trial. He would
ask me if I thought he would have to undergo a long
term, for he had not been conscious of what he was
doing. As he grew better, and the policeman arrived
to watch him, he decided that it would probably be
quite a long time. He had a little place of his
own somewhere, and he used to have chickens and other
presents sent up to fellow patients, and would have
done so to the nurses, only they could not receive
them. I was not personally present at his trial,
but I felt really sorry to hear that they hanged him.
Many of these poor fellows were only
prevented from ending their own lives by our using
extreme care. The case of one wretched man, driven
to desperation, I still remember. “Patient
male; age forty-five; domestic trouble fired
revolver into his mouth. Finding no phenomena
of interest develop, fired a second chamber into his
right ear. Still no symptoms worthy of notice.
Patient threw away pistol and walked to hospital.”
Both bullets had lodged in the thick parts of his skull,
and doing no damage were left there. A subsequent
note read: “Patient to-day tried to cut
his throat with a dinner-knife which he had hidden
in his bed. Patient met with no success.”
Another of my cases which interested me considerably
was that of a professional burglar who had been operated
upon in almost every part of the kingdom, and was
inclined to be communicative, as the job which had
brought him to hospital had cost him a broken spine.
Very little hope was held out to him that he would
ever walk again. He was clear of murder, for he
said it was never his practice to carry firearms, being
a nervous man and apt to use them if he had them and
got alarmed when busy burglaring. He relied chiefly
on his extraordinary agility and steady head to escape.
His only yarn, however, was his last. He and a
friend had been detailed by the gang to the job of
plundering one of a row of houses. The plans
of the house and of the enterprise were all in order,
but some unexpected alarm was given and he fled upstairs,
climbed through a skylight onto the roof, and ran along
the gables of the tiles, not far ahead of the police,
who were armed and firing at him. He could easily
have gotten away, as he could run along the coping
of the brick parapet without turning a hair, but he
was brought up by a narrow side street on which he
had not counted, not having anticipated, like cats,
a battle on the tiles. It was only some twelve
or fifteen feet across the gap, and the landing on
the other side was a flat roof. Taking it all
at a rush he cleared the street successfully, but
the flat roof, black with ages of soot, proved to be
a glass skylight, and he entered a house in a way new
even to him. His falling on a stone floor many
feet below accounted for his “unfortunate accident”!
After many months in bed, the man took an unexpected
turn, his back mended, and with only a slight leg paralysis
he was able to return to the outside world. His
long suffering and incarceration in hospital were
accepted by the law as his punishment, and he assured
me by all that he held sacred that he intended to
retire into private life. Oddly enough, however,
while on another case, I saw him again in the prisoner’s
dock and at once went over and spoke to him.
“Drink this time, Doctor,”
he said. “I was down on my luck and the
barkeeper went out and left his till open. I climbed
over and got the cash, but there was so little space
between the bar and the wall that with my stiff back
I couldn’t for the life of me get back.
I was jammed like a stopper in a bottle.”
Among many interesting experiences,
one especially I shall never forget. Like the
others, it occurred during my service for Sir Frederick
Treves as house-surgeon, and I believe he told the
story. A very badly burned woman had been brought
into hospital. Her dress had somehow got soaked
in paraffin and had then taken fire. Her terribly
extensive burns left no hope whatever of her recovery,
and only the conventions of society kept us from giving
the poor creature the relief of euthanasia, or some
cup of laudanum négus. But the law was
interested. A magistrate was brought to the bedside
and the husband sent for. The nature of the evidence,
the meaning of an oath, the importance of the poor
creature acknowledging that her words were spoken
“in hopeless fear of immediate death,”
were all duly impressed upon what remained of her
mind. The police then brought in the savage,
degraded-looking husband, and made him stand between
two policemen at the foot of the bed, facing his mangled
wife. The magistrate, after preliminary questions,
asked her to make her dying statement as to how she
came by her death. There was a terrible moment
of silence. It seemed as if her spirit were no
longer able to respond to the stimuli of life on earth.
Then a sudden rebound appeared to take place, her
eyes lit up with a flash of light, and even endeavouring
to raise her piteous body, she said, “It was
an accident, Judge. I upset the lamp myself,
so help me God”; and just for one moment her
eyes met those of her miserable husband. It was
the last time she spoke.
