Chapter EIGHTEEN

Stories of Famous Folk--Mr. Lloyd George Chaffed by Lord
Birkenhead--We Journey Together to Eat Oysters--Sir John
Foster Fraser, Max Pemberton and Myself Make a Bet--How
the Ex-Premier “Pulled Our Leg”--Sir Robert Horne and the
New Zealand Mutton--General “Brab” Brabazon and His Good
Looks--Eveleigh Nash’s Funny Stories--Coulson Kernahan
Recounts Some Amusing Episodes--Miss May Edgington and
the Film Producer--How a Novelist Rode a Race--Sir Rider
Haggard and Myself Have an Adventure.

Last October I went as fellow-guest with Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Birkenhead, and Sir Laming Worthington Evans down to the annual oyster feast at Colchester. The Mayor of Colchester had asked me to propose the toast of “The Colne Oyster Fisheries”--why I know not--but as Mr. Lloyd George was available at the last moment I happily escaped the necessity of telling a lie as excuse.

We were a merry party on the way down, for it included T. P. O’Connor, the Lord Mayor of London and Lady Mayoress, Sir John Foster Fraser, Max Pemberton, and Mr. Lloyd George, who made us laugh with his many humorous remarks. He was wearing a particularly shabby felt hat, and Lord Birkenhead, always smartly groomed, chipped him about it.

Mr. Lloyd George took off his faded hat, regarded it critically, and said:

“Do you think anybody will notice it? It’s moving day to-day, for we are clearing out of Downing Street; the fact is, I couldn’t find another!”

Sir John Foster Fraser, Max Pemberton, and myself, then made a bet that somebody at the coming feast of oysters would in the course of his speech, certainly refer to “the succulent bivalve.”

Later we all three listened intently to the speeches, after we had eaten dozens of delicious oysters, washed down with Chablis.

Suddenly Mr. Lloyd George, beaming with good humour, rose, and in the course of his speech said: “And now that we have just partaken of these very succulent”--and then he paused and looked across to where Max and I were seated, and smiled slyly--“these very succulent oysters,” he went on.

I heard a distinct groan from Foster Fraser, near by.

At that function the Mayor of Colchester had, for some reason, issued the invitation to “Sir” William Le Queux, and as such I appeared in all the newspapers, much to the amusement of my friends and also to that of the ex-Prime Minister.

I have met so many famous folk, and heard so many stories told, that I hardly know where to commence.

A dear friend of mine who often kindly invited me to her delightful house, “Inchmery,” is Constance Lady de la Warr, who is a most charming hostess of the old school; she is extremely well versed in literature, and knows innumerable literary people. Her son, the late Earl, was a great friend of mine in the days when he was developing Bexhill and when all the financiers who helped him took their “pound of flesh,” much to the dear, but rather erratic, Earl’s detriment.

One winter evening, his lordship met me at a railway station on the border of the New Forest, and drove me to his mother’s house so furiously in the dark that I never thought I should live to enter the well-lighted stone hall. But I did, and there found Eveleigh Nash awaiting me, for he has been for many years a great friend of the de la Warrs.

That night at dinner I remember he told us an amusing story. He said: “I once knew well a wonderful old lady, Mrs. Herbert of Llanover (the mother of Lord Treowen). She was nearly ninety when she died, but to the end her brain was clear, and her memory amazing; and, when I used to stay with her at Llanover, she told me many good stories, of which the following is a sample.

“She married, in the early reign of Queen Victoria, Mr. John Arthur Jones of Llanarth Court, Monmouth, but she had not long been Mrs. Jones before she hated the name and asked her husband whether he could arrange to take the surname of Herbert, which he was quite entitled to do, as his family had inter-married with the Herberts. Being a very punctilious gentleman, Mr. Jones decided, before taking any definite steps in the matter, that he would write to Lord Pembroke, the head of the Herbert family, to ask whether he had any objection to his taking the name of Herbert. To this inquiry Pembroke replied, ‘I have not the slightest objection to your assuming the name of Herbert, provided in turn you don’t ask me to take the name of Jones.’”

