Книга - The Times Great Scottish Lives: Obituaries of Scotland’s Finest

The Times Great Scottish Lives: Obituaries of Scotland’s Finest
Magnus Linklater


Discover the fascinating lives of the iconic figures that have shaped Scotland from the early nineteenth century to the present day.Explore the rich history of Scotland’s cultural, social and political landscape, with more than 100 obituaries carefully curated from The Times archive.The Scots have contributed richly to the world, most notably in literature and science, but also in the arts, law, politics, religion, scholarship and sport. In this volume, The Times brings together a unique and fascinating collection of obituaries. The list includes people who have made the greatest impact in their fields, others who have led particularly interesting or influential lives, and a selection of notable Scottish figures in the history of The Times.This book features the major Scottish figures of influence from the last 200 years and includes a diverse range of people, including: Sir Walter Scott, Sir David Livingstone, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Keir Hardie, Alexander Graham Bell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Phoebe Traquair, James Ramsay MacDonald, John Logie Baird, Mary Somerville, Jim Clark, John Smith, Donald Dewar, Eugenie Fraser, Robin Cook, Jock Stein, R. D. Laing, Margo MacDonald, William McIlvanney, Tam Dalyell and Ronnie Corbett.







Great

SCOTTISH Lives







Great

SCOTTISH Lives

OBITUARIES OF SCOTLAND’S FINEST



EDITED BY MAGNUS LINKLATER



Magnus Linklater is the former Scotland editor of The Times and former editor of The Scotsman. He is the author of several books on current affairs and Scottish history.

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Ebook first edition 2017



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Cover Image: Sir Alexander Fleming

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Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008280215, version 2017-09-18


Contents

Cover (#ufd857132-ef9b-5445-8a3d-b1b6ecbd753a)

Title (#u63ee7ed5-71e8-583b-8054-d786f038cb3b)

Copyright (#u840e01b9-da2f-57a1-8f4e-565d5c4b9e0a)

Contents (#udb5e72d6-ad10-590d-b351-4e26f27a3358)

Introduction (#ue4ff167d-e9b3-5679-aa2e-31cc34f13b5f)

Sir Walter Scott (#u385c3cf0-aefb-51f8-9b1d-9c75e3d8e9a1)

Thomas Telford (#u84dc0031-a778-5720-9add-13e237ba1a9c)

Sir John Sinclair, Bart. (#ud6e77e29-2267-5465-99eb-bac391f82020)

Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Napier, G.C.B (#u89f8d6ee-daa9-584e-8be0-ac0f32289def)

Field Marshal Sir Colin Campbell - Lord Clyde (#ufe04cbea-3def-5a8b-bf6f-ff856b7eb21d)

Sir David Livingstone (#u89508d3a-19a9-59a7-b529-7c9ca86b3de5)

Thomas Carlyle (#ua4349c37-b20c-571d-bad0-4e4ea69a53e0)

Dr. John Rae (#ue2e08a13-819c-549c-8f2f-e59189faaa5e)

Robert Louis Stevenson (#ua4c57310-d9f0-5d05-9ee4-e0f8462c5950)

The Marquis of Queensberry (#uc0bbc865-b431-5f9c-869f-76809bdd2410)

Lord Kelvin (#u65383df3-94d7-52af-acfa-3c024dc74efc)

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (#u5e9cd55d-6ca0-5505-87be-3418319e8f5f)

Keir Hardie (#u3f0509a3-a4d2-5eb7-b1f5-3fcf7a3936eb)

Dr. Elsie Inglis (#u70276682-a1a3-5d8c-95e1-59348c53e6b8)

Andrew Carnegie (#u9bd6984e-5def-59bb-a3bf-49ee0bf2a4ca)

Alexander Graham Bell (#u39fa30fc-d28e-576f-b0eb-45e6848cad36)

Andrew Bonar Law (#ue77fb148-7b0e-54b6-a7c9-ecbb0fb63810)

Douglas Haig (#u64220bda-6d82-53e1-9129-b3b3accbe964)

Richard Burdon, Lord Haldane (#u41119160-961b-56de-a8ad-a6403dcf7bbc)

Sir Robert Lorimar (#litres_trial_promo)

Arthur James, Lord Balfour (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Patrick Geddes (#litres_trial_promo)

Kenneth Grahame (#litres_trial_promo)

Professor J. S. Haldane (#litres_trial_promo)

Robert Cunninghame Graham (#litres_trial_promo)

Phoebe Traquair (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir J. M. Barrie (#litres_trial_promo)

James Ramsay MacDonald (#litres_trial_promo)

John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir (#litres_trial_promo)

Archbishop Lord Lang (#litres_trial_promo)

John Logie Baird (#litres_trial_promo)

James Maxton (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Harry Lauder (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Alexander Fleming (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir William Burrell (#litres_trial_promo)

Edwin Muir (#litres_trial_promo)

The Duchess of Atholl (#litres_trial_promo)

Dr. John MacCormick (#litres_trial_promo)

Admiral of the Fleet, Viscount Cunningham of Hyndehope (#litres_trial_promo)

Mary Somerville (#litres_trial_promo)

William Gallacher (#litres_trial_promo)

Tom Johnston (#litres_trial_promo)

David Maxwell Fyfe, Earl of Kilmuir (#litres_trial_promo)

Jim Clark (#litres_trial_promo)

Gavin Maxwell (#litres_trial_promo)

Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Archibald Sinclair, Viscount Thurso (#litres_trial_promo)

Iain Macleod (#litres_trial_promo)

Lord Reith (#litres_trial_promo)

Lord Boyd Orr (#litres_trial_promo)

John Grierson (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Compton Mackenzie (#litres_trial_promo)

The Duke of Hamilton (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Basil Spence (#litres_trial_promo)

John Mackintosh (#litres_trial_promo)

Hugh MacDiarmid (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Frank Fraser Darling (#litres_trial_promo)

Bernard Fergusson, Lord Ballantrae (#litres_trial_promo)

Bill Shankly (#litres_trial_promo)

James Cameron (#litres_trial_promo)

Jock Stein (#litres_trial_promo)

Manny, Lord Shinwell (#litres_trial_promo)

Jennie, Baroness Lee (#litres_trial_promo)

R. D. Lang (#litres_trial_promo)

Colonel Sir David Stirling (#litres_trial_promo)

Lord MacLeod of Fuinary (#litres_trial_promo)

Willie Waddell (#litres_trial_promo)

Jo, Lord Grimond (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Matt Busby (#litres_trial_promo)

John Smith (#litres_trial_promo)

Lord Lovat (#litres_trial_promo)

Alec Douglas Home, Lord Home of the Hirsel (#litres_trial_promo)

Norman MacCaig (#litres_trial_promo)

George Mackay Brown (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Bart. (#litres_trial_promo)

Sorley MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Alec Cairncross (#litres_trial_promo)

Lord Mackenzie-Stuart (#litres_trial_promo)

Donald Dewar (#litres_trial_promo)

Hamish Henderson (#litres_trial_promo)

Eugenie Fraser (#litres_trial_promo)

Rikki Fulton (#litres_trial_promo)

Robin Cook (#litres_trial_promo)

Jimmy Johnstone (#litres_trial_promo)

Dame Muriel Spark (#litres_trial_promo)

George Davie (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Bernard Crick (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Ludovic Kennedy (#litres_trial_promo)

Bill McLaren (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir James Black (#litres_trial_promo)

Jimmy Reid (#litres_trial_promo)

Edwin Morgan (#litres_trial_promo)

John Bellany (#litres_trial_promo)

Margo MacDonald (#litres_trial_promo)

Alan Davie (#litres_trial_promo)

William McIlvanney (#litres_trial_promo)

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (#litres_trial_promo)

Ronnie Corbett (#litres_trial_promo)

John Moffat (#litres_trial_promo)

Tam Dalyell (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


INTRODUCTION

Magnus Linklater



From Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth century to Tam Dalyell in the twenty-first, this collection of obituaries from The Times is a 200-year chronicle of great lives that have left their mark on the history and character of the Scottish nation. Politicians, artists, inventors, explorers, soldiers, academics, philosophers and troublemakers – these are men and women who have, in their different ways, broken the mould of their time, challenged its conventions and occasionally outraged them.

They cover a period that ranges from the age of the Enlightenment to the post devolution era – the building of empire, the industrial revolution, through two world wars and the economic chaos between them – culminating in the creation of a new Scottish Parliament and the legacy it has fashioned. Through all of these, Scots were often at the centre of great events, and their obituaries are, to an extent, a commentary on the times in which they lived.

This volume should not be read as a coherent history, nor is it necessarily a carefully balanced selection. These are lives judged, not from the vantage point of our time, but from the standpoint of their own time. That is its merit, and occasionally its idiosyncrasy. Great figures who seem to us now to loom large are sometimes dismissed with little more than a footnote; others are accorded page upon page of eulogy, which may seem, in the modern era, excessive. It is striking, for instance, that the Scottish colourists – artists like Peploe, Cadell or Fergusson, to say nothing of the designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose work is so valued today – were viewed by The Times, on their deaths, as worthy of only a few sketchy paragraphs. That may reflect a London perspective, but more likely the fact that their reputations have grown more in the last 50 years than during their own lifetimes. Statesmen and prime ministers, on the other hand, are chronicled with a depth of detail that amount almost to a political history of the age in which they lived.

There has had to be some editing. The death of the writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, for instance, prompted an obituary in The Times of more than 9,000 words, amounting almost to a full-scale critical biography. Those were the days when long columns of small print, uninterrupted by pictures, were routine. Running Carlyle’s obituary at full length – to say nothing of others which frequently amounted to 5,000 words or more – would have required a volume three times the size of this one. Instead I have tried to keep the flavour of the tributes paid, rather than including every last paragraph.

There has had to be selection, of course, and I am open to criticism for the lives that have been omitted. Legitimate questions will be asked about why there is no mention here of the writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, whose Sunset Song is on every respectable reading list; Walter Elliot, who created the modern Scottish Office; Sir William Lithgow, last of the great shipbuilders; the debonair Hollywood actor David Niven; Ewan MacColl, pioneering folksinger; the ballet director Kenneth Macmillan; the iconoclast journalist Sir John Junor – the list goes on.

There are two explanations. The first is that this is not, and was never intended as, a definitive collection; great Scottish lives have been well documented elsewhere in encyclopedias and biographies, researched, brought up to date, and accorded their proper place in history; a collect-ion of contemporary obituaries makes no claim to replace them. The second is that, where there is a judgment to be made, I have favoured the well-written and the colourful over the dutiful and the worthy. Thus the Marquis of Queensberry – “a man of strong character, but unfortunately also of ill-balanced mind” – is included, not just because he formulated the Queensberry rules of boxing, but because the obituary itself is an entertaining account of an eccentric character, and, to an extent, a commentary on the society of his day. The life of Sir Colin Campbell – he of the “thin red line” at Balaclava – is a remarkable narrative of military exploits, but is also invested with an eloquence which is very much of its time. Thus: “he did not conceal his ill opinion of the Indian army, and considered the Sepoys as the mere bamboo of the lance, which was valueless unless it were tipped with the steel of British infantry.”

The remarkable pioneer of nursing medicine Dr Elsie Inglis is lovingly described: “Her splendid organising capacity, her skill, and her absolute disregard of her own comfort … drew forth the love and admiration of the whole Serbian people, which they were not slow to express.”

I favoured the Labour rebel James Maxton, “tall, spare, pale, and almost cadaverous-looking, with piercing eyes and long black hair, a lock of which fell at emotional moments over the right ear …” as well as Bill Shankly, the football manager, an “old-fashioned half-back [who] was said to have run with his palms turned out like a sailing ship striving for extra help from the wind.”

No one could argue that the Russian-Scottish writer Eugenie Fraser changed history, but who, on the other hand, could resist an obituary that begins: “Ninety-six years ago, a baby girl, half Scottish, half Russian, wrapped in furs against the bitter cold of an Archangel winter, was taken by sledge across the River Dvina to the house of a very old lady [who] had lived long enough to remember seeing Napoleon’s troops fleeing down the roads of Smolensk and to have had a son killed in the Crimean War.”

There are too few women here, again a reflection of the age in which these obituaries were compiled; but those who are included are memorable: Katharine, Duchess of Atholl, the “red” duchess, and one of the first women to hold ministerial office: a “tiny, upright, hawk-like figure … poised with an innate dignity that was reinforced by the greatness of her moral stature.” Mary Somerville, the first woman controller at the BBC, of whom her obituarist wrote: “When troubles arose, no staff were ever better defended in public, though in private they were often told pretty frankly where their work had fallen short.” Or Margo MacDonald, the SNP’s “blonde bombshell,” who once said: “I don’t choose my enemies; they choose me.”

Times obituaries have always been anonymous – and remain so today – an important tradition which allows judgment to be made about a subject’s character without the accusation that the writer’s personal prejudices are being deployed. Whoever it was who wrote of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman that “it is impossible for the impartial historian not to blame [him] both for the unwisdom of his initial policy [on South Africa], and for the costly injudiciousness of some of his phrases” was able to do so without risking a lengthy correspondence on the objectivity of the writer – or lack of it. Behind each obituary lies the opinion of The Times rather than the individual.

Overall, however, the impression that emerges from this pantheon of Scottish characters is one of the rich contribution they made to human society. Those who wished to undermine it are greatly outnumbered by those who reinforced it – the bridge-builders, the architects of civic programmes, the great military commanders, the explorers and the inventors, many of whom made robust comments on the world in which they lived. Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, was scathing about government interference in the commercial exploitation of the telephone which he had invented: “I am afraid that the comparatively low state of efficiency in this country [the UK] as compared with our system in the United States must be attributed to Government ownership. Government ownership aims at cheapness, and cheapness does not necessarily mean efficiency.” His comments are as relevant today as they were then.