Tragedy and comedy ran hand in hand
even in this work. St. Patrick’s Day always
made the hospital busy, just as Christmas was the season
for burned children. Beer in an East London “pub”
was generally served in pewter pots, as they were
not easily broken. A common head injury was a
circular scalp cut made by the heavy bottom rim, a
wound which bled horribly. A woman was brought
in on one St. Patrick’s Day, her scalp turned
forward over her face and her long hair a mass of clotted
blood from such a stroke, made while she was on the
ground. When the necessary readjustments had
been made and she was leaving hospital cured, we asked
her what had been the cause of the trouble. “’Twas
just an accidint, yer know. Sure, me an’
another loidy was just havin’ a few words.”
On another occasion late at night,
we were called out of bed by a cantankerous, half-drunken
fellow whom the night porter could not pacify.
“I’m a regular subscriber to this hospital,
and I have never had my dues yet,” he kept protesting.
A new drug to produce immediate vomiting had just
been put on the market, and as it was exactly the
treatment he required, we gave him an injection.
To our dismay, though the medicine is in common use
to-day, either the poison which he had been drinking
or the drug itself caused a collapse followed by head
symptoms. He was admitted, his head shaved and
icebags applied, with the result that next day he
was quite well again. But when he left he had,
instead of a superabundance of curly, auburn hair,
a polished white knob oiled and shining like a State
House at night. We debated whether his subscription
would be as regular in future, though he professed
to be profoundly grateful.
I have digressed, but the intimacy
which grew up between some of my patients and myself
seemed worth while recounting, for they showed me
what I never in any other way could have understood
about the seamy side of life in great cities, of its
terrible tragedies and pathos, of how much good there
is in the worst, and how much need of courage, and
what vast opportunities lie before those who accept
the service of man as their service to God. It
proved to me how infinitely more needed are unselfish
deeds than orthodox words, and how much the churches
must learn from the Labour Party, the Socialist Party,
the Trades-Union, before tens of thousands of our
fellow beings, with all their hopes and fears, loves
and aspirations, have a fair chance to make good.
I learned also to hate the liquor traffic with a loathing
of my soul. I met peers of the realm honoured
with titles because they had grown rich on the degradation
of my friends. I saw lives damned, cruelties
of every kind perpetrated, jails and hospitals filled,
misery, want, starvation, murder, all caused by men
who fattened off the profits and posed as gentlemen
and great people. I have seen men’s mouths
closed whose business in life it was to speak out against
this accursed trade. I have seen men driven from
the profession of priests of God, making the Church
a stench in the nostrils of men who knew values just
as well as those trained in the universities do, all
through alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. This awful
war has been dragging its weary course for over four
years now, and yet England has not tackled this curse
which is throttling her. We sing “God save
the King,” and pretend to believe in the prayer,
and yet we will not face this glaring demon in our
midst. Words may clothe ideas, but it takes deeds
to realize them.
My parents having gone, it became
necessary for me to find lodgings which
I did, “unfurnished,” in the house of a
Portuguese widow. Her husband, who had a good
family name, had gone down in the world, and had disappeared
with another “lady.” The eldest son,
a mathematical genius, had been able to pay his way
through Cambridge University by the scholarships and
prizes which he had won. One beautiful little
dark-eyed daughter of seven was playing in a West End
Theatre as the dormouse in “Alice in Wonderland.”
She was second fiddle to Alice herself, also, and
could sing all her songs. Her pay was some five
pounds a week, poor enough for the attraction she
proved, but more than all the rest of the family put
together earned. At that time I never went to
theatres. Acquaintances had persuaded me that
so many of the girls were ruined on the stage that
for a man taking any interest in Christian work whatever,
it was wrong to attend. Moreover, among my acquaintances
there were not a few theatre fans, and I had nothing
in common with them. The “dormouse,”
however, used to come up and say her parts for my
benefit, and that of occasional friends, and was so
modest and winsome, and her earnings so invaluable
to the family, that I entirely altered my opinion.
Then and there I came to the conclusion that the drama
was an essential part of art, and that those who were
trying to elevate and cleanse it, like Sir Henry Irving,
whose son I had met at Marlborough, must have the
support of a public who demanded clean plays and good
conditions both in front and behind the screen.
When I came to London my father had asked me not to
go to anything but Shakespearian or equally well-recognized
plays until I was twenty-one. Only once did I
enter a music hall and I had plenty to satisfy me
in a very few minutes. Vaudevilles are better
than in those days. The censor does good work,
but it is still the demand which creates the supply,
and whatever improvement has occurred has been largely
due to the taste of the patrons. Medical students
need all the open air they can get in order to keep
body and soul fit, and our contempt for the theatre
fan was justifiable.