I can recall two more amusing stories Nash told before the smoking-room fire at the Devonshire Club, with Lewis Edmunds, K.C., the chairman of the committee, standing astride on the hearthrug, and Noel Mobbs, Lord Blyth, and Lord Cowdray listening.

He said:

“General Sir John Brabazon, who died recently, was a well-known figure in town. Among his friends he was called ‘Brab,’ but as he never could sound the letter ‘r’ he was more familiarly referred to as Bwab. He was once talking to a lady in the drawing-room of a house where he had been invited to dinner, when an ugly-looking man with a large blue patch on his cheek and nose came into the room. Brab, who hadn’t caught the lady’s name, turned to her and said in a horrified accent, ‘What a dreadful looking fellow!’ ‘Excuse me, General Brabazon,’ replied the lady frigidly, ‘but that is my husband.’ ‘Oh, really,’ said Brab, who was not in the least perturbed by his blunder, ‘how very interesting that I should have met you this evening, because very likely you can tell me--_is he like that all over_?’”

We all laughed, whereupon Nash went on:

“Dr. W. A. Chapple, who was Liberal M.P. for Stirlingshire for several years, told me an amusing story about Sir Robert Horne, the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir Robert was the Conservative candidate who opposed him, and having heard that Dr. Chapple was a native of New Zealand, he determined to make the best of the information. One evening Sir Robert was addressing a meeting in the parish of Slamanan, where he was born, and remarked, ‘I see around me many old friends with whom I have played on the green as a boy, and I venture to think that you would rather have the home-bred stock than New Zealand mutton.’ This was received with cheers and much laughter, but, unfortunately, its effect was spoilt by an old Scotsman, who shouted from the back of the hall, ‘We can do fine wi’ the mutton; it’s the horns we dinna want.’ Sir Robert Horne was not returned at that election.”

* * * * *

Basil Tozer, whose newly-published volume, _Recollections of a Rolling Stone_, has been so much talked about, I have known for many years, and among amusing stories that he has not included in his book is one that he told me in Boodle’s recently.

For some months during the war he was billeted in a little cosmopolitan hotel in Rouen, and on going up to his bedroom rather late one night he found that his heavy earthenware hand basin had not been emptied. Deciding on a course habitual to the aborigines of the town, he opened his bedroom window, meaning to empty his basin out of it, when to his horror the basin slipped from his hands and fell with a crash on to a glass roof on the ground beneath, and on to the table where a lot of Canadian N.C.O.’s were playing jack-pot.

“The howls of execration and outburst of frightful language that followed I shall never forget as long as I live,” Tozer said to me. To avoid discovery he at once switched off the light and jumped into bed, and next day he had the satisfaction of hearing the Canadian N.C.O.’s declaring to each other the awful things they would do to the owner of that basin if they only could lay hands on him.

But they never did lay hands on him!

The eccentric Dr. Cann, who, as Tozer tells us in his book, used to walk about the London streets in his shirt-sleeves in the height of the season, had a great iron safe full of sixpences that he had collected. He thought that it was “insanitary” to wear a tie, and therefore never wore one; and though himself abstemious, he carried in his pocket a flask of port and a flask of sherry from which he would give drinks to anybody he met in Oxford Street or any neighbourhood that took his fancy. He was at one time the leading physician in Dawlish. He died a year or two ago.

But Tozer does not tell us that when Dr. Cann owned steeplechase horses, he, Tozer, used to train and ride them for him. One of these animals was, I well remember, a big raking chestnut, called Kaiser, which Tozer rode at Torquay races, Totnes races, and elsewhere.

It was at a Torquay meeting that, happening to be standing by when a horse fell at a bank, throwing and stunning its rider, Tozer jumped on to the animal’s back and finished the race, coming in second! And the most curious thing was that when he went to weigh in he exactly tipped the scale at the weight of the rider who had been thrown, so that had he won the race it would have been awarded to the animal’s owner!