Here then is a cross-section of history, told by those who are offering a contemporary view of its most significant characters. However far in advance of their demise these accounts may have been composed, there is a frankness of view which rarely emerges from more considered opinions; and where that view is warmly admiring, then the expression of it comes across with an immediacy which is refreshing.

The death of Sir Walter Scott, the first name to appear here, provoked an outburst of affection which comes down to us across the years, its spontaneity undiminished by time:

“Of a man so universally known and admired, of a writer, who by works of imagination, both in prose and verse, has added so much to the stores of intellectual instruction and delight − of an author who, in his own time, has compelled, by the force of his genius, and the extent of his literary benefactions, a unanimity of grateful applause which generally only death (the destroyer of envy) can ensure – it would be superfluous, and perhaps impertinent in us, to speak …”

It is often said that journalism is the first draft of history. If that is the case, then surely the obituary is the first sketch of those who shaped it.


Sir Walter Scott



‘The greatest genius and most popular writer of his age’



25 September 1832



Sir Walter Scott, the greatest genius and most popular writer of his nation and his age, expired at Abbotsford on Friday last − a man, not more admired or admirable for the inventive powers of his mind than beloved and respected for the kindness of his disposition and the manly simplicity of his character. After an absence of some months in Italy and other parts of the continent, which, it was fondly but vainly imagined by his friends, might restore his health − broken down by excess of mental labour − he returned about Midsummer last, with an instinct of patriotism, to lay his bones in his native land. On his way home, in descending the Rhine to embark for England, he suffered at Nimeguen, in Holland, a third time, a paralytic attack, which, but for the surgical skill and promptitude of his servant, must have been instantly fatal − and from which he never recovered sufficiently to be sensible of that zealous admiration with which a grateful country was desirous of honouring his name, and paying homage to his setting star.

It is almost needless to say, that though the death of this illustrious man has been long expected, no loss could be more deeply felt over the whole republic of letters, and none could excite more general or unmixed regret. His name and works are not only British but European − not only European but universal; for wherever there is a reading public − a literature − or a printing press, in any part of the world, Sir Walter must be regarded as a familiar household word, and gratefully admitted as a contributor to intellectual enjoyment.

Of a man so universally known and admired − of a writer, who by works of imagination, both in prose and verse, has added so much to the stores of intellectual instruction and delight − of an author who, in his own time, has compelled, by the force of his genius, and the extent of his literary benefactions, a unanimity of grateful applause which generally only death (the destroyer of envy) can ensure − it would be superfluous, and perhaps impertinent in us, to speak in this short announcement, as critics, or biographers. The illustrious author of Waverley, and twenty other historical romances displaying the spirit of Waverley, of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and six other greater lays than ever ancient minstrel sung − has latterly been exempted from the proverbial injustice inflicted on contemporary genius; and has been able to realise the most ample visions of posthumous celebrity. He does not, therefore, require any vindication of his fame, or any display of his literary merits, at our hands.

Our object in alluding to his death and character is of a higher land than that of literary criticism. Our object is to speak of him as a tolerant, candid, and kind-hearted member of that great republic of letters, of which he would willingly have been elected President had that republic acquired a settled organisation − to recommend his personal simplicity of character and total absence of literary affectation, to the imitation of those who, though they cannot pretend to his genius, think themselves exempted − on the ground of their inferior powers − from the common restraints and customs of society, to which he always submitted − and to bestow its due need of praise on that noble and manly spirit of independence which led him to the immense labours of the last years of his life, that he might disengage himself from debts and difficulties under which a less resolute mind must have sunk, or from which a less honest one would have sought relief by leaning on those friends and patrons who would have been proud to have offered their aid. The republication of his novels, with notes and illustrations, was perhaps one of the greatest literary enterprises known in this country; and the success of the work, if it has not enabled him to leave much to his children, has at least satisfied the demands of his creditors. His indifference to the attacks of envy and malignity with which he was assailed in the earlier part of his career was as remarkable as his candid appreciation of the merits, and his zealous desire to promote the fame, of his friends. The garland which he threw on the grave of Byron, and the zeal with which be defended his personal character, when it evinced some courage to rebut the charges brought against his memory, will never be forgotten by the admirers of misguided genius.

Though Sir Walter Scott was an unflinching Tory all his life, his politics never degenerated into faction, nor did they ever interfere with his literary candour or his private friendships. Indeed, his party principles seemed to have been rather formed from his early connexions or his poetical predilections, than adopted for ambitious objects or even selected after mature examination.

But one distinguishing characteristic of this great author’s mind and feelings deserves, even in the shortest allusion to his memory, to be mentioned as having given a colour to all his works − we mean his love of country − his devoted attachment to the land of his birth, and the scenes of his youth − his warm sympathy in every thing that interested his nation, and the unceasing application of his industry and imagination to illustrate its history or to celebrate its exploits. From the Lay of the Last Minstrel, or the border ballads, to the last lines which he wrote, he showed a complete and entire devotion to his country. His works, both of poetry and prose, are impregnated with this feeling, and are marked by the celebration of successive portions of its wild scenery, or of separate periods of its romantic annals. Hence his friends could often trace his residence, or the course of his reading, for periods anterior to the publication of his most popular works, in the pages of his glowing narrative or graphic description. Hence the Lady of the Lake sent crowds of visitors to the mountains of Scotland, who would never have thought of such a pilgrimage unless led by the desire to compare the scenery with the poem. No poet or author since the days of Homer was ever so completely a domestic observer, or a national writer, and probably none has ever conferred more lasting celebrity on the scenes which he describes. The border wars − the lawless violence of the Highland clans − the romantic superstitions of the dark ages, with their lingering remains in Scotland, the state of manners at every period of his country’s annals, the scene of any remarkable event are all to be found in his pages, and scarcely a mountain or promontory “rears its head unsung” from Tweed to John o’Groat’s.

The patriotism of Sir Walter Scott, though sometimes tinged with party, was always as warm as such poetical feelings could render it. Hence two or three of the most spirited of his lyrical pieces were written on the threatened invasion by Napoleon, and we need not cite his enthusiastic sympathy in the fame of his country, evinced in Waterloo and Don Roderick. His mind disdained that pretended enlargement, but real narrowness of spirit, which affects to consider all lands as alike, and would be ashamed to show any predilections for home.

But, as our object is not either criticism or biography, we must conclude these hasty remarks by referring for an account of Sir Walter Scott’s publications to the short article which we have extracted from the Globe. He had abandoned for nearly 20 years the cultivation of poetry, in which he was first distinguished, for the composition of his historical novels: he had left thus a most respectable property on Parnassus to descend into a more fertile spot below. Thence he has given to the world twenty works which will communicate delight, and extend his fame to all ages. The enchanter’s wand is now broken, and his “magic garment plucked off;” but the spirits which this Prospero of romance has “called up,” and placed in these noble productions, will last as long as the language in which they express themselves.


Thomas Telford



Engineer whose roads, bridges and canals opened up the Highlands





4 September 1834



We announce with feelings of deep regret, the death of this eminent and excellent individual, which took place at 5 o’clock yesterday after-noon at his house in Abingdon street.

Mr. Telford was in the 79th year of his age. The immediate cause of his death was a repetition of severe bilious attacks to which he had for some years been subject. He was a native of Langholm, in Dumfriesshire, which he left at an early age. His gradual rise from the stonemasons’ and builders’ yard to the top of his profession in his own country, or, believe we may say, in the world, is to be ascribed not more to his genius, his consummate ability, and persevering industry, than to his plain, honest, straightforward dealing, and the integrity and candour which marked his character throughout life.

Mr. Telford had been for some time past by degree retiring from professional business, to enable him the better to “adjust his mantle.” He has of late chiefly employed his time writing a detailed account of the principal works which he planned, and lived to see executed; and it is a singular and fortunate circumstance that the corrected manuscript of his work was only completed by his clerk, under his direction, two or three days ago. His works are so numerous all over the island, that there is hardly a county in England, Wales, or Scotland, in which they may not be pointed out. The Menai and Conway bridges, the Caledonian canal, the St. Katherine Docks, the Holyhead roads and bridges, the Highland roads and bridges, the Chirke and Pont-y-ciallte Aqueducts, the canals in Salop, and great works in that county, of which he was surveyor for more than half a century, are some of the traits of his genius which occur to us and which will immortalise the name of Thomas Telford.

We have access to know that he was inclined to set a higher value on the success which has attended his exertions for improving the great communication from London to Holyhead, the alterations of the line of the road, its smoothness, and the excellence of the bridges than on the success of any other work he executed; but it seems difficult to draw a line of distinction with anything like nicety of discrimination as to the degree of credit to which an engineer is entitled for ingenuity to plan, and the ability to execute magnificent and puzzling improve-ments on the public communications of a great country. The Menai bridge will probably be regarded by the public as the imperishable monument of Mr. Telford’s fame. This bridge over the Bangor ferry, connecting the counties of Carnarvon and Anglesea, partly of stone and partly of iron, on the suspension principle, consists of seven stone arches, exceeding in magnitude every work of the kind in the world. They connect the land with the two main piers, which rise 53 feet above the level of the road, over the top of which the chains are suspended, each chain being 1,714 feet from the fastenings in the rock. The first three-masted vessel passed under the bridge in 1826. Her topmasts were nearly as high as a frigate but they cleared 12 feet and a half below the centre of the roadway. The suspending power of the chains was calculated at 2,016 tons; the total weight of each chain, 12½ tons.

The Caledonian canal is another of Mr. Telford’s splendid work in constructing every part of which, though prodigious difficulties were to be surmounted, he was successful. But the individuals in high station now travelling in the most remote part of the island, from Inverness to Dunrobin Castle or from thence to Thurso, the most distant town in the north of Scotland, will there if we are not mistaken, find proofs of the exertion of Mr. Telford’s professional talent equal to any that appear in any other quarter of Britain. The road from Inverness to the county of Sutherland, and through Caithness, made, not only so far as respects its construction, but its direction under Mr. Telford’s orders, is superior in point of line and smoothness to any part of the road of equal continuous length between London and Inverness. This is a remarkable fact, which, from the great difficulties he had to overcome in passing through a rugged, hilly and mountainous district, incontrovertibly establishes his great skill in the engineering department, as well as in the construction of great public communications.

These great and useful works do not, however, more entitle the name of Telford to gratitude of his country, than his sterling worth in private life. His easiness of access and the playfulness of his disposition, even to the close of life, endear his memory to his many private friends.


Sir John Sinclair, Bart.



Agricultural reformer whose ‘Statistical Account’ collected details of every parish in North Britain



6 January 1836



Sir John Sinclair was born at Thurso Castle, in the county of Caithness, on the 10th of May, 1754. He received the rudiments of a classical education at the High School of Edinburgh, and having carried on his studies at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, he completed them at Oxford. At Glasgow he was a favourite pupil of the celebrated Adam Smith, who admitted him to familiar intercourse, and from whose conversation, as well as lectures, he imbibed a taste for political inquiries.

On the two first occasions which called forth his talents as a writer, his object was to rouse the sinking energies of the country in times of great disaster and embarrassment. At the close of the American war, the suspicion rapidly gained ground, under the influence of Dr. Price and Lord Stair, that the finances of the country were embarrassed beyond recovery, and that a national bankruptcy was inevitable. In reply to this dangerous assertion Sir John wrote a tract entitled Thoughts on the State of our Finances, which essentially contributed to restore the credit of Great Britain on the Continent. It “deserved letters of gold,” was the strong language of the British Minister at the Hague, to express his sense of its importance. In 1780 Sir John wrote his vindication of the British navy. No great victories had for a long period been gained at sea, and so general was the panic spread by the expected junction of the French and Spanish Beets, that even Lord Mulgrave, though a Lord of the Admiralty, was understood to have been carried away by the torrent of despondency. In a pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Naval Strength of the British Empire, Sir John Sinclair so effectually revived the public confidence, that Lord Mulgrave himself returned him thanks for a defence of our naval service so powerful and so well timed.

It was in the same year, 1780, that Sir John was first chosen to represent his native county; and, with the exception of a short interval, he continued in the House of Commons till the year 1811, a period of above 30 years.

During a visit to the continent in 1785-6, Sir John’s activity and perseverance enabled him to obtain information upon several points of great national utility; in particular on the art of coinage and on the manufacture of earthenware and of gunpowder. He described the last of these improvements to his friend Bishop Watson, Professor of Chemistry at Cambridge, before communicating it to the Board of Ordnance; and so important was the service rendered to the public, that the bishop in his memoirs represents his subordinate share in the transaction amongst his strongest claims to public gratitude.

Among the earliest and most laborious of Sir John Sinclair’s literary undertakings was his History of the Public Revenue, from the Remotest Eras to the Peace of Amiens − a work which supplied the necessary data for effecting various improvements in our financial system, and especially for the introduction of the income-tax, without which the war could never have been brought to a successful issue.

It was on Sir John Sinclair’s suggestion, that in 1793 Mr. Pitt proposed in Parliament the issue of Exchequer-bills for the relief of the commercial interest, then labouring under great distress. How soon and how effectually credit was restored by that politic measure, all merchants old enough to recollect the crisis must willingly, and many of them gratefully, acknowledge. Nor was Sir John’s diligence in executing his plan inferior to his sagacity in devising it; much depended upon a large sum of money reaching Glasgow before a certain day; by applying every stimulus to all the agents he was enabled to accomplish this important object, contrary to the expectations of his most sanguine friends. Meeting the Prime Minister the same evening in the House of Commons, he began explaining to him his success, when Mr. Pitt interrupted him − ”No, no, you are too late for Glasgow; the money cannot go for two days.” − ”It is already gone,” was Sir John’s triumphant reply; “it went by the mail this afternoon.”