My new lodgings being close to Victoria
Park afforded the opportunity for training if one
were unconventional. To practise throwing the
sixteen-pound hammer requires rough ground and plenty
of space, and as I was scheduled for that at the inter-hospital
sports, it was necessary to work when not too many
disinterested parties were around. Even an East-Ender’s
skull is not hammer-proof, as I had seen when a poor
woman was brought into hospital with five circular
holes in her head, the result of blows inflicted by
her husband with a hammer. The only excuse which
the ruffian offered for the murder was that she had
forgotten to wake him, he had been late, and lost his
job.
A number of the boys in my class were
learning to swim. There was only one bathing
lake and once the waters were troubled we drew the
line at going in to give lessons. So we used
to meet at the gate at the hour of opening in the
morning, and thus be going back before most folks
were moving. Nor did we always wait for the park
keeper, but often scaled the gates and so obtained
an even more exclusive dip. Many an evening we
would also “flannel,” and train round and
round the park, or Hackney Common, to improve one’s
wind before some big event. For diet at that
time I used oatmeal, milk, and eggs, and very little
or no meat. It was cheaper and seemed to give
me more endurance; and the real value of money was
dawning on me.
Victoria Park is one of those open
forums where every man with a sore spot goes out to
air his grievance. On Sundays there were little
groups around the trees where orators debated on everything
from a patent medicine to the nature of God.
Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were associated
together in iconoclastic efforts against orthodox
religion, and there was so much truth in some of their
contentions that they were making no little disturbance.
Hanging on their skirts were a whole crowd of ignorant,
dogmatic atheists, who published a paper called “The
Freethinker,” which, while it was a villainous
and contemptible rag, appealed to the passions and
prejudices of the partially educated. To answer
the specious arguments of their propaganda an association
known as the Christian Evidence Society used to send
out lecturers. One of them became quite famous
for his clever arguments and answers, his ready wit,
and really extensive reading. He was an Antiguan,
a black man named Edwards, and had been a sailor before
the mast. I met him at the parish house of an
Episcopal clergyman of a near-by church, who, under
the caption of Christian socialism, ran all kinds
of social agencies that really found their way to
the hearts of the people. His messages were so
much more in deeds than in words that he greatly appealed
to me, and I transferred my allegiance to his church,
which was always well filled. I particularly
remember among his efforts the weekly parish dance.
My religious acquaintances were apt to class all such
simple amusements in a sort of general category as
“works of the Devil,” and turn deaf ears
to every invitation to point out any evil results,
being satisfied with their own statement that it was
the “thin edge of the wedge.” This
good man, however, was very obviously driving a wedge
into the hearts of many of his poor neighbours who
in those days found no opportunity for relief in innocent
pleasures from the sordid round of life in the drab
purlieus of Bethnal Green. This clergyman was
a forerunner of his neighbour, the famous Samuel Barnett
of Mile End, who thought out, started, and for many
years presided over Toynbee House, the first big university
settlement in East London. His workers preached
their gospel through phrases and creeds which they
accepted with mental reservations, but just exactly
in such ways as they believed in absolutely.
At first it used to send a shiver down my spine to
find a church worker who didn’t believe in the
Creed, and stumbled over all our fundamentals.
At first it amazed me that such men would pay their
own expenses to live in a place like Whitechapel,
only to work on drain committees, as delinquent landlord
mentors, or just to give special educational chances
to promising minds, or physical training to unfit
bodies. Yet one saw in their efforts undeniable
messages of real love. Personally I could only
occasionally run up there to meet friends in residence
or attend an art exhibition, but they taught me many
lessons.
Exactly opposite the hospital was
Oxford House, only two minutes distant, which combined
definite doctrinal religion with social work.