A racing friend tells me that the rule is that if a horse falls, anybody who is a qualified rider, as Basil Tozer was, is at liberty to get up and finish the race, if the horse be in the field where he fell, namely that he had not jumped another fence.

* * * * *

Stanley Austin of the _Daily Mirror_, who is so well-known in literary and Bohemian circles, related a story to me lately, while we were dining together at the Arts Club. Sir William Orpen, K.B.E., R.A., the famous portrait painter was, he told me, staying at a well-known country house and incidentally painting the portrait of the wealthy owner. One morning Sir William came down before breakfast to work on the portrait and was met in the hall by the butler, who said, “You’re a painter, aren’t you?” “Certainly,” said Orpen. “Well, I wish you’d do a little job for me. That infernal fool, my young footman, has kicked some paint off the drawing-room floor, and there will be a devil of a row if the master sees it; will you touch it up a bit?” “Of course I will,” said Orpen, and fetched his palette and did the job, thoroughly enjoying the humour of the situation as did also the “master” when Orpen told him some time afterwards.

The other day, while I was walking with a well-known member of the Wellington Club up St. James’s Street, an elegantly-dressed foreign-looking man in tall hat, morning coat and monocle, suddenly passed us. They nodded, and I asked who he was.

“Oh! Don’t you know? That’s Count Glaxo,” was my friend’s reply, “they call him that because he is the father of so many bonnie babies.”

* * * * *

Miss May Edgington, the well-known novelist and dramatist, who is one of the prettiest and most charming of all our lady writers, one afternoon, with her husband, motored out to see me at Guildford. Her husband is Mr. F. E. Baily, editor of the _Royal Magazine_.

We were sitting together on the lawn discussing the sharp practices of the kinema trade and how the importation of German-made films was proving detrimental to our own products, when she told me a good story concerning the foreign kinema idea of English sport.

“One of my stories has been recently filmed,” she said, “and I was asked to the trade show and to be guest of honour at the lunch afterwards. Although I hate films, I went to the trade show and saw that they had kept faithfully to the story, except that they had put in an extra scene at the beginning, depicting a lovely country house, with its lawns, gardens, and flowers, with beautiful women walking about in beautiful frocks. One or two of the women were leading petted greyhounds. The men were mostly in silk hats and morning coats, apparently proposing marriage to anyone they met under the rose arches. It was altogether a pretty scene.

“So when the film people asked me afterwards what I thought of my picture, I said it seemed very nice and that they had kept pretty closely to the story, except for the addition of the garden-party with which it opened. Whereupon the producer replied somewhat coldly: ‘That isn’t a garden-party, Miss Edgington; that’s a British coursing match!’”

* * * * *

Coulson Kernahan, a friend of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, has been my friend ever since the days of long ago when he was “reader” to Ward & Lock, the publishers, and recommended them to publish some of my earlier works. To him quite recently a well-known novelist with no small idea of himself, but who had had, in the _Daily Chronicle_, a bad review of his latest book, said:

“I don’t care what the _Chronicle_ says, or what any other infernal paper says about my work--I have a public behind me.”

“Have you?” remarked “C.K.,” as he is known to his friends, with a smile. “That accounts, of course, for the odour of bad whiskey that pervades you, and gives some of us the idea that you very often have a head.”

“I might have said swelled head,” remarked Kernahan, as he told me the story. But instead he went on:

“You’re lucky, my dear old fellow, to have a public behind you. My nearest ‘pub’ at Fairlight is half-a-mile away.”

Mr. J. A. Craig, editor of _Great Thoughts_, remarked one day to Kernahan that a friend of his, the Rev. Principal Griffith-Jones, was busy writing a book on “Providence,” a subject he had studied for thirty years.

“Oh, that’s nothing!” said Kernahan. “I have studied and practised improvidence for more than sixty.”

