by John Buchan
“June 25th. — Went up town to make purchases in the shape of a disguise to go to Henley. After dinner I stayed out and started for Henley by a train which leaves Windsor at about 3:30. We drove from Twyford to Henley, a distance of about five miles. I had a round hat on and a thin overcoat, a moustache, no whiskers, and a couple of bits of sticking plaster on my face. Sherbrooke had nothing but a thin overcoat and a pair of blue spectacles. Very few fellows knew us. Snowe (a master) went and came back with us in the same train, and I think if it had not been for Hubbard’s and Freeling’s good nature (they had left school) we should have been nailed.
“Hope lent me a key which would open all the doors of the carriages on the Great Western Line, which proved very useful. I was in a horrid funk when I first saw Snowe on the platform at Slough. I met him again at Henley once when I was walking on the bank, on which occasion we took advantage of our acquaintance with Heave, who is rowing for Trinity Hahl, and hung on to him and passed Snowe all right. The next time I met him was on the Bridge^ and I lounged by him without taking any notice, I met the Eight coming over the Bridge, just before they got into their boat. Sheepwood was one of the few fellows who recognized us: he set up a howl in the middle of the Bridge and swore he would have known us anywhere: he was very nearly getting us nailed, for Warre was close behind him, but luckily stopped just at the moment to say how-d’ye-do to Freeling.
“Snowe was on the station at Henley, but Hubbard and Freeling kept a lookout for us. We came back second class, and at Slough got out on the wrong side of the carriage. We got into a fly and drove up to Serle’s, where we were the first to publish the news of the race. It was Eton 1st, Trinity Hall 2nd, and Radley 3rd. It is glorious our licking a Cambridge crew which is second boat on the river at Cambridge. We won by about a length and a half.
“When we came back I found that I had not been nailed, and Snowe called Sherbrooke in the evening and told him about the race. I felt rather guilty when my tutor came to tell me about it. He told the fellows in the Eight that he knew I should be as anxious to hear about it as any one.
“June 27th. — After lock-up my tutor sent for me and told me that my name was mixed up in the row about Henley, and after Prayers he came up to my room and began again. He was justgoing out of the room when he said, ‘Then I am to understand that you were in the house?’ I said, ‘No, sir, I was not in the house.’ He said, ‘Where were you?’ to which I answered, ‘I was at Henley, sir.’ He stood for some time without saying anything. At last he said that of course he would say nothing as I has told him in confidence, but that the thing was not yet finished. He was in an awful way about it, and declared that he would never go to Henley again as he had found out that he could not trust his fellows. The worst of him is that he expects you to treat him exactly as any of your friends, but I don’t think tutor and pupil ought to be on the same footing.
“June 30th. — Yesterday my tutor sent for me and said that I had escaped out of the Henley row; that I was the luckiest fellow in creation; that I had been within an ace of being nailed; that inquiries had been made at the house, and that owing to some mistake of Mrs. Digby’s (the matron) I had got off. He said there was only one link wanting in the evidence against me. This evening he came up to my room again and told me that there was a report that I had gone to Henley disguised as a Methodist Parson. At this I nearly had a fit of hysterics: of course the Methodist Parson was Lamb, who has been swished and turned down. My tutor says that the worst of this row is that if it happened again next year it might put a stop to our Eight going to Henley altogether. The only thing I care particularly about is that my tutor has taken it to heart.”
On 17th July he writes in his journal: —
“Upper Eights were rowed to-day. I suppose this is the last long boat race I shall ever row in, and I am sorry for it. I do not believe there can be anything much jollier than rowing a good race: it is awfully stunning to come up with a boat and then go by and row past the Brocas in triumph. Even though you don’t win the race, yet you know that you have done your best, and after all perhaps there is more honour in rowing a good stern race than in winning an easy one. . . . Sam Corkran wanted me to start with him in the pulling. I would have given worlds to start with Sam, but I did not see how I could get off Pope.”
To refuse to row with the Captain of the Boats because he was pledged to another boy was proof of a stiff sense of honour. He stuck to Pope, and Corkran and Richards won the pulling.