Being an Oxford effort it had great attractions for
me. Moreover, right alongside it in the middle
of a disused sugar refinery I had hired the yard,
converted it into a couple of lawn-tennis courts, and
ran a small club. There I first met the famous
Dr. Hensley Henson, now Bishop of Hereford, and also
the present Bishop of London, Dr. Winnington-Ingram a
good all-round athlete. He used to visit in our
wards, and as we had a couple of fives courts, a game
which takes little tune and gives much exercise, we
used to have an afternoon off together, once a week,
when he came over to hospital. Neither of these
splendid men were dignitaries in those days, or I am
afraid they would have found us medicals much more
stand-offish. I may as well admit that we had
not then learned to have any respect for bishops or
church magnates generally. We liked both of these
men because they were unconventional and good sports,
and especially in that they were not afraid to tackle
the atheist’s propaganda in the open. I
have seen Dr. Henson in Whitechapel debating alone
against a hall full of opponents and with a fairness
and infinite restraint, convincing those open to reason
that they were mistaken. Moreover, I have seen
Dr. Ingram doing just the same thing standing on a
stone in the open park. It may all sound very
silly when one knows that by human minds, or to the
human mind, the Infinite can never be demonstrated
as a mathematical proposition. But the point
was that these clergy were proving that they were
real men men who had courage as well as
faith, who believed in themselves and their message,
who deserved the living which they were supposed to
make out of orthodoxy. This the audience knew
was more than could be said of many of the opponents.
Christ himself showed his superb manhood in just such
speaking out.
Indelibly impressed on my mind still
is an occasion when one of the most blatant and vicious
of these opponents of religion fell ill. A Salvation
Army lass found him deserted and in poverty, nursed
and looked after him and eventually made a new man
of him.
Far and away the most popular of the
Park speakers was the Antiguan. His arguments
were so clever it was obvious that he was well and
widely read. His absolute understanding of the
crowd and his witty repartee used frequently to cause
his opponents to lose their tempers, and that was
always their undoing. The crowd as a rule was
very fair and could easily distinguish arguments from
abuse. Thus, on one Sunday the debate was as
to whether nature was God. The atheist representative
was a very loud-voiced demagogue, who when angry betrayed
his Hibernian origin very markedly. Having been
completely worsted and the laugh turned against him
by a clever correction of some one’s, he used
the few minutes given him to reply in violent abuse,
ending up that “ladies and gentlemen did not
come out on holidays to spend their time being taught
English by a damned nigger.”
“Sir,” Edwards answered
from the crowd, “I am a British subject, born
on the island of Antigua, and as much an Englishman
as any Irishman in the country.”
Edwards possessed an inexhaustible
stock of good-humour and his laugh could be heard
halfway across the Park. As soon as his turn came
to mount the stone, he got the crowd so good-natured
that they became angry at the interruptions of the
enemy, and when some one suggested that if nature
were that man’s God, the near-by duckpond was
the natural place for him, there was a rush for him,
and for several subsequent Sundays he was not in evidence.
Edwards was a poor man, his small salary and incessant
generosity left him nothing for holidays, and he was
killing himself with overwork. So we asked him
to join us in the new house which we were fitting
up in Palestine Place. He most gladly did so
and added enormously to our fun. Unfortunately
tuberculosis long ago got its grip upon him, and removed
a valuable life from East London.
It was a queer little beehive in which
we lived in those days, and a more cosmopolitan crowd
could hardly have been found: one young doctor
who has since made his name and fortune in Australia;
another in whose rooms were nearly a hundred cups
for prowess in nearly every form of athletics, and
who also has “made good” in professional
life, besides several others who for shorter or longer
periods were allotted rooms in our house. Among
the more unusual was the “C.M.,” a Brahmin
from India, a priest in his youth, who had been brought
back to England by some society to be educated in
medical missionary work, but whom for some reason
they had dropped. For a short time a clever young
Russian of Hebrew extraction who was studying for
the Church helped to render our common-room social
engagements almost international affairs.
As I write this I am at Charleston,
South Carolina, and I see how hard it will be for
an American to understand the possibility of such a
motley assembly being reasonable or even proper.
It seems to me down here that there must have been
odd feelings sometimes in those days. I can only
say, however, that I never personally even thought
of it. East London is so democratic that one’s
standards are simply those of the value of the man’s
soul as we saw it. If he had been yellow with
pink stripes it honestly would not have mattered one
iota to most of us.
It so happened that there was at that
time in hospital under my care a patient known as
“the elephant man.” He had been starring
under that title in a cheap vaudeville, had been seen
by some of the students, and invited over to be shown
to and studied by our best physicians. The poor
fellow was really exceedingly sensitive about his most
extraordinary appearance. The disease was called
“leontiasis,” and consisted of an enormous
over-development of bone and skin on one side.