The gratitude of the Minister was in proportion to the magnitude of the service. He desired Sir John to specify some favour to be conferred upon him by the Crown. He requested the support of Government to his intended proposition for the establishment of “a Board of Agriculture.”

A spirit of enterprise and of invention was excited among the farming classes, and a dignity attached to agriculture which it never had before acquired. Agricultural associations suddenly sprung up on every side; reports were published, in 50 volumes octavo, describing accurately every county in the United Kingdom, and the substance of the information thus accumulated was digested, by Sir John himself, into his Code of Agriculture, a work which has now reached the fifth edition.

Among the labours undertaken by Sir John Sinclair, the most arduous, and perhaps the most successful, was The Statistical Account of Scotland. So little had the subject been at that time attended to, that the very term “statistics” was of his invention (see Walker’s Dictionary). The work was first commenced in 1790; it was prosecuted uninterruptedly for seven years, during which a correspondence was carried on with all the clergy of the church of Scotland, amounting nearly to 1,000; and it was brought successfully to completion by the gradual publication of 21 thick octavo volumes, in which a separate account is given of every parish in North Britain. Sir John made no attempt to derive even a partial compensation by the sale of his performance, for the immense expenditure he had incurred, but generously made over the whole work to the above mentioned body. A new edition, under their direction, is now in progress.

Along with his agricultural and statistical inquiries Sir John Sinclair from time to time exerted himself for the extension of the British fisheries. Having reason to believe that large quantities of herrings annually resorted to the coast of Caithness, he advanced a sum of money towards enabling certain enterprising individuals to decide the question. Their report was so favourable, that he prevailed upon the British Fishing Society to form a settlement in that county. The fishery thus established and encouraged has ever since continued rising in importance. It employs, on the coast of Caithness alone, about 14,000 individuals; it produces annually above 150,000 barrels of herrings; and being since extended to the neighbouring counties, has become the most productive fishery in Europe.

A tall athletic figure, in a military garb, his pretension to that costume was grounded on an important benefit to the public − that of raising, in 1794, a regiment of fencibles. Sir John’s first battalion, consisting of 600 men, served in England; and the second, 1,000 strong, in Ireland. The latter corps furnished above 200 volunteers for the expedition to Egypt.

Among the measures recommended by Sir John Sinclair in Parliament, he always himself attached peculiar value to the grant for forming bridges, roads, and harbours throughout Scotland. To his other public services may be added that he originated and long presided over the Society for the Improvement of British Wool, and introduced, at his own risk, into the north of Scotland, the Cheviot breed of sheep, of which so many millions have, in consequence, pastured on our Highland hills; lastly, that he suggested in the House of Commons the appointment of a committee on the famines in the Highlands, and by prevailing on them to wave the want of precedent, and grant relief without delay, he was the means of saving thousands from starvation.

The value of the various services above enumerated has been acknowledged from all quarters by the most competent judges. King George III honoured him with friendly notice and correspondence conferred upon him the dignity of a privy councillor, and is understood to have intended for him further marks of Royal favour. Various agricultural associations presented him with pieces of plate. Out of 33 counties in Scotland no less than 25 voted him their thanks. The magistrates of Thurso, the town adjoining his own residence, publicly and gratefully acknowledged “that amidst other pursuits of a more extensive tendency, the improvement of his native county had been the peculiar object of his care and attention;” and the freeholders of Caithness passed resolutions thanking him for having brought to a completion measures “which laid a solid foundation for the future prosperity of the county.”

His funeral took place within the chapel of Holyrood Palace, on the 30th of December, and although it was the wish of the family that the ceremony should be strictly private, yet the Lord Provost, magistrates, and Town Council, in their robes, and a deputation from the Highland Society of Scotland, of which Sir John was a distinguished member, solicited permission to join the procession on its entering the precincts of the palace, an unexpected tribute of respect which the friends of the deceased, we believe, did not decline, and which strongly marks the feeling which his loss has occasioned in the metropolis of Scotland. Sir John is succeeded in his title and estates by Sir George Sinclair, the present member for Caithness.


Sir Charles Napier, G.C.B.



‘Few officers have seen more service or suffered more from the casualties of war’



30 August 1853



We regret to announce the death of this distinguished soldier, whose services, spread over a period of half a century, have shed no small lustre on the British arms. The melancholy event took place at his seat at Oaklands, near Portsmouth, yesterday morning, at 10 o’clock. We understand he had been suffering severely from illness for some time past, and death was therefore not unexpected by his friends.

Few officers have seen more hard service, or suffered more from the casualties of war, than Sir Charles Napier. He was literally covered with wounds, and his hairbreadth escapes amid dangers from which he never shrunk would require a volume to enumerate. Sir Charles entered the army as an ensign in January, 1794, and was a lieutenant in May of the same year. In 1803 he became captain, and in 1806 acquired the rank of major; was a lieutenant-colonel in 1811, colonel in 1825, a major-general in 1837, and a lieutenant-general in 1846. He was also colonel of the 221 Regiment of Foot. The following is a brief list of the more important services in which he was engaged: –

In 1798 he was engaged in the suppression of the Irish rebellion, and again in putting down the insurrection of 1803. In the Peninsula he commanded the 50th throughout the campaign, terminating with the battle of Corunna, and was made prisoner after receiving no fewer than five wounds, viz, leg broken by a musket shot, a sabre cut to the head, wound in the back with a bayonet, ribs broken by a cannon shot, and several severe contusions from the buttend of a musket.

In the latter end of 1809 he returned to the Peninsula, where he remained till 1811, and was present at the action of the Coa, where he had two horses shot under him; at Busaco, where he was shot through the face, and had his jaw broken and eye injured; at the battle of Fuentes d’Onor, at the second siege of Badajos, and a great number of skirmishes. In 1813 he served in a floating expedition on the coast of the United States of America, and landed a great number of times at Craney Island and other places. He served in the campaign of 1815, and was present at the storming of Cambray. Sir Charles, as is well known, commanded the force employed in Scinde, and, on the 17th of February, 1843, with only 2,800 British troops, attacked and defeated, after a desperate action of three hours duration, 22,000 of the enemy strongly posted at Meeanee. On the 21st of February Hydrabad surrendered to him; and on the 24th of March, with 5,000 men, he attacked and signally defeated 20,000 of the enemy posted in a very strong and difficult position at Dabba, near Hydrabad, thus completing the entire subjugation of Scinde. Early in 1845, with a force consisting of about 5,000 men of all arms, he took the field against the mountain and desert tribes situated on the right bank of the Indus to the north of Shikarpore, and, after an arduous campaign, effected the total destruction of these robber tribes.

In 1849 Sir Charles was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in India, but this position he did not long retain. For his services at the Corunna he received the gold medal, and also the silver war medal, with two clasps, for Busaco and Fuentes d’Onor. Long and arduous as his military services had been, he found time for the more peaceful pursuits of literature, and was the author of works on the colonies, on colonisation, and military law, &c. Sir Charles was born in 1782, and consequently was 71 years of age.


Field Marshal Sir Colin Campbell – Lord Clyde



Distinguished soldier who held the ‘thin red line’ at Balaclava



15 August 1863



On the 20th of October, 1792, there was born in Glasgow a child in whose veins the gentle blood of the Highland lady commingled with that of the Lowland mechanic. No ray of hope or fortune illuminated his humble cradle; but by his own right hand, and by the exhibition of qualities which have raised nameless lads to fortune before now, that child came to fill a place among the foremost soldiers and highest dignitaries of the day. At a very early age Colin Campbell was taken from Scotland and put to school abroad and in England, and for many years he never revisited his native land.

As Ensign in the East Norfolk Regiment, he was taken to a military outfitter’s − a pigtail was attached to the back of his head, a tight-fitting, epauletted, short-waisted, red coat covered with lace, a pair of leather knee-breeches, and betasseled Hessian boots were also duly provided for him, and he was sent off the same evening to Canterbury to join the 9th Regiment of Foot, which may be said to have commenced its military career. He had no time to enjoy the pleasure of his fine uniform, for the regiment marched the next day to embark for the Peninsula; in later years he was wont to recall the miseries of his first march to Margate in his leather tights and Hessians, and to declare that he endured more pain in that unaccustomed, and unsuitable, attire than he ever knew in his long afterlife of march-making.

For three weeks from the time when he had quitted the schoolboy’s desk at Gosport he saw the French infantry cresting the hillsides of Vimiera, and took part in the opening actions of that series of campaigns which, after many checks and some reverses, led to the liberation of thankless Spain from the yoke of Bonaparte. Scarce landed from the transport which carried him from the shores of Spain, he was ordered off to participate in the shame, suffering, and disasters of the Walcheren expedition in 1809. The fever struck into his body so keenly that, until he went to China 30 years afterwards, “Walcheren,” as he said, “was with me every season.” From Walcheren he returned to Spain in 1810, where, with better fortune and guidance, he shared in the battle of Barossa in March, 1811, and the defence of Tarifa in January 5, 1812; and in 1812 he was transferred to a corps of the Spanish army, with which he was actively employed against the French in a long series of harassing skirmishes and operations. He was particularly struck with the Spaniards’ powers of marching, their great sobriety and frugality. In 1813 he joined the Duke of Wellington’s army again, and plunged into the thickest of the hard fighting which took place in that memorable year. He passed unscathed through Vittoria, the greatest of our victories after Waterloo, but in the desperate encounter at St. Sebastian he received two wounds. On the 9th of November, 1813, he became a Captain by brevet, and in that position had added to his wounds a bullet path through the thigh, received at the passage of the Bidassoa, which remained for 12 years. By the time he left France and proceeded to America, to serve against the Federal Government in 1814, he bore as many marks as the body of the saint who gave the name to the fortress where Sir Colin’s wounds spoke for and returned themselves against his will; for an actual sabre slice, a thorough bayonet stab, and an ingoing bullet put all modesty to shame and insisted on mention in the despatches.

He had now been transferred to the 60th Rifles, and when the brief war was over in which we drove the President out of Washington after the “Races of Bladensburg,” and were beaten at New Orleans, Colin Campbell was left on the same rung of the ladder of promotion, and he sturdily but not contentedly hung on it till he was 33 years of age − a Captain still. In 1823 he served as Brigade-Major, then obtained a sum to purchase his Lieutenant-Colonelcy.

When the interests of commerce and civilisation made it necessary for Great Britain to declare war against China in 1812, Colin Campbell went out in command of the 98th, and for 11 months his regiment was packed aboard a man-of-war, with a neglect of all consideration for health and comfort, which cruelly avenged itself upon officers and men. From China to India is a common step, though it is not attended with benefit to the constitution. Colonel Campbell had a short repose in Hindostan, but it was broken by the outbreak of the Sikh war. In virtue of his seniority he was appointed to the command of the Third Division of the army of the Punjab, and he soon flamed out on the field with more than the old Peninsular fire, and led his men with such skill that in all the great battles in which we stood foot to foot with the sternest foe we ever met or are likely to meet in India, his soldiers appeared in the very crisis of the fight. However, his critics were not disposed to be more favourable to him because he did not conceal his ill opinion of the Indian army, and considered the Sepoys as the mere bamboo of the lance, which was valueless unless it were tipped with the steel of British infantry. He was not regarded with favour by the Indian authorities, and his command on the frontier was terminated.

Colin Campbell was now, however, on the upward path. The ship of the State drifted into the Russian war, and from her decks, in 1834, marched the Glasgow boy at the head of three kilted and plumed regiments, which, fortunate in their chief and in their place, won much honour with little loss at the Alma, and almost as much reputation, in so far as one of them was concerned, with no loss at all on the famous day of Balaclava, when the thin red line of the 93rd was opposed to the Russian cavalry. Lord Raglan, to whom Sir Colin Campbell was not much known except by report, knew, however, that he was one whose eye never closed and whose hand never relaxed, and therefore he covered up the right flank of his army with the Highland Brigade, and gave their General the charge of Balaclava and all its works. There he had, indeed, little of the glory of battle, but much wearying anxiety and incessant vigilance. He was overlooked for promotion, until he returned to the Crimea to take a command which would no doubt have worthily employed him had not peace abruptly prevented the campaign. He had been gazetted a Major-General in 1854. In the October of the same year he was appointed to the colonelcy of the 67th Regiment. On the 4th of June, 1856, he was made Lieutenant-General, and in that rank he fairly settled down, almost surprised at his late honours, if not quite satisfied with the part he had played in the great war wherein they were bestowed.

But his opus magnum was yet to be accomplished. When we were startled by the Indian mutiny, it was not a favourite in high places or a dilettante soldier who was selected to save our tottering empire. There was a sigh of satisfaction and content throughout the country when we were told that Sir Colin Campbell had at a moment’s notice, and with alacrity, taken command of the forces engaged in putting down that which history will call the Great Mutiny. From the time that Sir Colin Campbell took the field and set his columns in motion, rebellion, the offspring of mutiny, withered and died.

When his labours in the field were over, and he had returned home to receive the acknowledgments of the whole country, the thanks of Parliament, the approbation of his Sovereign, and the honours he so valued as a soldier, he was not permitted to rest quietly on the laurels he had gathered. At the review of the Volunteers at Brighton he took the command at the request of the higher powers; but after it was over he said it was his last day in the field, and he shaved off his moustache as a sign that he had retired from active service. A few months ago he had a severe illness, in which the lungs and heart were implicated, but the old shot-and-steel-rent body resisted the attack of the great enemy, and to the delight of his friends he seemed to become nearly as well as ever he had been of latter years, and no one was more firm and vigorous for his years. Appointed Colonel of the Coldstream Guards in 1860, Field Marshal in 1862, Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, had attained heights far beyond the flights of his highest ambition. At last came the illness of which he died, not perhaps as in his young days he would have desired, but as in his old age he would have surely sought to pass away − amid the tender cares and subdued sorrow of those who loved him well, and not the less that he had been the comrade of the soldier whose family stood by his pillow.