One day in the Savage Club I asked Kernahan what he thought of a certain man.

“Oh, well,” he replied, “He’s the sort of man whose chief interest in life would, I could well believe, be in his collection of postage-stamps.”

A few months ago I was lunching with him and Mrs. Coulson Kernahan, whose novels are so well known, at their pretty country house at Fairlight, near Hastings, where the windows command a magnificent view of the Sussex Downs and of the sea.

Among the guests was a very popular clergyman, the Rev. Halbert Boyd, author of that clever book _Men and Marvels_, with whom we are both on terms of intimate friendship.

While chaffing Boyd across the table Kernahan remarked, “There are four creatures entirely without conscience--cats, spiders, journalists, and--clergymen.”

I added publishers to the list, and it was unanimously accepted.

Another story told of him is that while lecturing at Norwich one night a dog in the audience started barking furiously, so that he could hardly be heard. When the dog had been unceremoniously hustled out, Kernahan, having stopped, said: “Now, if I were speaking in Parliament instead of lecturing here in Norwich, the papers to-morrow morning would punctuate its report with (in brackets) ‘Interrupted by the Member for Barking.’”

During a railway journey from London one night he told me a story about a man who lived in the same east coast town where he once was living. The man, whose name was Dickson, began life as a small barber, then turned into a money-lender and advanced on mortgages, which he foreclosed as soon as he found that his clients were pressed for money. He then started to develop a building estate, and built a number of small detached villas in what he called Dickson’s Avenue. Kernahan happened to be walking with a local friend when the name was being affixed to the end of the new road.

“Ah! Quite so,” he remarked to his friend, who had sadly suffered at Dickson’s hands. “Dickson’s been ’aving you all his life!”

While writing this book, I had an amusing experience with my friend and neighbour, Sir Rider Haggard. He had been asked to take the chair at the Gaiety Theatre at Hastings in aid of a fund for the starving children in Eastern Europe. Lady Paget, the organizer, spoke at some length, and after she had concluded a speaker rose from the row of the novelist’s supporters on the platform and began to address the meeting volubly on behalf of the League of Nations Union.

Now the League of Nations Union is like a red rag to a bull to the famous author of _She_. He had not noticed that the meeting was held under the auspices of the Union, so he writhed in his chair for some moments, and then rose to protest against “this gentleman addressing the meeting.”

The speaker apologized, and was about to sit down, when somebody shouted, “Go on! Go on!”

Another speaker explained humbly that the meeting had been called by the League of Nations Union, at which Sir Rider’s countenance was a study.

He withdrew his protest and sat it out to the end, but as he and I went back to St. Leonards his anger knew no bounds, and he declared that he would never again take the chair at a charity meeting.

Sir Rider Haggard’s business acumen is well shown in the following. A certain well-known book of his, written years ago, was not copyrighted in the United States, and an enterprising film firm at Los Angeles, on discovering this, resolved to make a screen-play of it. They did so, and it was a huge success. It was brought to England and shown everywhere up and down the country, the company making huge profits, while its author waited patiently. Then, when it was all over, Sir Rider Haggard descended heavily on the offending pirates and compelled them to disgorge all the profits they had made in England and other countries where the story had been copyrighted.

* * * * *

As I write these lines I note with deepest regret the death of my old “bull-dog” friend “Klondike” Boyle. A big, blue-eyed man with a hard, bitter look, he was a son of the Canadian prairie, and a man whose adventures in the “back of beyond” would fill volumes. His baptismal name was Colonel Joseph Wentworth Boyle, D.S.O. At one time he was manager to Slavin, the pugilist, but on the outbreak of war he was on the Yukon, 10,000 miles from England, where he raised a machine-gun corps, which was later trained at Witley camp, in Surrey.