Melgund was automatically moving up in the school; but his parents, fearing that sport was occupying the major part of his time, decided to take him away from these alluring surroundings and send him to a tutor. He regretfully bade farewell to Eton at the end of the summer half of 1863, just after his eighteenth birthday. He had become one of the most popular and distinguished figures in the school, and carried away with him sixty-four leaving books. Although he had frequently transgressed the rules from sheer devilry and love of excitement there had been no shadow of meanness or untruth on his career. With his tutor, Mr. Warre, he had formed a close friendship, for the latter, in spite of his strict standards of conduct, had much tolerance for youthful extravagances so long as they were honest and clean and did not offend against the canons of sportsmanship. To Lady Minto he wrote that “Melgund was unspoilt and unspoilable,” while the journal records that “Warre certainly is a very jolly fellow, not the least like a master when he is not acting as one.”
But the most delightful days in the retrospect of all the brothers were those spent at Minto, hunting and shooting, curling and skating in the winters, fishing and swimming in the long summer days. Hunting was the serious family pursuit—”A’ Elliots can ride,” said the old Buccleuch huntsman at a time when the two families were in opposite political camps and he was not prepared to allow them any other virtue. It was a Spartan business in those days, and we have a picture of the boys on bleak mornings shivering at covert side, in everyday little short jackets and waistcoats, a linen shirt (no under-flannels or drawers), trousers and riding-straps, no overcoats and no gloves. There was rarely a meet nearer than six or seven miles; ten miles was not considered distant, and fifteen nothing to complain of. The party would leave the house long before it was light, and hack the long roads in any weather^on the off-chance of hunting. In summer there was fishing in the Teviot, standing in the river all day up to their waists without waders; but the chief game was navigating a boat called a “trows,” used for “burning the water,” and consisting of two troughs joined together at an angle. In this venerable craft the boys shot the rapids of the Teviot, but the end came when Melgund and his brother Hugh embarked in it in a high spate, barely escaped shipwreck at Rulefoot, and in the end scrambled perilously ashore, while their Argo was whirled down towards Tweed. We hear of them in winter daring each other to swim the river in spate, and finishing stark naked in the open haugh with the sleet whipping their small bodies. There were days with the otter hounds, too, on Ale and Teviot, beginning long before sunrise; and there was shooting with old Stoddart, the head keeper, shooting with muzzle-loaders and later with pin-fire breech-loaders, pottering in the woods and boggy pastures, and long autumn days after grouse on the Langhope moors. There was no desire at Minto for record bags, and shooting always played second fiddle to hunting; but it was an enchanted country for boys to wander over with a gun.
School is a chief formative element, no doubt, in every life, but at that period still more depends upon the background of holidays, when young thoughts range adventurously before they find their inevitable grooves; and Eton in Melgund’s case was only an interlude in the full and happy course of a Border boyhood. The hereditary feeling for his home, found in every Elliot, was strengthened by his mother’s deep passion. She could write thus of the Craigs: —
“The White Rock this afternoon was much more like a holy place to me. Nothing could be more peaceful, and we all sat there for some time listening to the wood pigeons, and watching some boys wading in the ri
ver, probably following a salmon. I think sometimes if we would let God draw us to Him by means of the natural agencies with which He has surrounded us, instead of insisting upon it that we can only get at Him by violent and distasteful efforts of our own, by singing without voices and preaching without brains, we should be more religious people. And certainly no sermon I ever heard can speak to one’s heart so forcibly as do the scenes and associations of an old family house like this, where tender memories are in every room, like dried flowers between the leaves of a book.”
III
The autumn and winter of 1863 was spent by Melgund with a tutor in Dresden, and part of the summer of 1864 with a coach in the Isle of Wight. In February 1864 he went to hear the Queen’s Speech in the House of Lords. The Elliot clan had for generations produced diplomats and lawgivers, but Melgund had scant respect for politicians, whose ways, he considered, lacked candour. While still at Eton his father had taken him to hear a debate in the House of Commons, and in the journal he describes the legislators as “about the noisiest set of old coves I have ever seen.” It was an aversion of temperament which to some degree remained with him through life.