In person Lord Clyde was well knit, symmetrical, and graceful; but of late years his shoulders became somewhat bowed, though he lost little of the activity which was remarkable in so old a man. To the last his teeth remained full and firm in the great square jaws, and his eye pierced the distance with all the force of his youthful vision. His crisp, grey locks still stood close and thick, curling over the head and above the wrinkled brow, and there were few external signs of the decay of nature which was, no doubt, going on within, accelerated by so many wounds, such fevers, such relentless, exacting service. When he so willed it, he could throw into his manner and conversation such a wondrous charm of simplicity and vivacity as fascinated those over whom it was exerted, and women admired and men were delighted with the courteous, polished, gallant old soldier.


Sir David Livingstone



Missionary and explorer, whose search for the real source of the Nile led to his death – ‘fallen in the cause of civilisation and progress’



1 May 1873



The following telegram, dated Aden, the 27th inst., has been received at the Foreign Office from Her Majesty’s Acting Consul-General at Zanzibar:–

‘The report of Livingstone’s death is confirmed by letters received from Cameron, dated Unyanyembe, October 20. He died of dysentery after a fortnight’s illness, shortly after leaving Lake Bemba for eastward. He had attempted to cross the lake from the north, and failing in this had doubled back and rounded the lake, crossing the Chambize and the other rivers down from it; had then crossed the Luapuia, and died in Lobisa, after having crossed a marshy country with the water for three hours at a time above the waist; ten of his men had died, and the remainder, consisting of 79 men, were marching to Unyanyembe. They had disembowelled the body and had filled it with salt, and had put brandy into the mouth to preserve it. His servant Chumas went on ahead to procure provisions, as the party was destitute, and gave intelligence to Cameron, who expected the body in a few days. Cameron and his party had suffered greatly from fever and ophthalmia, but hoped to push on to Ujiji. Livingstone’s body may be expected at Zanzibar in February. Please telegraph orders as to disposal. No leaden shells procurable here.’

A plain Scottish missionary, and the son of poor parents, David Livingstone yet came of gentle extraction. Considering that his father and himself were strong Protestants, it is singular that his grandfather fell at Culloden fighting in the Cause of the Stuarts, and that the family were Roman Catholics down to about a century ago. More recently the Livingstones were settled in the little island of Ulva, on the coast of Argyleshire not far from the celebrated island of Iona.

Dr. Livingstone’s father, Neill Livingstone, kept a small tea dealer’s shop in the neighbourhood of Hamilton, in Lanarkshire, and was a ‘deacon’ in an independent chapel in Hamilton. The family motto was ‘Be honest.’ His son was born at East Kilbride, in Lanarkshire, in or about the year 1816. His early youth was spent in employment as a ‘hand’ in the cotton-mills in the neighbourhood of Glasgow; during the winter he pursued his religious studies with a view to following the profession of a missionary in foreign parts.

While working at the Blantyre mills, young Livingstone was able to attend an evening school, where he imbibed an early taste for classical literature. His religious feelings, however, warmed towards a missionary life; he felt an intense longing to become ‘a pioneer of Christianity in China,’ and hoped that by so doing he might ‘lead to the material benefit of some portions of that immense empire.’

We next find him, at the age of 19, attending the medical and Greek classes in Glasgow in the winter, and the divinity lectures of Dr. Wardlaw in the summer. His reading while at work in the factory was carried on by ‘placing his book on the spinning-jenny,’ so that he could ‘catch sentence after sentence while he went on with his labour.’ In 1838 he resolved to offer his services to the London Missionary Society as a candidate for the ministry in foreign parts. The opium war, which then was raging, combined with other circumstances to divert his thoughts from China to Africa. Having been ordained to the pastoral office, he left these shores in 1840 for Southern Africa, and after a voyage of nearly three months reached Cape-Town. His first destination was Port Natal, where he became personally acquainted with his fellow countryman, the still surviving Rev. Robert Moffat, whose daughter subsequently became his wife and the faithful and zealous sharer of his toils and travels, and accompanied him in his arduous journey to Lake Ngami.

It was not until 1849 that he made his first essay as an explorer, strictly so called, as distinct from a missionary; in that year he made his first journey in search of Lake Ngami. In 1852 he commenced, in company with his wife, the ‘great journey,’ as he calls it, to Lake Ngami, dedicating his account of it to Sir Roderick Murchison, as ‘a token of gratitude for the kind interest he has always taken in the author’s pursuits and welfare.’ The outline of this ‘great journey’ is so familiar to all readers of modern books of travel and enterprise that we need not repeat it here. It is enough to say that in the ten years previous to 1855 Livingstone led several independent expeditions, into the interior of Southern Africa, during which he made himself acquainted with the languages, habits, and religious notions of several savage tribes that were previously unknown to Englishmen, and twice crossed the entire African continent, a little south of the tropic of Capricorn, from the shores of the Indian Ocean to those of the Atlantic.

In 1855 the Victoria gold medal of the Geographical Society was awarded to Livingstone in recognition of his services to science. In the whole of these African explorations it was calculated at the time that Livingstone must have passed over no less than 11,000 miles of land, for the most part untrodden and untraversed by any European, and up to that time believed to be inaccessible.

Back in England, he was hailed as ‘the pioneer of sound knowledge, [whose] scientific precision … left his mark upon so many important stations in regions hitherto blank upon our maps.’

Early in the spring of 1858 Livingstone returned to Africa for the purpose of prosecuting further researches and pushing forward the advantages which his former enterprise had to some extent secured. Before setting out he was publicly entertained at a banquet at the London Tavern, and honoured by the Queen with a private audience, at which Her Majesty expressed, on behalf of herself and the Prince Consort, her deep interest in Dr. Livingstone’s new expedition.

Within a very few months from the time of leaving England, Dr. Livingstone and his expedition reached that part of the eastern coast of Africa at which the Zambesi falls into the ocean; her two small steamers were placed at their disposal, and they resolved to ascend the river and thence make their way into the interior. In these journeys Livingstone and his companions discovered the lakes Nyassa and Shirwa, two of the minor inland meres of Africa, and explored the regions to the west and north-west of Lake Nyassa for a distance of 300 miles – districts hitherto unknown to Europeans, and which lead to the head waters of the north-eastern branch of the Zambesi and of several of that river’s tributaries.

It is no slight thing to be able to boast, as Dr. Livingstone could boast, that by means of the Zambesi a pathway has been opened towards Central Highlands, where Europeans, with their accustomed energy and enterprise, may easily form a healthy and permanent settlement. This leads us to the third and last great journey of Dr. Livingstone, the one from which such great results have been expected, and in which he has twice or thrice previous to the last sad news been reported to have lost his life. Leaving England at the close of 1865, or early in the following year, he was despatched once more to Central Africa, under the auspices of the Geographical Society, in order to prosecute still further researches which would throw a light on that mystery of more than 2,000 years’ standing – the real sources of the Nile. Of his explorations since that date the public were for several years in possession of only scanty and fragmentary details, for it must be remembered that Dr. Livingstone was accredited in this last expedition as Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul to the various native chiefs of the unknown interior. One result was that his home despatches have been of necessity addressed, not to the Geographical Society, but to the Foreign Office. It was known, however, that he spent many months in the central district between 10 deg. and 15 deg. south of the Equator, and Dr. Beke – no mean authority upon such a subject – considers that he has solved the mystery of the true source of the Nile among the high tablelands and vast forests which lie around the lake with which his name will for ever be associated.

We are bound to record the fact that Dr. Livingstone claims to have found that ‘the chief sources of the Nile arise between 11 deg. and 12 deg. of south latitude, or nearly in the position assigned to them by Ptolemy.’ This may or may not be the case; for time alone will show us whether this mystery has been actually solved. During the last year or two our news of Dr. Livingstone has been but scanty, though from time to time communications – some alarming and others, again, reassuring – have reached us from himself or from other African Consuls, officially through the Foreign Office and privately through Sir Roderick Murchison. An account of his death at the hands of a band of Matites was discounted by Sir Roderick, who, with a keen insight which almost amounted to intuition, refused to believe the evidence on which the tale was based and gradually the world came round and followed suit.

In July, 1869, Dr. Livingstone resolved to strike westwards from his headquarters at Ujiji, on the Tanganyika Lake, in order to trace out a series of lakes which lay in that direction, and which, he hoped, would turn out eventually to be the sources of the Nile. If that, however, should prove not to be the case, it would be something, he felt, to ascertain for certain that they were the head waters of the Congo; and, in the latter case, he would probably have followed the course of the Congo, and have turned up, sooner or later, on the Western Coast of Africa. But this idea he appears to have abandoned. At all events, in the winter of 1870–71, he was found by Mr. Stanley, once more in the neighbourhood of his old haunts, still bent on the discovery of certain ‘fountains on the hills,’ which he trusted to be able to prove to be the veritable springs of the Nile.

During the last two years or so, if we except the sudden light thrown upon his career by the episode of Mr. Stanley’s successful search after him, we have been kept rather in the dark as to the actual movements of Dr. Livingstone. Mr. Stanley’s narrative of his discovery of the Doctor in the neighbourhood of Ujiji is in the hands of every well-informed Englishman, and his journey in company with him round the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika was recorded in the address delivered by Sir Henry Rawlinson, the President of the Geographical Society, last summer, who ended by predicting that ‘he will continue his journey along the Congo, and emerge from the interior on the Western Coast.’

We fear that these forecastings have been falsified by the event, and that we must now add the name of David Livingstone to the roll of those who have fallen in the cause of civilisation and progress. After his death on 1 May 1873 from dysentery in what is now Zambia, his body, accompanied as far as Zanzibar by his two most faithful servants, was brought back to Britain for burial in Westminster Abbey. His posthumous reputation was fostered by Henry Morton Stanley.

It is impossible not to mourn the loss of a missionary so liberal in his views, so large-hearted, so enlightened. By his labours it has come to pass that throughout the protected tribes of Southern Africa Queen Victoria is generally acknowledged as ‘the Queen of the people who love the black man.’ Livingstone had his faults and his failings; but the self-will and obstinacy he possibly at times displayed were very near akin to the qualities which secured his triumphant success, and much allowance must be made for a man for whom his early education had done so little, and who was forced, by circumstances around him, to act with a decision which must have sometimes offended his fellow-workers. Above all, his success depended, from first to last, in an eminent degree upon the great power which he possessed of entering into the feelings, wishes, and desires of the African tribes and engaging their hearty sympathy.


Thomas Carlyle



‘A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted’



7 February 1881



Thomas Carlyle died at half-past 8 on Saturday morning at his house in Cheyne-row, Chelsea. He had been for some years in feeble health, and more than once his recovery seemed doubtful. Of late even his friends saw little of him, and growing weakness and pain had compelled him to give up his old habit of taking long walks every day. The announcement of his death opens a chasm between the present and the past of our literature, a whole world of associations disappears. A great man of letters, quite as heroic as any of those whom he depicted, has passed away amid universal regret.

About eight months before Robert Burns died, and within but a few miles of Dumfries, the scene of his death, was born the most penetrating and sympathetic interpreter of his genius. Carlyle’s birth-place was Ecclefechan, an insignificant Dumfriesshire village, in the parish of Hoddam, known by name, at least, to readers of Burns, and memorable for an alehouse which was loved only too well by the poet. There Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795. He was the eldest son of a family of eight children; his brothers were all men of character and ability; one of them, Dr. John Carlyle, was destined to make a name in literature as the translator of Dante. Mr. Carlyle’s father, James Carlyle, was the son of Thomas Carlyle, tenant of Brown-Knowes, a small farm in Annandale, and of Margaret Aitken. At the time of his eldest son’s birth James Carlyle was a stone mason, and resided in Ecclefechan; but he became afterwards tenant of Scotsberg, a farm of two or three hundred acres, which is now occupied by Mr. Carlyle’s youngest and only surviving brother. Of James Carlyle, his son once said, ‘I never heard tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people,’ and his own lineage might well have suggested this saying. Carlyle never spoke of his father and mother except with veneration and affection. All extant testimony goes to show that Mr. Carlyle’s father and mother were of the finest type of Scotch country folk – simple, upright, and with family traditions of honest worth.

Carlyle learnt to read and write in the parish school of Hoddam, where he remained until his ninth year. The parish minister, his father’s friend, taught him the elements of Latin. From the parish school he passed to the Burgh School of Annan, six miles distant, where he saw Edward Irving, ‘his first friend,’ as he once called him, who was some years his senior. Carlyle was barely 14 when he entered the University of Edinburgh. It was then in its glory. Some of its professors possessed a European reputation. The eloquent and acute Dr. Thomas Brown lectured on moral philosophy; Playfair held the chair of natural philosophy; the ingenious and quarrelsome Sir John Leslie taught mathematics; and Dunbar was professor of Greek. However, the only professor for whom Carlyle seems to have had much regard was Sir John Leslie, who had some points of affinity to his pupil; and the feeling was returned. Carlyle made few friends at the University. He was lonely and contemplative in his habits. He took no part in the proceedings, and his name is not to be found on the list of members of the Speculative Society, which every clever student was then expected to join. In after years he laid it down that ‘the true University of these days is a collection of books,’ and on this principle he acted. Not content with ransacking the College Library, he read all that was readable in various circulating libraries – among others, one founded by Allan Ramsay – and acquired knowledge which extended far beyond the bounds of the University course. He left the University with no regret.

