Chapter XXIX (5)

This time we used the very largest wire we had, which was correspondingly more difficult to handle and harder to get to the destroyer, and not until 6 P.M., just as the light started to fail, were we able to get it to the destroyer. And all this time, you must remember, we made a sitting target for a submarine.

The remainder of the squadron were steaming round and round us acting as far as they could as a submarine screen, and individually, I don’t doubt, cursing us heartily for the length of time we were taking. But no enemy craft found us (such opportunities will be missed by fleets which operate in canals), and as twilight settled in we steamed slowly ahead, with rising hopes that this time the tow might hold and that we might succeed in getting her in.

Steaming at revolutions ordinarily sufficient to give us eight knots we made good four to five.

The sea was gradually getting up all the time, and the destroyer was towing crabwise through the water, not dead astern of us so as to give a straight haul, but out on our quarter which put variable strains and jerks on her and on the wire; more especially on the latter at the ‘nip’—that part where the wire led into the two ships, and where the bend due to her not being dead astern of us, came in.

The wind too was on our beam, and the seas rolling on swept the destroyer’s stern away from us causing our wire, a second later, to bring it back with a sudden jerk. Still for half an hour or so all went well, and the remainder of the squadron closed around us, zigzagging to and fro, as we all shaped course for home.

But fate, as you will guess, had no intention of giving up the game so easily, and at 6.45 P.M. our wire broke at the ‘nip.’ The ‘I-told-you-so’s’ were in evidence.

We had now no other wire strong enough to tow by, and so, to the disappointment of us all, another cruiser was detailed to take on the job. Disappointing as it was to us, it must have been far more than that to the destroyer. For thirty-six hours she had lain helpless, with alternate fears of being captured or of breaking up, and that after a sudden collision which would have been sufficient to shake the nerves of many. Four times had she hauled in towing wires, and on each occasion they had parted soon afterwards. Pitched and tossed about in the North Sea swell, tired and wet and with a good deal of their kit gone under, I should think that many of her crew were in that state of mind which is called ‘fed up.’ And now she had to start the game again.

But, profiting by our experience of how great the strain was under the particular conditions, the new cruiser took special precautions, the which I will not detail lest the Bosches benefit. By very clever seamanship and after over three hours’ hard work, mostly in the dark, the destroyer was again in tow, this time more securely; and so we started again on our journey home.

There is not really much more worth relating, for the wind, sea, a couple of snowstorms, our anxious lookout at daylight next morning to see if any enemy were about, and our precautions against submarine attack—these are everyday war events, and make dull reading.

Suffice it to say that our command of the sea was a sufficiently real factor to allow the cripple to be towed home unmolested a few hundred miles, and we came to our base as if no enemy fleet were within a thousand miles—who can accuse the Teuton of no sense of humour when he designated the water we steamed over the ‘German Ocean’?

So, comparatively tamely, concluded a trip which had at one time promised unusual excitement, but which anyhow gave us for four days some interest out of the ordinary, besides to some a fair measure of anxiety.

But wouldn’t Old Tirpitz be peevish if he knew of the chance he had missed?

PRESS BUREAU: PASSED FOR PUBLICATION.

_MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK._

George Frederick Pollock, formerly senior Master of the King’s Bench and King’s Remembrancer, was born on June 1, 1821, and died on May 20, 1915, just before his ninety-fourth birthday. His faculties, his interests, and his affections remained as fresh as ever up to the last. Apart from his unusual personal charm as a human being, his range of reminiscences was extraordinary, not only by reason of his great age and retentive memory, but also of his native and characteristic versatility. I often urged him to collect them, and indeed a publisher offered to send a shorthand writer for as long as was necessary to dictate a volume. But he said that what he wanted was a ‘Boswell,’ and even if such a prodigy had been found George Pollock would most probably have been too tired or bored to go on for many days continuously.

In more recent years I made notes of most conversations that I had with him, but I fear that a full harvest could only have been achieved by everyone following my example, and even my own jottings were sadly casual.

I remember being startled by his remarking one day how delighted he was to see G.R. on the mail-carts. It made him feel ‘quite a boy again.’ He had not seen any of the Georges, but had been astonished, walking down Whitehall as a youth, to see a genial gentleman suddenly look out of his carriage window and put out his tongue. This turned out to be His Majesty King William IV, who wished to indicate to some old naval friends on the pavement that his elevation to the throne had not made him too proud. No wonder that my eldest daughter, on being taken to see him, promptly asked him for his impressions of the execution of Charles I, and was sadly disappointed to find that her great-great-uncle had not attended the ceremony.