In October 1864 he and his brother Arthur went up to Cambridge together as fellow commoners of Trinity.* As a peer’s son, according to the rule of those days, he had the privilege of taking his degree in seven terms instead of nine. The journal of his undergraduate life does not reflect any great desire for learning, but it reveals untiring enthusiasm for every form of sport. He naturally became a member of the Third Trinity Boat Club, and, though other arenas soon proved more attractive than the river, we find him a competitor for the ^olquhoun Sculls. He was distinguished on the running track, winning the Third Trinity Mile though heavily handicapped by having his arm strapped to his side owing to a fall with the Drag, and he came in second at the London Amateur Athletic Club. He was earnestly exhorted to continue that career by his friend, Dick Webster, the future Lord Chief Justice of England, who wrote him disconsolate letters from London complaining of the utter boredom of the study of law. The journal records “a match with Trickett for two miles, giving him a hundred yards start, and I backed myself £5 to a postage stamp to beat him. At first I thought I should hardly catch him, but very soon got up to him, and he shut up almost directly after I passed him.” But soon all other sports gave way to his passion for riding and horses, not as an idle spectator but for the physical accomplishment of horsemanship. He never missed a good race meeting, if within reasonable distance, or a chance of riding in it. He hunted with the true Elliot industry, as witness this entry: “I went out with the Fitzwilliam to-day They met at Ashton Wold. I had about 32 miles to ride to cover . . . we had a pretty good day, and I had about 32 miles to ride home as we left off very near where we began.” He had the good fortune to be out with the Pytchley the day of the famous “Waterloo Run.” Captain Anstruther Thomson, the Master, was on his fifth horse, and Melgund on his hireling saw about a third of it. He was constantly at Newmarket, and rode frequently in local steeplechases, but he had then, as he always had, a dislike of the gambling fashion which tends to degrade a famous sport, and he never betted. In the jottings in his journal, and the correspondence which remains from those days, there is none of that dreary chatter about cash lost and won which makes the conversation of some honest sportsmen like the gossip of a bucket shop.
* Dr. Montagu Butler, Master of Trinity, wrote in 1914: “My memory goes back to 1865, when Melgund had but lately left Eton as confessedly one of the best loved that even that great school of friendship had produced.”
There are records in the journal of balls and amateur theatricals and undergraduate high jinks which do not differ greatly from the undergraduate doings of to-day. He lived at the start with his brother Arthur in Rose Crescent, but when the latter went into college he migrated to a famous set of apartments called “French’s,” a resort of riding men, which remained his headquarters, except when he was careering about the country to race meetings, and contenting himself, if no better accommodation could be found, with a shake-down in a brush shop or the back room of a wine merchant.
There was little time left for study during those strenuous days. That the pace must have been furious is evident from the entries in his journal recording wonderful gallops, serious falls, and hairbreadth escapes. In reading old letters of this period from Queensberry, Aberdour,* Jersey, Horace Seymour, “Cat” Richardson, and others, one is struck by the deep affection in which Melgund was held by his friends. He brought from Eton the nickname of “Rolly” (apparently from his slightly rolling gait), and there must have been something curiously engaging in his manner, a kind of serious jollity, without a trace of the arrogant or the selfish or the peevish. But he did not win his popularity by any slackness of standards, for he had a very strict notion of what he considered right and wrong. He burned out a gambling set at French’s with hot cayenne pepper, and when he first came up took a strong line about the snobbishness of some of the clubs. Snobbery, indeed, and all the minor vices which attend society, he cordially disliked. At the time his mother wrote of him: “Don’t be alarmed about Berty; the ballroom will have no chance in his affection for many a day against the hunting field and the river: but his Dresden life has done him good by making him more ready to talk, and more anxious to understand what people are talking about. I must say, though I perhaps ought not, that he is a very satisfactory chip of a very good old block (I don’t speak of his father only, but of his race); perfectly natural and unassuming, and as spirited and energetic as a boy can be.” And again: “The boys’ Cambridge talk is very amusing and thoroughly satisfactory — I mean as to the moral effect of their residence there. I can’t say I see any evidence of intellectual training whatever; but it is impossible to listen to Berty’s frank and full revelations of himself and his habits and companions without feeling thoroughly happy about him; he is not intellectual, but he has plenty of good sense, a singularly fair and candid mind, and a will strong enough to be unconscious of itself, by which I mean that there is no effort in his independence of mind. He sees what seems to him to be right, and as a matter of course does it.”