Carlyle had been intended for the church, but could not bring himself to embrace the doctrines of his father’s kirk, and turned his hand instead to work by which he could earn his bread. For a year or two he taught mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, and remained there only two years; at their close he was appointed teacher of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy. Teaching Fifeshire boys however was not Carlyle’s vocation. After staying about two years in Kirkcaldy he quitted it, leaving behind him the reputation of a too stern disciplinarian to begin in Edinburgh the task his life as a writer of books.

Carlyle tried his ’prentice hand in Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, to which he contributed many articles on geographical and biographical subjects; among others, articles on Sir John Moore, Dr. Moore, Nelson, the elder and younger Pitt, Montaigne, and Montesquieu. They give but faint, uncertain promise of the author’s genius and of those gifts which made his later works as individual as a picture by Albert Dürer or Rembrandt. But they indicate patient industry and research and minute attention to details. At the instance of Sir David Brewster he translated Legendre’s Geometry and Trigonometry, prefixing to the treatise a short and modest introduction on Proportion. Carlyle about this time mastered German; his brother was studying in Germany, and the letters from Dr. Carlyle heightened his interest in its language and its literature, which was then in full blossom. The first fruits of this knowledge was an article contributed to the New Edinburgh on Faust, a subject to which he was so often to return.

About this period of Carlyle’s life the once famous John Scott was editing The London Magazine and had gathered round him a group of clever writers; Hazlitt, Lamb, Croly, Cary, and Allan Cunningham amongst them. Carlyle joined them. Here appeared, in 1823, the first part of the Life of Schiller. No name was attached to it. Those who knew that it was Carlyle’s work predicted great things from a writer who, in youth, exhibited noble simplicity and maturity of style, and who had conceptions of criticism very rare in those times. In the following year he published, again anonymously, a translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre. Goethe was then no prophet out of his own country. He was known to no Englishman but De Quincey, Coleridge and a few students of German literature. The novel was sneered at, and the savage, elaborate invectives which De Quincey hurled at Goethe did not spare the translator. Undeterred by sneers and remonstrances, Carlyle published in 1827 several volumes entitled German Romance, containing translations from the chief writers of the romantic school.

In 1827 he married Miss Jane Welsh, the only daughter of Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, a descendant of John Knox. She had inherited a farm lying remote and high up among the hills of Dumfriesshire; and there Carlyle found the Patmos which his perturbed spirit needed. To the farmhouse of Craigenputtock – a plain, gaunt two-story dwelling, with its face blankly looking towards the hill, some 15 miles from town or market – came Carlyle and his bride in 1828. Here for six years he lived with this one friend and companion – a companion worthy of him, a talker scarcely inferior to himself, a woman, as he himself termed her, of ‘bright invincibility of spirit.’

Carlyle toiled hard in this temple of industrious peace. In these obscure youthful years, he wrote, read, and planned much, and made incursions into many domains of knowledge. In a bare, scantily furnished room of the farmhouse, now shown with pride to visitors, he pursued this plan and wrote essay after essay and did much of his best work. Here were composed his essays on Burns, Goethe and Johnson, Richter, Heyne, Novalis, Voltaire and Diderot. Sartor Resartus was composed here; the manuscript to be laid aside until some other time. Carlyle contributed to the Edinburgh Review, which was still under the management of Jeffrey. The relationship was not perfectly smooth or entirely satisfactory to either editor or writer. It was difficult to adjust the boundaries of the respective provinces, Carlyle being apt to take offence at the ruthless hacking and hewing of his work in which Jeffrey indulged, and the latter being cut to the quick by the eccentricities of style displayed by his contributor, and surprised that Carlyle was not grateful for efforts to impart trim grace and polish to his articles. With Professor Napier, on the other hand, Carlyle’s dealings were much to his satisfaction. Sartor Resartus, that unique collection of meditations and confessions, passionate invective, solemn reflection, and romantic episodes from his own life, was composed at Craigenputtock in 1831. It is not a little astonishing that this book, every page of which is stamped with genius of the highest order, failed at first to find admirers or appreciators. Even John Stuart Mill who afterwards delighted in the book, admitted that when he saw it in manuscript he thought little of it. Not for seven years after its composition did Sartor appear as a volume. It ‘had at last,’ says its author, ‘to clip itself in pieces, and be content to struggle out, bit by bit, in some courageous magazine that offered.’

Strengthening and helpful and rich in fruit were these years in his Nithsdale hermitage. But the time came for him to leave Craigenputtock. A historian, a critic, a biographer must needs have libraries within his reach. Some ties which bound Carlyle to Dumfriesshire had been severed. His father had passed away full of years, and it became fit, and even necessary, that Carlyle should leave his mountain seclusion and betake himself to London. He settled in Cheyne-row, in a small three-storied house, which he never afterwards quitted.

Carlyle was a man of mature years when he removed to London. The first years after his coming to the city were the most fruitful of his literary life. Essays, histories, lectures, biographies poured from his brain with surprising rapidity. No book-hack could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked, late and early, in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day’s duties. At 10 o’clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until 3 o’clock; nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends. One of his favourite relaxations was riding, in an omnibus. In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow.

His best books were by no means instantaneously successful. Even The French Revolution, with all its brilliancy and captivating élan, had to wait for a publisher. He found his first warmest admirers on the other side of the Atlantic. Before fame in its common form had come to him, men whose private opinions were to be future public opinion had conceived the highest notion of his powers and the future before him; and the little parlour in Cheyne-row had become the gathering place, the favourite haunt of many literary men. At different times between 1837 and 1840, Mr. Carlyle delivered at Willis’s Rooms and Portmansquare courses of lectures on some of his favourite subjects – German Literature, The History of Literature, The Revolutions of Modern Europe, and Heroes and Hero-Worship. Each of these lectures was a considerable event in literature. People of all shades and schools were amazed. Crabbe Robinson, who attended the whole of one course, says of a certain lecture, ‘It gave great satisfaction, for it had uncommon thoughts, and was delivered with unusual animation.’ ‘As for Carlyle’s Lectures,’ writes Bunsen, ‘they are very striking, rugged thoughts, not ready made up for any political or religious system; thrown at people’s heads, by which most of his audience are sadly startled.’

The French Revolution, the first work to which Mr. Carlyle put his name, appeared in 1837. It would have been published sooner but for the famous disaster which befell the manuscript of the first volume. The author had lent it to Mr. John Stuart Mill; the latter handed it to Mrs. Taylor, his future wife. What became of it was never exactly known. Mrs. Taylor left the manuscript for some days on her writing table: when wanted it could nowhere be found; and the most probable explanation of its disappearance was the suggestion that a servant had used the manuscript to light the fire. Carlyle at once set to work to reproduce from his notes the lost volume; he swiftly finished his task, but he always thought that the first draft was the best.

There followed Carlyle’s political period, when he produced pamphlet after pamphlet, abhorring the Chartists and their movement. Carlyle pronounced them one and all vain and unprofitable. His criticisms were often grotesque caricatures. They abounded in contradictions, and it was always pretty clear that Mr. Carlyle found it much easier to rail at large than to suggest any working substitutes for the systems which he despised. De Quincey was unanswerable when he said to Carlyle, ‘You’ve shown or you’ve made another hole in the tin kettle of society; how do you propose to tinker it?’

In 1845 he published Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations. The work was well received. It passed rapidly through several editions. In a petition addressed in 1839 to the House of Commons on the subject of the Copyright Bill, Mr. Carlyle had said of his literary labours that they had ‘found hitherto, in money or money’s worth, small recompense or none,’ and he was by no means sure of ever getting any. Between 1858 and 1865 appeared the ten volumes of Mr. Carlyle’s laborious History of Frederick the Great. On this work Mr. Carlyle spent more time and trouble than on any of his other books. It is a marvel of industry. Every accessible memoir and book bearing on the subject was read and collated. And yet the ten volumes are painful to read. Peculiarities of diction, embarrassing in others of Mr. Carlyle’s books, have grown to be wearisome and vexatious; little tricks and contortions of manner are repeated without mercy; miserable petty details are pushed into the foreground; whole pages are written in a species of crabbed shorthand; the speech of ordinary mortals is abandoned; and sometimes we can detect in the writer a sense of weariness and a desire to tumble out in any fashion the multitude of somewhat dreary facts which he had collected.

Since his Frederick was published Mr. Carlyle had undertaken no large work. But he had not been altogether silent. During the American War was published his half-contemptuous, we had almost said, truculent, account of the issues in his Ilias in Nuce, enunciating his old predilection for the peculiar institution. In 1865 he was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Those who remember the old man’s appearance, as he talked to the lads before him with amiable gravity of manner, his courageous, hopeful words, did not expect that in a few hours exceeding sorrow would befall him. During his absence from London his wife died. Her death was quite unlooked for; while she was driving in the Park she suddenly expired. When the coachman stopped he found his mistress lifeless. Carlyle might well say that ‘the light of his life had quite gone out;’ and the letters which he wrote to his friends are full of exceeding sorrow, and were at times the voice of one for whom existence has nothing left.

Mr. Carlyle has shunned many literary honours which were always within his reach. He did not accept the Grand Cross of the Bath, and on the death of Manzoni, in 1875, he was presented with the Prussian Order ‘for Merit’ – an honour given by the Knights of the Order and confirmed by the Sovereign, and limited to 30 German and as many foreign Knights.

Those who remember him best do so through his talks. One who heard them often describes them thus: ‘His talk is still an amazement and splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse only harangues. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound … He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical Poem with regular cadences and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full ... He puts out his chin till it looks like the beak of a bird of prey, and his eyes flash bright instinctive meanings like Jove’s bird.’

This is not the fit time to try to measure Mr. Carlyle’s services or the worth of his works. Wherever, in truth, men have turned their minds for the last quarter of a century to the deep relations of things his spirit has been present to rebuke frivolity, to awaken courage and hope. No other writer of this generation ever cast so potent a spell on the youth of England. To many he was always a teacher. He brought ardour and vehemence congenial to their young hearts, and into them he shot fiery arrows which could never be withdrawn. What Hazlitt said of Coleridge was true of him − he cast a great stone into the pool of contemporary thought, and the circles have grown wider and wider.


Dr. John Rae



Arctic explorer who uncovered the fate of the Franklin expedition



26 July 1893



By the death of Dr. John Rae we have lost one of the most striking personalities in the history of Arctic exploration and one of the few remaining men connected with the stirring episode of the search for Franklin. Though born in the Orkneys 80 years ago, until his last illness no more vigorous-looking or active man walked the streets of London. The hardships he endured during his many years’ work in the Arctic regions seemed to have made no impression upon his frame; his robust health, indeed, made him somewhat intolerant of others not gifted with his iron constitution. Dr. Rae was a man of a disposition at once generous and sensitive. Probably he was somewhat unjustly dealt with by the Admiralty, who in some editions of their Polar charts gave others the credit for what Rae had done. But Rae’s work as an Arctic explorer is too well known to be affected by any mistake of this kind. When he returned to England in 1854, bringing with him many relics of the Franklin expedition in the Erebus and Terror, and conclusively proving that the worst fate had overtaken its members, he received the reward of £10,000 which had been offered by Government. The Royal Geographical Society showed its estimate of what Rae had accomplished by awarding him its gold medal (1852).

When Rae was a youth of 16 he went to Edinburgh to study medicine. In 1833, having obtained his surgeon’s diploma, he was appointed surgeon to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s ship which annually visited Moose Factory, on the shores of Hudson’s Bay. His interest in the Arctic regions and in Arctic exploration was soon aroused. His first expedition was undertaken in 1846, when he succeeded in laying down 700 miles of now coast on the northern mainland of America, uniting the surveys of Ross on Boothia with Parry’s in Fury and Hecla Strait. In 1848, in company with Sir John Richardson, Rae undertook one of the earliest expeditions sent out to search for the missing Franklin expedition. In that and the following year all the coast between the Mackenzie and the Coppermine rivers was searched in vain. In 1850 Rae was sent out in command of another search expedition, and between that and 1854 he examined the whole of Wollaston Land, all the coast east of the Coppermine river; Victoria Land, and Victoria Strait. In this time Rae travelled in all some 5,300 miles, a considerable proportion of it being new country, and much of the travelling being done on foot. In 1853 Rae was once more in the Arctic at the head of an expedition which connected the surveys of Ross with that of Dease and Simpson and proved King William’s Land to be an island. It was on the last journey that Rae was able to collect evidence which showed that not only were the Erebus and Terror lost, but that in all probability every member of the Franklin expedition had perished. Though Lady Franklin continued the search for some years longer, Government took no further part in a search which most people were convinced would be in vain. During the nine or ten years’ work of Dr. Rae he was able to lay down some 1,500, if not 1,800, miles of previously unexplored ground. Even if the deductions which some of his enemies would make were allowed, it is evident that Rae did original work enough to entitle his name to occupy a high and permanent place in the history of Arctic exploration.

In 1860 Rae took part in surveying for a cable from England, by the Faeroes, Iceland, and Greenland, to America; and in 1864 he conducted a difficult telegraph survey from Winnipeg, across the Rocky Mountains. For the last 15 years Dr. Rae’s tall, lithe, muscular figure has been prominent at the meetings of the Geographical and other societies. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had been honoured by foreign scientific bodies. Dr. Rae was an ardent Volunteer, even in his later days, and an excellent shot. In 1850 he published a “Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847.” The accounts of the other work done by Rae will be found in the publications of the Royal Geographical Society and in official reports.