George Pollock was no mere lawyer. He was, as his father, the Chief Baron, used proudly to announce to his friends, a first-rate mechanic, and had made a complete study and hobby of clocks and watches.[11] The family watches were always chosen by him and are still going as no other watches go, though they were always a little erratic at first. His accurate observation was never at fault, as when he took up a silver teapot at a wedding reception from among the presents and remarked that it had a hole in it. He told me that when he was leaving Wimbledon he saw his old plumber and said ‘I wish you could explain how it was that I always had to get my pipes put right once a year until ten years ago, when you were too busy and I had to attend to them myself, since when they have never gone wrong.’ The plumber smiled significantly and replied ‘Well, sir, we must live somehow.’ Members of the family who had mishaps with bicycles used to find that the mere mention of the name of Pollock evoked kindly welcome and sometimes even an offer to repair the machine free of charge. This was no doubt partly due to his own ungrudging benevolence. In an age when we are all being exhorted to economise it is refreshing to remember that an official in the Law Courts not so very long ago penetrated a large crowd on a London pavement and discovered George Pollock extended over a grating from which he was trying with an umbrella to extract a penny which an urchin in tears professed to have dropped down the abyss. He was a well-known arbitrator in patent cases. He had some knowledge of astronomy, and counted Sir George Airey and Sir Norman Lockyer among his friends, not to mention other scientific men such as Faraday, Owen, and Hooker.

The John Murray of his day consulted him as to publishing 500 copies of the ‘Origin of Species.’ Murray was extremely sceptical as to the soundness of the work, and thought 500 copies as large a number as it was prudent to print. He remarked that the Darwinian theory was as absurd as though one should contemplate a fruitful union between a poker and a rabbit. George Pollock read the book and remarked that the contents were probably beyond the comprehension of any scientific man then living. But he advised publishing 1000 copies, because Mr. Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the formidable obstacles which he was honest enough to put in his own path. This is an interesting example of the way in which a man of good general ability, accustomed as a lawyer is to apply broad principles of reason to different kinds of subject-matter, may arrive at sounder conclusions than a specialist.

Talks with him were always a liberal education, because they gave first-hand impressions of an excellent observer in regard to many characters whose biographies are often written by persons who have not even seen the subject of the biography. It was thus thrilling for me, who had always admired the career of Mrs. Norton and read a recent account of her life, to hear that at a time when the differences between Mr. and Mrs. George Norton were most acute the Chief Baron put his house at the disposal of both so that Mrs. Norton should see her children there. She was accustomed to meet them in a room at one end of which George Pollock (on at least one occasion) sat and read the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ while she played with them at the other end. Usually his sister Mary was there. The heroines of history are not always wholly approved by their contemporaries. An old man, long since dead, told me that the advent of Florence Nightingale was not at first popular with the soldiers in the Crimea, because they felt embarrassed by the idea of female nursing. Similarly, Mrs. Norton was thought by some to be ‘playing to the gallery,’ and in the opinion of Baron Martin ‘talked to too many men’ on one occasion when crossing the Atlantic. But George Pollock nevertheless sympathised, as his father did, with her position as regards her children.

His talk, as might be expected, shed light on social usages of the past. One night the Duchess of Somerset was driving near Wimbledon and her carriage fell into a ditch. George Pollock was passing and assisted her and the coachman to get the vehicle out of the ditch and collect various toys and pieces of china back into the carriage. The next morning the Duchess, ‘in a refined manner,’ sent a military friend to convey her acknowledgments but did not come herself, since, for aught she knew, her benefactor might have had a ‘vulgar wife who would return the call.’

He mentioned that baths first came into fashion in the ’fifties, and caused much annoyance to a certain old colonel because they encumbered the officers’ luggage. ‘These young men,’ he complained, ‘keep washing themselves till there is not a bit of natural smell about them.’ The only unpardonable smell was of course tobacco. Even onions were preferable. Though the late King Edward introduced smoking as far as he could, even when his hosts drove him into the stable-room, George Pollock, despite his respect for the Church, felt it his duty, even in 1883, to remonstrate with a curate who smoked a cigar at a garden party.

His attitude to the divorce question interested me. He mentioned that all the lawyers of the time strongly supported the Act of 1857 in spite of ecclesiastical opposition. But he felt himself ‘incompetent to form an opinion’ on the question, which curiously illustrated the survival of the old Catholic tradition that marriage should be an institution entirely subject to ecclesiastical control and jurisdiction.

He naturally told many stories of his father and the law. One of his earliest memories was of mischievously abstracting Scarlett’s spectacles from the back of his coat just as he was about to read an important letter to the jury. This was in 1833, when he was a boy of twelve. He mentioned how his brother judges would give way to Maule for fear of his ability and sharp tongue till on one occasion Maule, after delivering judgment and then hearing all the other judgments, suddenly remarked: ‘After mature consideration, I differ from my learned brothers. I have come to the conclusion that my judgment was wrong, and the first misgivings that occurred to me about it were due to the fact that my brothers agreed with it.’