His head and face were so deformed as really to resemble
a big animal’s head with a trunk. My arms
would not reach around his hat. A special room
in a yard was allotted to him, and several famous people
came to see him among them Queen Alexandra,
then the Princess of Wales, who afterward sent him
an autographed photograph of herself. He kept
it in his room, which was known as the “elephant
house,” and it always suggested beauty and the
beast. Only at night could the man venture out
of doors, and it was no unusual thing in the dusk of
nightfall to meet him walking up and down in the little
courtyard. He used to talk freely of how he would
look in a huge bottle of alcohol an end
to which in his imagination he was fated to come.
He was of a very cheerful disposition and pathetically
proud of his left side which was normal. Very
suddenly one day he died the reason assigned
being that his head fell forward and choked him, being
too heavy for him to lift up.
In 1886 I passed my examinations and
duly became a member of the College of Physicians
and of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; and
sought some field for change and rest, where also I
could use my newly acquired license to my own, if
to no one else’s, benefit. Among the patients
who came to the London Hospital, there were now and
again fishermen from the large fishing fleets of the
North Sea. They lived out, as it were, on floating
villages, sending their fish to market every day by
fast cutters. Every two or three months, as their
turn came round, a vessel would leave for the home
port on the east coast, being permitted, or supposed
to be permitted, a day at home for each full week
at sea. As the fleets kept the sea summer and
winter and the boats were small, not averaging over
sixty tons, it was a hazardous calling. The North
Sea is nowhere deeper than thirty fathoms, much of
it being under twenty, and in some places only five.
Indeed, it is a recently sunken and still sinking
portion of Europe, so much so that the coasts on both
sides are constantly receding, and when Heligoland
was handed over by the English to the Kaiser, it was
said that he would have to keep jacking it up or soon
there would be none left. Shallow waters exposed
to the fierce gales which sweep the German Ocean make
deep and dangerous seas, which readily break and wash
the decks of craft with low freeboard, such as the
North Sea vessels are obliged to have in order to
get boats in and out to ferry their fish to the cutter.
There being no skilled aid at hand,
the quickest way to get help used to be to send an
injured man to market with the fish. Often it
was a long journey of many days, simple fractures
became compound, and limbs and faculties were often
thus lost. It so happened that Sir Frederick
Treves had himself a love for navigating in small sailing
craft. He had made it a practice to cross the
English Channel to Calais in a sailing lugger every
Boxing Day that is, the day after Christmas.
He was especially interested in those “that
go down to the sea in ships” and had recently
made a trip among the fishing fleets. He told
me that a small body of men, interested in the religious
and social welfare of the deep-sea fishermen, had
chartered a small fishing smack, sent her out among
the fishermen to hold religious services of a simple,
unconventional type, in order to afford the men an
alternative to the grog vessels when fishing was slack,
and to carry first aid, the skipper of the vessel
being taught ambulance work. They wanted, however,
very much to get a young doctor to go out, who cared
also for the spiritual side of the work, to see if
they could use the additional attraction of proper
medical aid to gain the men’s sympathies.
His advice to me was to go and have a look at it.
“If you go in January you will see some fine
seascapes, anyhow. Don’t go in summer when
all of the old ladies go for a rest.”
I therefore applied to go out the
following January, and that fall, while working near
the Great London docks, I used often to look at the
tall East Indiamen, thinking that I soon should be
aboard just such a vessel in the North Sea. It
was dark and raining when my train ran into Yarmouth,
and a dripping, stout fisherman in a blue uniform
met me at that then unattractive and ill-lighted terminus.
He had brought a forlorn “growler” or
four-wheeled cab. Climbing in we drove a mile
or more along a deserted road, and drew up at last
apparently at the back of beyond.
“Where is the ship?” I asked.
“Why, those are her topmasts,”
replied my guide, pointing to two posts projecting
from the sand. “The tide is low and she
is hidden by the quay.”
“Heavens!” I thought; “she’s
no tea clipper, anyhow.”
I climbed up the bank and peered down
in the darkness at the hull of a small craft, a little
larger than our old Roysterer. She was just discernible
by the dim rays of the anchor light. I was hesitating
as to whether I shouldn’t drive back to Yarmouth
and return to London when a cheery voice on deck called
out a hearty welcome. What big things hang on
a smile and a cheery word no man can ever say.
But it broke the spell this time and I had my cabby
unload my bags on the bank and bade him good-night.
As his wheels rumbled away into the rain and dark,
I felt that my cables were cut beyond recall.
Too late to save me, the cheery voice shouted, “Mind
the rigging, it’s just tarred and greased.”