Robert Louis Stevenson



Novelist, poet and travel writer: ‘Even when he brooded over the physical and metaphysical nightmares ... the vagaries of his inspirations were kept in check by exquisite taste and sound literary judgment’



18 December 1894



Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, and was the son of Thomas Stevenson, Secretary to the Commissioners of Northern Lights, and the greatest practical authority on lighthouses of his generation. It was he who built the lighthouse at Skerryvore. Louis Stevenson, as he was familiarly called, was educated at private schools and the University of Edinburgh, and had been brought up for the law. We believe he served his apprenticeship to a Writer to the Signet and he was subsequently called to the Bar. But he never cared to tread the salle des pas perdus in the old Scottish Parliament House, and he wrote feelingly in his ‘Picturesque Edinburgh’ of that dreary purgatory of the gossiping unbriefed. The roving spirit and an hereditary tendency to literature were too strong for him. Nor can we conceive Mr. Stevenson submitting himself to the drudgery of legal routine, and bending his neck to the yoke of exacting Scottish observances. For he was always unconventional – in his costume, in the very cut of his hair, and, above all, in the brilliancy of his conversation and in his unrivalled talent as a raconteur.

For example, the friends whom he fascinated have often heard him tell the story of the Bottle of Rousillon, which appears as a chapter in The Wrecker, and he never told it exactly in the same way, but always with new and more piquant embellishments. He went abroad for his health and it was borne in upon him to narrate his experiences. Whether he wrote of California or the Cevennes, the charm of the polished narrative was irresistible. Yet he never realised his veritable vocation, till he floated into fame, in 1883, after the cruise to his Treasure Island.

His first books had rather a succès d’estime, although they had commended themselves to the appreciation of the most capable critics. It is very much to say of him that he subsequently made himself popular, without degenerating from that refined literary standard. It was no longer a question of settling to the practice of law in Edinburgh. He exchanged Scotland for the French Bohemia and became for a time a denizen of the Quartier Latin, while he was always the bienvenu in the artist colony at Barbizon. It seems strange, by the way, but the only reminiscences of those pleasant Fontainebleau visits are to be found in one of his latest novels, The Wrecker.

We need not catalogue his works in chronological order. His health had always been feeble. He gratefully dedicated the Child’s Garden of Verses to the good old lady who had lovingly nursed him into boyhood. Too soon again his strength showed signs of failing and it was delicacy of the chest which first sent him abroad. But he had always sufficient command of money, and latterly, at least, his malady and anxieties were alleviated by an ample and increasing income. English editors and publishers treated him handsomely; as for the Americans, their passion for him made them forget their usual sharp practice with unfortunate English authors; and their flattery took the agreeable form of substantial cheques. The descendant of sea-faring Norsemen was free to indulge his love for the sea, and when living on shore he could choose his places of residence at such sunny marine resorts as Bournemouth or Torquay.

As for his native Edinburgh, much as he admired it, he wisely avoided what he has denounced as the vilest climate in the world. Finally, the man who paints himself in the New Arabian Nights as the misanthrope of the Fiji Sandhills, had sought a home in the South Seas where he was destined to die. But to the last he never lost touch with his countrymen, nor interest in that new world where he was naturalised; and the magician of the realms of romance was still the hardheaded Scotchman, as has been proved by his exhaustive communications to us on the troubled politics of Samoa.

The death leaves a melancholy blank in the literary world. We regret Mr. Stevenson selfishly as well as sincerely, because in the crowd of successful and rising writers there is no one left who can even approximately fill his place. He had the instincts and susceptibilities of a born man of letters, and it is noteworthy that his earliest productions were not the least finished of his works. His most marked characteristics were distinctly his own, which is only another way of saying that he had rare and special genius. Though he had innumerable admirers in his own craft animated by laudable ambition, and stimulated by no dishonourable envy, no one has rivalled, or even approached, him in his special lines.

To begin with, he had the charming and exquisitely graceful style which seems to have come naturally to him, and within certain wide though well-defined limits his versatility was as remarkable as his brilliancy. His tact and self-knowledge assured him against attempting anything where he was likely to fail. Yet no one could be less monotonous in the manner of his workmanship or the selection of his subjects. Few would have predicted that the vivacious author of the uneventful Inland Voyage and the Travels with a Donkey, would have cast irresistible spells on the devourers of sensational fiction as the author of Treasure Island or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Yet there is evidence of the same dramatic power in all these books; although in the former the dramatic element is toned down to the sober key in which the thoughtful travels are narrated.

But whether Stevenson indulged in fond and picturesque recollections of the scenes and circumstances of his childhood and youth; whether he threw off his spirited, or pathetic verses or wrote fairy tales to please childish fancies; whether he gave free rein to a wonderfully vivid imagination in his wild romances of the Scottish Highlands and the South Seas or in almost grotesque extravaganzas of superstition and crime; even when he brooded over the physical and metaphysical nightmares which shaped themselves under the master’s touch into terribly impressive possibilities, the vagaries of his inspirations were invariably kept in check by exquisite taste and sound literary judgment.

That his genius had a morbid tinge there is no denying, and, indeed, it is to that we are indebted for his most marvellous tours d’esprit. We fancy we can trace through the varied series of his writings the sad story of failing health, of broken nights, and the sowing of the seeds of pulmonary disease. He had his moods of inspired depression and pessimism, even while the vigorous intellectual powers were still unimpaired. The Suicide Club, with its forbidding title, The Dynamiter, and the Dr. Jekyll may suffice to show that. But even in his middle life when memory revived early recollections, what can be fresher or more healthy?

Even as a youth he had learned to shudder at the fogs and winds and gray skies of his birthplace. Yet ‘the romantic town’ of ‘Marmion’ was a ‘meet nurse’ for such a poetic child. He revelled in the beauties of the scene and the wild romance of the associations, from the castle on its hill, down the High-street and gloomy Canongate to the Palace of Holyrood; from the Heart of Midlothian to the Queensferry of The Antiquary.

In fact he was sitting at the feet of Scott, whom he worshipped. Like Scott he was the best of companions and the soul of good fellowship, as is shown in the dedication to one of his novelettes, when he fondly recalls the debates in the Speculative Society and the subsequent adjournments to some favourite convivial haunt. But there is far more of Sterne than Scott in the narratives of his early wanderings. He models himself on the author of The Sentimental Journey, though in more masculine vein. The Inland Voyage was the travel of a romancist who consciously made mountains of molehills and who succeeded in extending the hallucination to his readers. Always original, he struck sympathetically into a vein the riches of which had for long been left unworked; and we can almost fancy that the title of With a Donkey in the Cevennes was ironically meant as an aggressive challenge to critical innocence. But the reviewers took the writer pleasantly and seriously, and he might well have been proud of the eulogies of hyper-critical connoisseurs.

The stories of his philosophical wanderings and ponderings, his poetry, his essays, and his ‘familiar studies’ might each have entitled him to a high place in literature, but it is as the popular novelist that he will be most widely remembered. Dramatic imagination comes to the aid of a realism which vividly reflects the scenes as his fancy paints them. We are haunted with the Highland outlaws and join in the revels of the pirates. Incident succeeds swiftly to incident, and each striking situation has its direct relation to the steady development of the ingenious plot. The interest never flags, and the curiosity is perpetually being stimulated. In the incidents there is almost invariably characteristic originality, and the situations, although often unexpected, are never unnatural.

Most sensational writers devote themselves to developing the stage action and are either indifferent to the interpretation of character or incapable of it. Mr. Stevenson, on the contrary, is always suggesting studies in strange individualities, or human problems which excite the curiosity of the reader. He analyzes those individualities with subtle skill, or leaves them to analyze themselves in their conduct. Not unfrequently conflicting appreciations have left a difficult problem unsolved. For example, the most competent critics differ widely in their estimates of the meaning and artistic merit of the Master of Ballantrae. Are the inconsistencies in that commanding personality conceivable? Are the redeeming touches true to nature?

We fancy that Mr. Stevenson has idealised a veritable personage, with his habitual tendency towards exaggeration and eccentricity of colour. So it is with that other most impressive personage, John Silver, the smooth-spoken tavern-keeper and cook of ‘Treasure Island,’ who for cold-blooded truculence and diabolical astuteness might have been the favourite élève of Satan himself. The greatest immortals in fiction, such as Scott or George Eliot, were in the habit of painting from people they had known, though they combined the results of their studies and observations. Stevenson, although always on his guard against absurdities, seems to carry romancing into his most powerful delineations. The practice is the more effective, from the sensational point of view, that elsewhere sobriety of drawing and colouring is more closely observed.

Nor are the Scotch stories less graphic. Kidnapped is as full of sensation as Treasure Island, with greater variety of more probable incident. When Alan is run down in the Western Seas, when he is fighting for dear life in the deck-house, when the fugitives, exhausted by thirst, heat, and hunger, are being hunted through mountains and moorland by the soldiers, and when David is cast away on the reefs off Mull, there is as much of poetry as of prose in the epic.

It was in The Black Arrow that Stevenson came nearest to the limits of the ground on which he prudently hesitated to venture. For necessarily even his bright imagination almost ceased to be realistic in conjuring up the dim days of the ‘Wars of the Roses,’ and consequently he has failed in vividly presenting what he but faintly saw himself. The simple repetition of the expression ‘shrew’ shows how much he was at a loss in mediæval language.

One of his charms is that he is never prolix, and his tales in the Arabian Nights are marvels of sensational condensation. Take, for example, The Pavilion on the Links, in which the absconding banker is tracked to his doom by the gentlemanly carbonari he has been foolish enough to swindle. Scarcely less thrilling is A Lodging for the Night, of which that most disreputable of all the Bohemian poets, Villon, is the hero.

The handling of the horrible and grotesque culminated in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the possible discoveries of the practical chemist are pressed into the service of the supernatural. We have spoken of the little volume as the expression of a nightmare, and indeed we happen to know that it was born of a dream. It has all the effect of having been dashed off in a prolonged trance of unhealthy inspiration, and for the touches which heighten the terrors of the unholy transformation we are indebted to a not very enviable phase of genius.

Very different is the impression left on us by Mr. Stevenson’s poems. It is delightful to see in the Garden of Verses how happily the man can identify himself with the child; how he rises in estimation and reputation when he seems to stoop. The secret is that there is nothing of effort in the little book; that the many-sided man of the world could be a child when it pleased him, and that fancy lives freshly again in the past as it followed memory back to the nursery. It is enough merely to name Mr. Stevenson’s latest books, which are fresh in the public memory. By far the most remarkable is the volume which, after appearing in Atalanta under the title of David Balfour, was published in volume form, in 1892, with the name Catriona. It has the double charm of continuing the fascinating history of David and of Alan Breck, and of being Mr. Stevenson’s only love story. Later came The Ebb-Tide, a story of Tahiti, written, like The Wrecker, in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, the author’s stepson. Stevenson had met in America, some ten or twelve years ago, Mrs. Osbourne, a widow with two children, and had married her; and it was with her help that he wrote The Dynamiter. Lastly, we may mention the elaborate and beautiful Edinburgh edition of Mr. Stevenson’s collected works, which is now being issued under the superintendence of his intimate friend Mr. Sidney Colvin. By a sad coincidence the second volume of this edition appeared on the very day of the announcement of the author’s death.

Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Valima, the house he had built himself on the Samoan island of Upolo, on 3 December 1894. He was 44. As this obituary emphasises, he was a restless and chronically sick man who found physical relief, satisfaction and inspiration in travel. The obituary does not mention his most taxing, but ultimately rewarding, journey. In France in 1876 he fell in love with a married American woman, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne. When she returned to California, Stevenson resolved to follow her, travelling steerage to New York on board the Devonian and then taking the transcontinental railroad. At Monterey he collapsed and was nursed back to health by ranchers. He finally reached San Francisco in December 1879 and married the by-then divorced Fanny in May 1880. She was ten years his senior, and was to prove both a vivid companion and a devoted nurse.


The Marquis of Queensberry



‘A man of strong character, but unfortunately

also of ill-balanced mind’



1 February 1900



The death of Lord Queensberry, which occurred last night in London, removes a curious figure from the social world. The late peer represented a type of aristocracy which is less common in our time than it was a century ago − the type which is associated in the public mind with a life of idleness and indulgence rather than with the useful aims which such a man as the late Duke of Westminster set steadfastly before him. The eighth Marquis of Queensberry was in many ways a man of strong character, but unfortunately also of ill-balanced mind, and he never turned to any account either his talents or the powers which his position gave him. For his failure to do so he was perhaps not altogether to blame. The title he bore still has associations clinging to it from the days of the fourth Duke of Queensberry, whose personality is preserved to us in the memoirs of the 18th and early 19th centuries. For more than half a century “Old Q.,” as he was called, was notorious for his follies and wildness. He began to be noted for his escapades before he left school. At 70 he was still a “polished, sin-worn fragment,” and the picture of him that lives in the mind of posterity is that of a worn-out roué,

“Ogling and hobbling down St. James’s-street.”

Thackeray, of course, drew a portrait of him in his younger days, when he was Lord March, in The Virginians.

It cannot be said that the eighth marquis, his kinsman, did anything to bring the title into better repute. Born in 1844, he succeeded his father at the age of 14. The seventh marquis was killed by an accidental discharge of his gun while he was shooting, and by a sad coincidence the same manner of death befell the late peer’s heir, Lord Drumlanrig, a popular young nobleman, who had been a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen and had acted as assistant private secretary to Lord Rosebery when he was Foreign Secretary in Mr. Gladstone’s 1892 Ministry. Shortly before his death, Lord Drumlanrig had been created, for purposes of official convenience, Lord Kelhead, so that he was able to sit in the House of Lords with his chief. A curious feature of the situation thus brought about was that the son became a peer of the United Kingdom with a seat in the Upper House, while the father was only a Scottish peer and had no seat. He had sat from 1872 until 1880 as a representative peer for Scotland, but in the latter year he was not re-elected. Lord Kelhead died in October, 1894, at the age of 27, and his brother, Lord Douglas, became heir to the title.