As a boy of eighteen he had attended the famous trial of John Frost and others whom his father ably defended on a charge of high treason at Monmouth. He used to relate with great gusto the objection to the proceedings taken on the ground that the list of witnesses had not been handed to the prisoners _with_ the copy of the indictment as prescribed by the Act of Queen Anne. It was in that trial that a woman was closely cross-examined about the movements of her husband who had returned home very late and come straight up to bed. ‘As he was getting into bed,’ she said, ‘his words were⸺’ But here she was sharply interrupted by Counsel: ‘You must not tell us what he _said_, because that is not evidence; you can only tell us what he _did_.’

His grandfather, David Pollock, had come to London from Berwick and started a saddler and military contractor’s business at Charing Cross. David’s father was a bookseller at Berwick-on-Tweed, and his grandfather (George Pollock thought) was a cobbler at Perth in the seventeenth century. David died in 1815, and was embarrassed by the fact that Parliament did not allow enough money to cover the liabilities of the Duke of York, not to mention those of the Duke of Kent. He was sometimes in attendance on Royalty itself, when he had to present himself in Court dress. But David died solvent in 1815, and his business was carried on for two years afterwards by his widow and his son William. William died early at the age of thirty-five. Another son, David, who became before his death Lord Chief Justice of Bombay, was sixty-seven at the time of his death. He has been described as a singularly lovable man. Of the other sons George, my great-uncle’s godfather, was ultimately a Field-Marshal, and Frederick the Chief Baron of the Exchequer. It was quite usual for one of the sons to sleep under the counter if the house was more full than usual, and more than one slept there on the occasion of David’s funeral. The other son, John, was an adventurous solicitor. He was renowned for his prowess at racquets and generally as an athlete. In the same day he once walked from London to Windsor, won a foot race, and walked back again.

But the hero of George Pollock’s stories was usually his father, the Chief Baron, whose judgments bulk so large in the Common Law of England. Unlike his brother John, he thought taking exercise a bore unless it took the form of dancing or of leaping over tables and chairs, as a friend of mine who is still alive saw him doing at an hotel in Norwich after receiving a pair of white gloves, when he was about seventy-five years old. He drove up from Hatton every day in his family coach, though his sedentary habits never prevented his doing justice to his excellent brown sherry, a few bottles of which I once had the privilege of possessing in my own cellar. Though he kept very open house at Hatton, he had a frugal mind in less essential matters. Thus, on consulting Sir Harris Nicolas in regard to tracing the family coat of arms, he was told that it would cost £100 in London, but subsequently discovered that the same operation could be performed in Edinburgh for £20, which gave him great satisfaction. There is a romantic legend that the Pollocks were ruined by the Hanoverians in the Rebellion of 1715, and that the Pollock boar is to be found on a prison wall in Carlisle Castle, presumably carved by a Pollock in captivity. But the Chief Baron cared little for these things, and derived pleasure from recording that his father was a saddler and that he owed much to his mother’s co-operation in the family business and belief in himself when a boy. His career at Trinity College, Cambridge, was mainly due to her unsparing efforts.

He had a very human sympathy with prisoners. I have a volume of his notes of evidence, and in one of the murder trials he lays great stress to the jury on the fact that there was no Court of Criminal Appeal. There is a story of a certain burglar having been induced by the prison chaplain to atone for his crime by pleading guilty before the Chief Baron. But after an interval in the Court the burglar returned to the chaplain _acquitted_. ‘When I saw that good kind man sitting in Court,’ he explained, ‘I knew I should be acquitted and really could not bring myself to plead guilty.’

I have put together as much as I can have recorded of George Pollock’s reminiscences. Probably there is better material at the disposal of others, but perhaps this attempt to collect what I heard may stimulate a better qualified relation or friend to write something worthier of him. Such a collection would to some extent mitigate the loss of his winning personality. For a man to be missed as he now is after dying on the verge of his ninety-fourth birthday shows how little old age can extinguish a rare and singularly loving spirit. Up to the last he answered every letter by return of post, and his letters were as affectionate as on the other hand they were businesslike when the occasion demanded. We shall not see his like again. Even his type is gone. The combination of kindliness, geniality, and pawky humour that distinguished him is not to be found in our day.

‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?’

E. S. P. HAYNES.

FOOTNOTES

[11] He chose the clock which now stands in the smoking-room of the Athenæum.

_LADY CONNIE._

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.

Copyright, 1915, by Mrs. Humphry Ward in the United States of America.