I was already sliding down and sticking to it as I
went. Small as the vessel was she was absolutely
spotless. Her steward, who cooked for all hands,
was smart and in a snow-white suit. The contrast
between-decks and that above was very comforting, though
my quarters were small. The crew were all stocky,
good-humoured, and independent. Democratic as
East London had made me, they impressed me very favourably,
and I began to look forward to the venture with real
pleasure.
Drink was the worst enemy of these
men. The quaysides of the fisherman’s quarters
teemed with low saloons. Wages were even paid
off in them or their annexes, and grog vessels, luring
the men aboard with cheap tobacco and low literature,
plied their nefarious calling with the fleets, and
were the death, body and soul, of many of these fine
specimens of manhood.
There was never any question as to
the real object of the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen.
The words “Heal the sick” carved in large
letters adorned the starboard bow. “Preach
the Word” was on the port, and around the brass
rim of the wheel ran the legend, “Jesus said,
Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”
Thirty years ago we were more conventional than to-day,
and I was much surprised to learn from our skipper
that we were bound to Ostend to ship four tons of tobacco,
sent over from England for us in bond, as he might
not take it out consigned to the high seas. In
Belgium, however, no duty was paid. The only
trouble was that our vessel, to help pay its expenses,
carried fishing gear, and as a fishing vessel could
not get a clearance in Belgium. Our nets and
beams, therefore, had to go out to the fishing grounds
in a friendly trawler while we passed as a mercantile
marine during the time we took on our cargo.
So bitter was the cold that in the
harbour we got frozen in and were able to skate up
the canals. We had eventually to get a steamer
to go around us and smash our ice bonds when we were
again ready for sea. During the next two months
we saw no land except Heligoland and Terschelling or
Skilling, as the fishermen called it far
away in the offing. Nor was our deck once clear
of ice and snow during all the time.
Our duty was to visit as many fleets
as we could, and arrange with some reliable vessel
to take a stock of tobacco for the use of their special
fleet. The ship was to carry about six feet of
blue bunting on her foretopmast stay, a couple of
fathoms above her bowsprit end, so that all the fleet
might know her. She was to sell the tobacco at
a fixed price that just covered the cost, and undersold
the “coper” by fifty per cent. She
was to hoist her flag for business every morning,
while the small boats were out boarding fish on the
carrier, and was to lie as far to leeward of the coper
as possible so that the men could not go to both.
Nineteen such floating depots were eventually arranged
for, with the precaution that if any one of them had
to return to port, he should bring no tobacco home,
but hand over his stock and accounts to a reliable
friend.
These deep-sea fisheries were a revelation
to me, and every hour of the long trip I enjoyed.
It was amazing to me to find over twenty thousand
men and boys afloat the merriest, cheerfullest
lot which I had ever met. They were hail-fellow-well-met
with every one, and never thought of deprivation or
danger. Clothing, food, customs, were all subordinated
to utility. They were the nearest possible thing
to a community of big boys, only needing a leader.
In efficiency and for their daring resourcefulness
in physical difficulties and dangers, they were absolutely
in a class by themselves, embodying all the traits
of character which make men love to read the stories
of the buccaneers and other seamen of the sixteenth-century
period.
Each fleet had its admiral and vice-admiral,
appointed partly by the owner, and partly by the skippers
of the vessels. The devil-may-care spirit was
always a great factor with the men. The admiral
directed operations by flags in the daytime and by
rockets at night, thus indicating what the fleet was
to do and where they were to fish. Generally
he had the fastest boat, and the cutters, hunting for
the fleet always lay just astern of the admiral, the
morning after their arrival. Hundreds of men
would come for letters, packages, to load fish, to
get the news of what their last assignment fetched
in market. Moreover, a kind of Parliament was
held aboard to consider policies and hear complaints.
At first it was a great surprise to
me how these men knew where they were, for we never
saw anything but sky and sea, and not even the admirals
carried a chronometer or could work out a longitude;
and only a small percentage of the skippers could
read or write. They all, however, carried a sextant
and could by rule of thumb find a latitude roughly.