Lord Queensberry was an undoubted authority on one thing, and that one thing was boxing. The Queensberry rules, which govern the contests of the prize-ring, will keep his fame alive at any rate amongst pugilists and amateurs of the “noble art.” Of his career there is little to be said. He served in the Navy for a time, and he held a commission in the Dumfriesshire Volunteers. Except in these capacities he came little before the public, save when his eccentricities were subjects of nine-day wonder for all the gossips of the town. As an instance may be mentioned his demonstration at a performance of Tennyson’s drama, The Promise of May, at the Globe Theatre in 1882. At a certain point in the play Lord Queensberry rose in the stalls and protested, in the name of Free Thought, against the manner in which the poet had drawn the character of a freethinker, denouncing it as “an abominable caricature.” He was at this time a strong supporter of Mr. Bradlaugh and other militant apostles of Atheism. Lord Queensberry’s intervention in a scandalous case which disturbed society some years ago will probably be within most people’s recollection. The action he then took was dictated by the fact that the name of his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was connected with the proceedings, which eventually brought the affair into a criminal Court.

Lord Queensberry married in 1866 Sibyl, daughter of Mr. Alfred Montgomery and granddaughter of the first Lord Leconfield. By her he was divorced in 1887. He married again in 1893, but in the following year the second marriage was also annulled.

Lord Douglas of Hawick, who now becomes marquis, was born in 1868. He is married to a daughter of the Rev. Thomas Walters, vicar of Boyton, Launceston, and has two sons and a daughter. Besides the sons of the late marquis already mentioned, there is Lord Sholto Douglas, who gained a curious reputation in America some years ago. There is also one daughter, who was married last year to Mr. St. George Lane Fox-Pitt.


Lord Kelvin



Scientist and inventor: ‘He may be said to have taken all

physical science to be his province’



17 December 1907



We deeply regret to announce the death of the most distinguished British man of science, Lord Kelvin, which took place last night, at his Scottish residence, Netherhall, Largs. Lord Kelvin had not been well for over three weeks. He caught a chill on November 23, and his condition became serious some days ago.

William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, was born in Belfast on June 24, 1824. The second son of James Thomson, a remarkable man who, though he started with very slender advantages of education, died in 1849 Professor of Mathematics in the University of Glasgow, he began to attend the classes at Glasgow at the age of 11, and in the year he attained his majority graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge, as Second Wrangler and first Smith’s Prizeman. His success immediately earned him a Fellowship at his college, and in the following year, after spending a short time in Regnault’s Laboratory in Paris, he returned to succeed Dr. Meikleham in the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow.

It is not often that a father and son simultaneously hold professorships at an important University; but even that does not exhaust the academic record of the Thomson family. Lord Kelvin’s elder brother James was Professor of Engineering in the University from 1873 to 1889, so that three professors at Glasgow were provided by two generations of the descendants of a small farmer in the north of Ireland. The rest of Lord Kelvin’s life is chiefly a record of strenuous and successful scientific work which obtained early recognition.

The Royal Society made him one of their number in 1851, and, after conferring on him successively a Royal and a Copley medal, accorded him in 1890 the highest honour at their disposal by choosing him to be their president. At the British Association, of which he acted as president at Edinburgh in 1871, he was an assiduous attendant. Much of his work was first published as communications or reports to that body, and it was only at its last meeting that he delivered a long address on the constitution of matters and the electronic theory. Honorary degrees he received in abundance, among them being D. C. L. from Oxford and LL. D. from Cambridge, Dublin, and Edinburgh, together with many foreign academical distinctions.

In 1896 he was knighted for the part he took in the laying of the Atlantic cable, and when, in 1892, Lord Salisbury created him a peer he borrowed his title from the stream that flows below the University in which his scientific life had been spent. He received the Order of Merit on its institution in 1902 – he was already a member of the Prussian Order ‘Pour le Mérite’ – and in the same year became a Privy Councillor. But perhaps the crowning occasion of his life was the celebration of his jubilee as professor at Glasgow in 1896, when a unique gathering assembled to do him honour, and congratulations from scientific men in all quarters of the globe testified to the universal admiration with which his genius was regarded.

Three years later, after 53 years’ service, he resigned his Glasgow professorship. But his retirement by no means meant the cessation of active work. While still maintaining his connexion with the University, of which in 1904 he was unanimously chosen Chancellor in succession to the Earl of Stair, he continued to contribute to the proceedings of various scientific societies, and much of his time was devoted to the rewriting and revision of his Baltimore lectures on molecular dynamics and the wave theory of light.

These lectures were delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, and the printing of them, begun in 1885, was only brought to a conclusion in 1904. He chose the wave-theory as his subject with the deliberate intention of accentuating its failures, but in his preface to the volume published in 1904 he was able to express his satisfaction that it contained a dynamical explanation of every one of the difficulties which had been encountered in the lectures 20 years before. Lord Kelvin was also a director of several manufacturing companies, and his name formed part of the style of the Glasgow firm which manufactures his compass and measuring instruments. He was president of the institution of Electrical Engineers for the present year, though he did not live to deliver his inaugural address.

Within the limits of a short article it is impossible to give a full account of Lord Kelvin’s achievements in the realms of scientific thought and discovery. Generally recognised at the time of his death as the foremost living physicist, he was not less remarkable for the profundity of his researches than for the range and variety of his attainments. Not confining himself to a single more or less specialised department of learning, he may be said to have taken all physical science to be his province; for there were few branches of physical inquiry that he did not touch, and all that he touched he adorned. Perhaps this many sidedness of his intellectual interests may be connected with the deep conviction he cherished of the unity of all Science, and his impatience of conclusions which, drawn from a limited field of study, were in opposition to the well-ascertained facts of wider generalisations.

On one occasion, when accused of being ‘hard on the geologists,’ he repudiated the suggestion with the remark that he did not believe in one science for the mathematician, another for the chemist, another for the physicist, and another for the geologist. All science, he said, is one science, and any part of science that places itself outside the pale of the other sciences ceases for the time being to be a science.

Some idea may be obtained of the amount of his scientific work from the fact that, according to the Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, down to the year 1883 he had published 262 memoirs under his name, not including papers published jointly with other men; while his republished mathematical papers – not yet completed – already fill three substantial volumes. Nor must his contributions to the increase of natural knowledge – to use one of his favourite expressions – be reckoned merely by the sum of the results at which he was personally able to arrive.

Hundreds of men are proud to recognise him as their master, and in all parts of the world scientific workers may be found who have not only profited by his advice and been stimulated by his enthusiasm, but owe to him in many cases the very subjects of research upon which they are engaged – either as his direct suggestions or as problems opened out by his prior investigations.

To solve the puzzle of the ultimate constitution of matter may be regarded as the goal of the pure physicist’s ambition. The problem afforded Lord Kelvin a congenial field of speculation, and he succeeded in propounding an hypothesis as to the nature of atoms which, according to Clerk Maxwell, satisfied more of the conditions than any hitherto imagined. Starting from a number of mathematical theorems established by Helmholtz respecting the motion of a perfect, incompressible fluid, he suggested that the universe may be filled with such a primitive fluid of which in itself we can know nothing, but of which portions become apparent to our perceptions as matter when converted by a particular mode of motion into vortex-rings. These vortex-rings (of which a fair imitation is given by smoke rings in air) are the atoms or molecules that compose all material substances. They are indivisible not because of their hardness and solidity, but because they are permanent both in volume and in strength. Lord Kelvin’s work on the atomic theory, though perhaps his most striking contribution to mathematical physics, is only a small part of the whole. Light, electricity, and magnetism, to mention a few wide departments, all engaged his attention, to what extent may be judged from the fact that his papers on electrostatics and magnetism alone up to 1872 filled a volume of 600 pages.

Some of the earliest and not least important of Lord Kelvin’s work was in connection with the theory of heat: indeed he is to be looked upon as one of the founders of the modern science of thermodynamics. In 1824 Sadi Carnot published his book on the motive power of heat, setting forth the conditions under which heat is available in a heat-engine for the production of mechanical work, but it attracted little or no attention until Lord Kelvin about the middle of the century drew the notice of the scientific world to its value and importance.

A direct and immediate result of Lord Kelvin’s study of Carnot’s work was his definition of the ‘Absolute scale of temperature’ – that is, a scale which, unlike the graduations of an ordinary thermometer that are based on the observed alterations in volume produced in a particular material by heat or cold, is independent of the physical properties of any specific substance. A second addition to science soon followed in the principle of the dissipation of energy, enunciated in 1852. A further general inference is that this earth, as now constituted, has been within a finite time, and within a finite time will again become unfit for human habitation.

In a paper communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1862 he declared that for 18 years it had been pressed on his mind that much current geological speculation was at variance with essential principles of thermodynamics, and proceeded to show from considerations founded on the conduction of heat that the earth must within a limited time have been too hot for the existence of life. Six years later, in an address on ‘Geological Time’ which provoked a lively controversy with Huxley, he brought some other physical considerations to bear on the question.

Since the tides exercise a retarding influence on the rotation of the earth, it must in the past have been revolving more quickly than it does now, and calculations of its deceleration indicate that within the periods of time required by some geologists it must have been going at such a speed that it could not have solidified into its present shape. But Lord Kelvin did not think the amount of centrifugal force existing 100 million years ago incompatible with its present form. Again he pointed out that the sun cannot be regarded as a permanent and eternal factor in the universe.

It is only fair, however, to say that his arguments have not been universally endorsed even among physicists; and it has been urged that there are other assumptions – in regard, for instance, to the conductivity of the earth’s interior – not less admissible than those adopted by him, which lead to results much more favourable to the geological and biological demand for more time. Radium, too, has been invoked to explain the maintenance of the sun’s heat.

Great as were Lord Kelvin’s achievements in the domains of scientific speculation, his services to applied science were even greater. A prolific and successful inventor, he had nothing in common with that frequent class of patentees who are brimming over with ideas, all crude, most worthless, and only in occasional instances capable of being worked up into something valuable by men combining the requisite mechanical skill with an adequate knowledge of scientific first principles. Invention with him was not a mere blind groping in the dark, but a reasoned process leading to a definitely conceived end.

Of the scores of patents he took out few have not been found of practical and commercial value. It was in connection with submarine telegraphy that some of his most valuable inventions were produced in this department, indeed, his work was of capital importance and of itself sufficient to establish his title to lasting fame. Lord Kelvin was a firm believer in the practicability of transoceanic telegraphy and did not hesitate to show by acts the faith that was in him. He became a director of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which hazarded large sums in the enterprise of making and laying a cable, and he took an active and personal part in the operations which culminated in the successful laying of the short-lived cable of 1853.

As is well known, the system broke down completely after it had been in use for a very short time, and there is little reason to doubt that the reason of its untimely end was the inability of its insulation to stand the potentials to which it was exposed. Lord Kelvin, who believed that but for this treatment the cable would have worked satisfactorily, declared that feeble currents ought to be employed together with very sensitive receiving instruments, and, characteristically, was ready, not only with a theoretical prescription, but with the working instrument, his mirror galvanometer, that enabled it to be carried into effect.

Some of his finest work is to be found in his electric measuring instruments, a subject in which his knowledge and authority were unrivalled. More especially was this the case in regard to electrostatic measurements – perhaps the most difficult of all. When the need for accurate instruments in his studies on atmospheric electricity caused him to take up the matter, the electrometers in existence were little more than electroscopes – capable of indicating a difference of electric potential, but not of measuring it; but in his quadrant, portable, and absolute electrometers his skill and ingenuity put at the disposal of electricians three beautiful instruments of exact research.

Measurement he regarded as the beginning of science and as the origin of many of the grandest discoveries. Hence he was always ready to do anything by which it could be facilitated, whether in matters of daily life or abstruse scientific inquiry. Thus on the one hand the metric system found in him a strong supporter, and he rarely missed a chance of bestowing a word or two of half-humorous disparagement upon the unhappy English inch or ‘that most meaningless of modern measures, the British statute mile.’

A keen amateur yachtsman, he developed navigational aids for ships, a steady compass that could still work accurately when a ship rolls at sea, and a sounding mechanism to measure depth at regular intervals.

As a lecturer Lord Kelvin was rather prone to let his subject run away with him. When this happened, limits of time became of small account, and his audience, understanding but little of what he was saying, were fain to content themselves with admiring the restless vivacity of his manner (which was rather emphasised than otherwise by the slight lameness from which he suffered) and the keen zest with which he revelled in the intricacies of the matter in hand. Similarly, the intelligence and patience of his Glasgow classes were not always equal to the mental strain entailed by his expositions, and, though they were thoroughly proud of him and his attainments, their orderliness was not of the strictest kind, and they were not above varying the proceedings with an occasional practical joke. But he was quick to express his approval of a piece of good work, or his delight at a new result or well-planned experiment; and no one could come in contact with him without feeling the charm of his kindly, lovable nature, and falling under the spell of the enthusiasm and untiring energy with which he devoted himself to the advancement of knowledge.

Lord Kelvin was twice married; first, to Margaret, daughter of Mr. Walter Crum, of Thornliebank; and, secondly to Frances Anna, daughter of Mr. Charles R. Blundy, of Madeira. There was no issue of either marriage.

A devout Christian, Kelvin believed that his theory of heat-death and his calculations of the age of the earth exposed flaws in Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution. To some Victorians, however, the implications of his ideas about the finite habitability of the earth seemed to offer a doom-laden vision of an icy end to all things rather than a fiery one.