* Afterwards twentieth Earl of Morton
Of his studies there are few records. The journal contains occasional entries such as: —
“Had a trigonometry paper this morning, which, of course, I did not attempt to do a word of. In the afternoon we had a Livy translation paper. I think I could have managed most of it with the help of the man next me, but unluckily I got throwing pens about, one of which cut over one of the examiners. . . . Hudson, the other examiner, got in a great rage: he found out that Montgomerie, among others, had been throwing pens about, and has gated him at 8 o’clock for the rest of the term. Luckily the term is just at an end. . . . Before I left Cambridge to-day I wrote a note to Hudson to tell him that it was I who had hit the examiner with the pen during the examination and not Montgomerie.”
It may be mentioned that, in spite of a notable economy of effort Melgund never failed to pass the requisite examinations either at Eton or Cambridge.
His Cambridge vacations, like his Eton holidays, were pleasantly varied. Christmas of 1864 was spent with his family in Rome, as we learn from his mother’s letters: —
“Berty, with all his spirits and idleness (which perhaps I exaggerate) is as good as it is possible to be. He has really not a wish or a taste or a habit which we would rather see away. He leads a very lively life, hunting twice a week, and going out constantly in the evenings to dinners, operas, balls, parties, and private theatricals. His dinners are frequently to meet Lord and Lady Grey, or some Monsignori, or some other persons equally old and dignified; but he always finds them ‘awfully jolly,’ is quite without shyness, and among foreigners or English has always the same perfectly easy well-bred manner.”
Elsewhere she writes: —
“Berty, I fear, has no honourable intentions towards any of the many young ladies to whom he offers his hand in the co
tillon. He dances six times in one evening with the prettiest, and blushes about her next day; and he dances most nights, and therefore blushes most mornings; but the first of pleasures to him is a good gallop across country, and no young lady would have the slightest chance of attracting his attention on hunting days. . . . His Sunday best costume includes a waistcoat with the buttons of a Cambridge Club-the ‘Quare Haec’ — and a breastpin in his cravat with a note of interrogation in dark blue enamel on a gold ground! I say that no one but Socrates has the right to go about in the guise of a perpetual question.”
There were seasons at Minto when balls and race meetings were attractions which now took the place of the old voyaging in the “trows,” and parties of Cambridge and Eton companions were added to the clan of relations. During two summer vacations Melgund went to Switzerland, once with his friend Maclean,* with whom he made the third ascent of the Schreckhorn; the journal records sleeping out on a ledge of rock in the snow from which the top was reached in seven and a half hours. They also climbed the Wetterhorn and Monte Rosa, and traversed the Jungfrau with the famous mountaineer, Mr. Horace Walker, and his daughter, leaving Zermatt just before Mr. Whymper’s first ascent of the Matterhorn, when Queensberry’s brother was killed. High mountains were with the Elliots a hereditary passion, and as an Eton boy Melgund had begun his mountaineering career by ascending the Breithorn, the peak which his father had, thirty years earlier as an Eton boy, ascended with his father long before there was an inn at Zermatt, or the Alpine Club had been dreamed of. He came of age on July 9, 1866, on the top of the Lyskamm. It is significant that the only extracts copied into his early journals are a poem by the Rev. Arthur G. Butler defending the assault on the Matterhorn when Lord Francis Douglas was killed: —
“We were not what we are Without that other fiery element — The love, the thirst for venture, and the scorn That aught should be too great for mortal powers”;