But that was only done at a pinch. The armed lead
was the fisherman’s friend. It was a heavy
lead with a cup on the bottom filled fresh each time
with sticky grease. When used, the depth was
always called out by the watch, and the kind of sand,
mud, or rock which stuck to the grease shown to the
skipper. “Fifteen fathoms and coffee grounds must
be on the tail end of the Dogger. Put her a bit
more to the westward, boy,” he would remark,
and think no more about it, though he might have been
three or four days looking for his fleet, and not
spoken to a soul since he left land. I remember
one skipper used to have the lead brought down below,
and he could tell by the grit between his teeth after
a couple of soundings which way to steer. It
sounds strange even now, but it was so universal, being
just second-nature to the men, who from boyhood had
lived on the sea, that we soon ceased to marvel at
it. Skippers were only just being obliged to
have certificates. These they obtained by viva
voce examinations. You would sometimes hear
an aspiring student, a great black-bearded pirate
over forty-seven inches around the chest, and possibly
the father of eight or ten children, as he stamped
about in his watch keeping warm, repeating the courses “East
end of the Dogger to Horn S.E. by /2 and W. point
of the island [Heligoland] to Barkum /2 W. Ower
Light to Hazebrough N.N.W.” and so
on. Their memories were not burdened by a vast
range of facts, but in these things they were the
nearest imaginable to Blind Tom, the famous slave musician.
Our long round only occupied us about
a month, and after that we settled down with the fleet
known as the Great Northerners. Others were the
Short Blues, the Rashers (because they were streaked
like a piece of bacon), the Columbia, the Red Cross,
and so on. Sometimes during the night while we
were fishing into the west, a hundred sail or more
of vessels, we would pass through another big fleet
coming the other way, and some of our long trawls
and warps would tangle with theirs. Beyond the
beautiful spectacle of the myriads of lights bobbing
up and down often enough on mighty rough seas for
it needed good breezes to haul our trawls would
be the rockets and flares of the entangled boats,
and often enough also rockets and flares from friends,
and from cutters. One soon became so friendly
with the men that one would not return at night to
the ship, but visit around and rejoin the Mission
ship boarding fish next day, to see patients coming
for aid. Though it was strictly against sea rules
for skippers to be off their vessels all night, that
was a rule, like all others on the North Sea, as often
marked in the breach as in the observance. A
goodly company would get together yarning and often
singing and playing games until it was time to haul
the trawl and light enough to find their own vessel
and signal for the boat.
The relation of my new friends to
religion was a very characteristic one. Whatever
they did, they did hard. Thus one of the admirals,
being a thirsty soul, and the grog vessels having
been adrift for a longer while than he fancied, conceived
the fine idea of holding up the Heligoland saloons.
So one bright morning he “hove his fleet to”
under the lee of the island and a number of boats
went ashore, presumably to sell fish. Altogether
they landed some five hundred men, who held up the
few saloons for two or three days. As a result
subsequently only one crew selling fish to the island
was allowed ashore at one time. The very gamble
of their occupation made them do things hard.
Thus it was a dangerous task to throw out a small
boat in half a gale of wind, fill her up with heavy
boxes of fish, and send her to put these over the
rail of a steamer wallowing in the trough of a mountainous
sea.
But it was on these very days when
less fish was sent to market that the best prices
were realized, and so there were always a number of
dare-devils, who did not care if lives were lost so
long as good prices were obtained and their record
stood high on the weekly list of sales which was forwarded
to both owners and men. I have known as many
as fourteen men upset in one morning out of these boats;
and the annual loss of some three hundred and fifty
men was mostly from this cause. Conditions were
subsequently improved by the Board of Trade, who made
it manslaughter against the skipper if any man was
drowned boarding fish, unless the admiral had shown
his flags to give the fleet permission to do so.
In those days, however, I often saw twenty to thirty
boats all tied up alongside the cutter at one time,
the heavy seas every now and again rolling the cutter’s
sail right under water, and when she righted again
it might come up under the keels of some of the boats
and tip them upside down. Thus any one in them
was caught like a mouse under a trap or knocked to
pieces trying to swim among the rushing, tossing boats.
As a rule we hauled at midnight, and
it was always a fresh source of wonder, for the trawl
was catholic in its embrace and brought up anything
that came in its way. To emphasize how comparatively
recently the Channel had been dry land, many teeth
and tusks of mammoths who used to roam its now buried
forests were given up to the trawls by the ever-shifting
sands. Old wreckage of every description, ancient
crockery, and even a water-logged, old square-rigger
that must have sunk years before were brought one
day as far as the surface by the stout wire warp.