He was known to everyone as “The King of the Klondike,” and while at Witley was invited by my popular friend, Mrs. George Pinckard, to stay at Coombe Court, George Pinckard’s beautiful place close by, and I dined with them one night. While there Mrs. Pinckard’s charming little daughter, Coral, became greatly attached to the big, bluff fellow, and he gave her several small nuggets of Klondike gold. One day Coral came up to him and said: “You are a king, aren’t you?”

Boyle smiled at the child, and replied: “They call me a king, but I’m not really one.”

“Ah!” replied the little child, “I thought not, because you don’t wear a crown.”

One day I was his fellow guest at Coombe, and with his hostess, Mrs. Pinckard, we were walking across the park to see the remounts, when the conversation turned on his great fortune. He described, how during the gold rush, he and his seven companions did their thrilling 400-mile forced march from Dawson City to the Yukon. The party reached the Yukon more dead than alive. There were rumours that gold was to be found in that area, and, with Frank Slavin as his partner, Boyle staked out a claim, the boundaries of which were determined only by the limit of view.

“Yes,” said Boyle, as we crossed the beautiful park, “we picked out a bend of the river as far as the eye could reach, and soon proved our claim, and struck it square.”

The fact was that, after the claim had proved to be the greatest placer (alluvial) gold mine in the world, Boyle and his associates took out £3,000,000 worth of gold.

Harry de Windt and his friend Tony Safe were up there at the time, and though they were both lucky, Boyle took the honours.

Immediately after the Armistice I again met Boyle at the house of a well-known actress, and our conversation chanced to turn on the Near East. He became interested, especially about things I told him concerning Roumania. It apparently fired his ambition to go there, for a few weeks later he went to Bucharest, and within a couple of months had become the hero of the Roumanians. A dare-devil to his finger-tips, he was absolutely without fear. It was he who, when the Bolshevists refused to hand over sixty Roumanian prisoners, flew into the Bolshevist camp by French aeroplane, leaped into the same boat as the prisoners, and made the Russians take him with the prisoners to the Crimea. There he persuaded the Bolshevists to keep their word and returned with the prisoners to Bucharest.

The King and Queen of Roumania took a great fancy to him, so much so that our Foreign Office regarded him with considerable annoyance, for he became one of the leading men in that country. It was he who prevented one of the Roumanian princes from eloping. Subsequently he became food-controller and also reorganized the Roumanian railway service. He always appealed to me as one of the most daring adventurers I have ever met. He had the spirit of a lion and the heart of a child.

Boyle latterly went everywhere with the King and Queen of Roumania, and the last time I saw him was last summer, when he was bathing in the sea at Deauville accompanied by the Queen, with the King of Spain watching. I afterwards had a chat with him in the palm-court of the Normandy, when he told me that he had fallen foul of the British Government, who suspected him of espionage!

I have just mentioned Mrs. George Pinckard. She is one of the most witty and popular women in London, and has an enormous circle of friends, whom at her charming house in Chesterfield Street she so constantly entertains.

When a certain man who began life as a small grocer had married his cook, and had waxed wealthy during the war, was made a baronet, Ruby Pinckard is credited with inventing a conundrum, which went the rounds of Society:

“What has the King accomplished that the Almighty was unable to do?” was the question.

The answer was: “He’s made Mrs. X a ‘lady’!”

George Pinckard her husband, who is equally popular in Society, is Lord of the Manor of Witley, and was for some years Master of the Chiddingfold Hounds.

One day during the war George, on being told that a lady with a foreign name had changed it to Nelson, at once remarked:

“Why Nelson? Why isn’t she up to date and call herself Jellicoe at once?”

The late Viscount Midleton was extremely near-sighted--indeed, almost blind. One day he and George Pinckard were travelling together from Waterloo to Guildford, when, after chatting a few moments, both settled themselves and began to read. Suddenly Lord Midleton thought he had a bundle of rugs at his side, got up, and began to lift them up on to the rack. There was a loud shriek, for the bundle proved to be a diminutive old lady wrapped in furs. Lord Midleton was most profuse in his apologies, and George Pinckard had to begin a merry conversation in order to clear the atmosphere.