After the loss of a large steamer called the Elbe
many of the passengers who had been drowned were hauled
up in this way; and on one occasion great excitement
was caused in Hull by a fisher lad from that port
being picked up with his hands tied behind his back
and a heavy weight on his feet. The defence was
that the boy had died, and was thus buried to save
breaking the voyage supported by the fact
that another vessel had also picked up the boy and
thrown him overboard again for the same reason.
But those who were a bit superstitious thought otherwise,
and more especially as cruelty to these boys was not
unknown.
These lads were apprenticed to the
fishery masters largely from industrial or reformatory
schools, had no relations to look after them, and
often no doubt gave the limit of trouble and irritation.
On the whole, however, the system worked well, and
a most excellent class of capable seamen was developed.
At times, however, they were badly exploited.
During their apprenticeship years they were not entitled
to pay, only to pocket money, and yet sometimes the
whole crew including the skipper were apprentices
and under twenty-one years of age. Even after
that they were fitted for no other calling but to follow
the sea, and had to accept the master’s terms.
There were no fishermen’s unions, and the men
being very largely illiterate were often left victims
of a peonage system in spite of the Truck Acts.
The master of a vessel has to keep discipline, especially
in a fleet, and the best of boys have faults and need
punishing while on land. These skippers themselves
were brought up in a rough school, and those who fell
victims to drink and made the acquaintance of the remedial
measures of our penal system of that day were only
further brutalized by it. Religion scarcely touched
the majority; for their brief periods of leave ashore
were not unnaturally spent in having a good time.
To those poisoned by the villainous beverages sold
on the sordid grog vessels no excess was too great.
Owners were in sympathy with the Mission in trying
to oust the coper, because their property, in the
form of fish, nets, stores, and even sails, were sometimes
bartered on the high seas for liquor. On one
occasion during a drunken quarrel in the coper’s
cabin one skipper threw the kerosene lamp over another
lying intoxicated on the floor. His heavy wool
jersey soaked in kerosene caught fire. He rushed
for the deck, and then, a dancing mass of flames,
leaped overboard and disappeared.
Occasionally skippers devised punishments
with a view to remedying the defects of character.
Thus one lad, who through carelessness had on more
than one occasion cooked the “duff” for
dinner badly, was made to take his cinders on deck
when it was his time to turn in, and go forward to
the fore-rigging. Then he had to take one cinder,
go up to the cross-tree, and throw it over into the
sea, come down the opposite rigging and repeat the
act until he had emptied his scuttle. Another
who had failed to clean the cabin properly had one
night, instead of going to bed, to take a bucketful
of sea water and empty it with a teaspoon into another,
and so to and fro until morning. On one occasion
a poor boy was put under the ballast deck, that is,
the cabin floor, and forgotten. He was subsequently
found dead, drowned in the bilge water. It was
easy to hide the results of cruelty, for being washed
overboard was by no means an uncommon way of disappearing
from vessels with low freeboards in the shallow water
of the North Sea.
A very practical outcome in the mission
work was the organization of the Fisher Lads’
Letter-Writing Association. The members accepted
so many names of orphan lads at sea and pledged themselves
to write regularly to them. Also, if possible,
they were to look them up when they returned to land,
and indeed do for them much as the War Camp Community
League members are to-day trying to accomplish for
our soldiers and sailors. As every practical
exposition of love must, it met with a very real response,
and brought, moreover, new interests and joys into
many selfish lives.
I remember one lady whose whole care
in life had been her own health. She had nursed
it, and worried over it, and enjoyed ill health so
long, that only the constant recourse to the most refined
stimulants postponed the end which would have been
a merciful relief to others. The effort
of letter-writing remade her. Doctors were forgotten,
stimulants were tabooed, the insignia of invalidism
banished, and to my intense surprise I ran across
her at a fishing port surrounded by a bevy of blue-jerseyed
lads, who were some of those whom she was being blessed
by helping.
The best of efforts, however, sometimes
“gang aft agley.” One day I received
a letter, evidently written in great consternation,
from an elderly spinster of singularly aristocratic
connections and an irreproachableness of life which
was almost painful. The name sent to her by one
of our skippers as a correspondent who needed help
and encouragement was one of those which would be
characterized as common let us say John
Jones. By some perverse fate the wrong ship was
given as an address, and the skipper of it happened
to have exactly the same name. It appeared that
lack of experience in just such work had made her
letter possibly more affectionate than she would have
wished for under the circumstances which developed.
For in writing to me she enclosed a ferocious letter
from a lady of Billingsgate threatening, not death,
but mutilation, if she continued making overtures
to “her John.”