Sir Henry

Campbell-Bannerman



Prime Minister who showed ‘a shrewd sense of what the public wanted at the moment’



23 April 1908



In the opinion of his followers, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has been a successful Prime Minister; but few would be found to say that his life offers a specially interesting subject of study to the biographer. In his case the interest was not that of genius, of versatility, of obstacles unexpectedly overcome, of high intellectual variety, of impassioned eloquence, or of mordant wit. It was just the interest which in a lesser degree attaches to the career of any very successful business man. A line of action early and definitely adopted; strong party consistency rigorously observed; a shrewd sense of what the public wanted at the moment; a firm will, a temper never ruffled except with intention, a gift of speech just adequate to its purpose and no more; a pleasant humour, a ready tact in dealing with friends and opponents, and behind it all the valuable background of ample wealth – these were the endow-ments of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and they made him Prime Minister.

By origin he belonged to the middle-class, being by birth a member of an outlying branch of the clan Campbell, and no known relation to the Bannermans who hold the baronetcy. He was born in 1836, the second son of James Campbell, who after making a considerable fortune in business in Glasgow became Lord Provost of that city, and was knighted. Sir Henry’s elder brother, who lives at the family place of Stracathro in Forfarshire, and whose own serious illness was an added sorrow to the closing months of his brother’s life, is a strong Conservative in politics, and as such represented Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities till 1906, when he retired, and was succeeded by Sir Henry Craik. Sir James Campbell married Janet, daughter of Henry Bannerman, a Scotsman settled in Manchester, who became very rich and whose son Henry, dying in 1872, left all his property to the young Henry Campbell on condition that he added the name Bannerman to his own.

It was in this way that be became possessed of Castle Belmont, near Meigle, where so much of his later life was spent. Henry Campbell’s early education was received partly near home, partly abroad, where he became a good French scholar; then, after passing through Glasgow University, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1858 and his M.A. in 1861. In 1860 he married Charlotte, daughter of General Sir Charles Bruce, K.C.B. a lady who, till her death in 1906, was, in spite of the ill-health which incapacitated her for many years, the close associate of all his thoughts and plans. They had no children, but this only threw them closer together, and the long holidays which they spent in each other’s company, in Scotland or on the Continent of Europe, are said by those who knew them to have been ideal episodes in the “marriage of true minds.”

In 1868 Henry Campbell had his first chance of entering Parliament, and in the May of that year he was brought forward by the advanced Liberals of Stirling to contest the burghs at a by-election. The new voters under the Reform Act of 1867 had not yet taken their place on the register, so that on a poll of 1,059 votes the young “advanced” candidate suffered defeat at the hands of Mr. Ramsey, a Liberal of more Whiggish colour, by a majority of 71. Then came the dissolution, and at the end of the year, on a poll which had grown to 3,883, Henry Campbell secured a majority of 519. He thus entered on that flood tide of Liberal opinion which made Mr. Gladstone Premier and gave him what was thought in those days to be an overwhelming majority.

In Gladstone’s third session the sensible, steady-going, impeccable Scotch member, who had married a general’s daughter and was about to inherit a great fortune, was chosen to be Financial Secretary of the War Office. From 1874 to 1880 Disraeli and the Tories were in power; when Gladstone returned, Campbell-Bannerman was moved, in 1884, to what was at that time the most conspicuous and difficult post in the Ministry, that of Chief Secretary for Ireland, in which he succeeded Sir George Trevelyan.

It was a fortunate appointment. Of the three former occupants of the post one had been driven to resign by the intrigues of his own party, one had been murdered, the third, Sir George Trevelyan, had, after two short years, come back prematurely aged. Campbell-Bannerman was immediately called, by his opponents, “our chief antagonist and our hapless target … and a very dull man.” But it was not many days before they began to have an inkling they had made some mistake. Before the end of the year the story went round that his critics were describing him as “the only possible Chief Secretary, with the hide of a rhinoceros and the heart of an iceberg.” This, of course, was only a pleasant way of saying that Campbell-Bannerman went on quietly administering the law and that he was the very last man in the world to take the Irish members at their own valuation.

Up to the time when Campbell-Bannerman, with the rest of the Gladstonian Cabinet, went out of office, in the summer of 1885, there seemed no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Chief Secretary’s Unionist principles. During the election campaign in October and November, 1885, he not only repudiated the notion of yielding to what he called “the Separatist faction,” but argued forcibly that the law should be specially and permanently amended to strengthen the arm of justice against intimidation and boycotting, and to secure that Irish jurymen should not be allowed to combine to create impunity for terrorist violence and menaces.

A very few weeks later, when Lord Salisbury’s Government was thrown out on the Address and Gladstone once more came into office prepared to solve the Irish question by a deal with Parnell, Campbell-Bannerman blossomed out at once as an undisguised Home Ruler. In spite of the brave words of his election address and his campaign speeches, he went with his leader in the full adoption of the policy of Parnell and Davitt. Indeed he declared to a colleague, in a phrase of which he was the inventor and which had much success at the time, that he had “found salvation long ago, though he had kept his secret well.” But he did not return to Ireland; the Chief Secretaryship was given to Mr. Morley, who was no new convert, and the member for the Stirling Burghs went back as Secretary of State to the scene of his earlier labours.

He remained at the War Office during the short Government of 1886, and returned again during Gladstone’s second Home Rule Government of 1892-93. Of his first tenure of this high post there is little to record, except that within the office itself and in Parliament he made a good impression.

His tenure of the War Office was brought to an end in June, 1895, by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition. He, of course, was blamed as Secretary for War; but it must be added in fairness that Mr. Balfour, speaking at Manchester in the following January, at a very anxious moment in our history, paid a handsome tribute to the “additions to the fighting power of the Army” which had been made by the Home Rule Government between 1892 and 1895.

The cordite vote, in fact, was only a pretext to get rid of a Government of which the country was tired, and which ought, in the opinion of most people, to have resigned or dissolved after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords.

Campbell-Bannerman was made a G.C.B; but for some years afterwards he remained one of the least prominent of the Liberal leaders. But all this time the internal of the party continued; and on December 14 the world was taken by surprise when Sir William Harcourt announced his withdrawal from the leadership of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The party deliberated in private, and, at a meeting on February 6, 1899, at the National Liberal Club, the names of Mr. Asquith and Sir Henry Fowler having been withdrawn, unanimously voted that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman should lead the party in the House of Commons. This position Sir Henry filled till the end of 1905, if not with overmastering ability, at least with sufficient success to make his choice as Prime Minister almost inevitable when the time came for a change of Government.

For a long time one question, and one question only, filled the public mind − our relations with South Africa, and the war which broke out in October. With regard to this crisis in our history, it is impossible for the impartial historian not to blame Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman both for the unwisdom of his initial policy and for the costly injudiciousness of some of his phrases. Speaking at Ilford, soon after the Bloemfontein Conference, he used a sentence which he liked so well that he repeated it in the City of London on June 30, thus proclaiming it as the deliberate policy of his party; it was “I can see nothing whatever in all that has occurred to justify either warlike action or military preparations.” Of course the Boers took this to mean that, whatever they did, we should not proceed to extremities. The Liberal leader was also accused of attacking British soldiers when he spoke of the destruction of farms and the policy of the concentration camps as “methods of barbarism.” It was in vain that he subsequently explained: “I have always borne public testimony to the humane conduct of the officers and men of the Army, and absolved them from all blame.” But the word went round among the Boers that public opinion in England was bitterly divided, and that they had only to hold out.

Meantime the party itself was by no means a happy family, and Lord Rosebery opened a split, when he came out of retirement to propose the abandonment of Home Rule, and went on to found the Liberal (Imperialist) League, with himself as president and Sir Edward Grey, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Haldane as vice-presidents, all of them men destined within a few years to enter a Campbell-Bannerman Cabinet; but with their titular chief he himself had henceforth no political relations.

Very little need be said of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s conduct of his party during the last four sessions of Unionist rule. It was sound and competent, and, as the subsequent general election showed, was efficient in keeping the party together and in educating the country, but it was not marked by any unexpected qualities.

On December 4 Mr. Balfour resigned, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was sent for. For a moment it seemed uncertain whether Sir Edward Grey and the other vice-presidents of the Liberal League would accept office; but the difficulties were quickly removed; and by December 10 Sir Henry had completed a strong Cabinet, containing, on the one hand, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Haldane, and Sir Edward Grey, and on the other Mr. Lloyd-George and Mr. John Burns.

In January, 1906, came the general election. The rout of the late Government was complete. The Unionists, who had numbered 369, came back 157; while the Liberals, who, with a few Labour members, had been 218 all told, now comprised 379 faithful followers of the Government, and − the most astonishing feature of all − no fewer than 51 Labour members who, on most questions, could be depended on for votes. Such a majority had never been seen in any Parliament since that following the first Reform Bill; and, though both sides had expected that the new House of Commons would be strongly in favour of the new Government, none of the party prophets anticipated anything like what really happened.

It may suffice to say that, as regards domestic legislation, a great deal was achieved; but the fate of several of the most important measures of the Government shows that even the strongest Minister, with a vast and obedient majority behind him, cannot in this country expect to have everything his own way. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was not conspicuous either in the statement of policies or in the conduct of Ministerial measures in the House of Commons; but, on the whole, he proved himself an adroit tactician and especially skilful in holding together a party composed of incongruous and often unruly elements. The determination he displayed to push his measures through and to obtain the full advantage of his party’s numerical strength at whatever cost to the traditions of free debate and the rights of minorities produced continual friction.

During the debate on the Address, a year later, he went out of his way to give an indirect answer to Lord Rosebery’s challenge on the Irish question. The Prime Minister asserted with deliberate emphasis, “The Irish people should have what every self-governing colony in the Empire has − the power of managing its own affairs. That is the larger policy I have spoken of.”

The principal measure of 1906 was the Education Bill; it was so much amended in the Lords that the Government took offence and refused to proceed with it. Another important measure was Mr. Harcourt’s Plural Voting Bill; but this the Lords refused to pass until they had before them a complete scheme of electoral reform. In the following Session a Scotch Land Bill, the effect of which would have been to assimilate the Scotch land system, not to that of England, but to that of Ireland, was postponed by the Lords until they could compare it with the Government’s Small Holdings Bill for England − another cause of deep offence, for which the House of Lords was threatened with condign punishment.

The House of Lords, however, have not been cowed upon this point by the menaces of the Prime Minister and his colleagues, and they have again refused to yield to the demand that the Scotch Lowlands should be turned into another Ireland. Gradually the threats against the Upper House have lost their shrill tones, and the Prime Minister’s effort to whip up the agitation once again last autumn was so conspicuous a failure that, at the beginning of 1908, he practically withdrew from it and exonerated the Peers from anything like deliberate obstruction. Nevertheless, he proposed, early in February, a verbose and lengthy resolution, to the effect that the Scotch Bills passed by the House of Commons and rejected by the House of Lords should be sent up again without delay and by the most stringent use of the closure. But after the repeated Liberal defeats since the close of the autumn there ceased to be any probability that a renewed effort would be made to precipitate an agitation originally intended to end in an early dissolution or a complete victory.

His impaired health prevented Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman from taking any share in the recent discussions of Licensing and Education, and Mr. Asquith discharged the duties of leader of the House of Commons practically since the opening of the Session. Grave trouble of a personal nature fell upon him during the years of his Ministry. The health of his wife, with whom, as we have said, he had lived for six and forty years in the most perfect union, had been for some time seriously affected; and on August 30, 1906 she died at Marienbad. He himself was physically not so strong as he looked, and this heavy blow affected him deeply. In the autumn of 1907, after he had helped to entertain the German Emperor at the Guildhall, he had to attend the Colston banquet at Bristol where he made a speech. The effort was too much for him; he had a serious heart attack, and for some hours his life was in danger.

He recovered, but not entirely; and was compelled to spend all December and the first three weeks of January at Biarritz. A few days after the opening of the Session he caught influenza, suffered from a recurrence of some of the former symptoms, and was soon found to be unfit either to attend Cabinet Councils or to be present in his place in Parliament, except for two or three days, when he unfortunately overtasked his powers in the delivery of an important and exhausting speech on February 13. Two days after he had again to withdraw from his place in the House of Commons and to leave his duties to Mr. Asquith, who it was well known was to succeed to the Premiership when a vacancy was created. His condition, grave from the outset, rapidly grew worse. For a time it was hoped that he might still continue to retain his office, at least temporarily, but increasing weakness compelled a prompt decision. On the 5th of April the King received at Biarritz a letter from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman tendering his resignation in compliance with the urgent recommendations of his medical advisers. This was graciously accepted, and Mr. Asquith was summoned.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s loss to his party is almost irreparable at a crisis when electoral difficulties are multiplying when there are ominous signs of disintegration and division which he, more than any of his colleagues, had the gift of smoothing over, if not removing.


Keir Hardie



Founder of the Labour Party who led a stormy political career



27 September 1915



Mr. J. Keir Hardie, Labour M.P. for Merthyr Tydvil, died from pneumonia after a long period of ill-health in a Glasgow nursing home yesterday. Born in Scotland in 1856, he was engaged in mining work from the age of seven to that of 24. He was elected secretary of the Lanarkshire Miners Union in 1880, and at once threw himself with great zeal and little discretion into the work of a trade unionist and political agitator. He attempted to secure election to Parliament as a Labour candidate for Mid-Lanark in 1888, but was badly beaten. At the General Election four years later, however, he was elected for South-West Ham, and made his first appearance at St. Stephen’s in circumstances which necessitated the interference of the police. He was defeated in West Ham in 1895, but at the General Election of 1900 was elected for Merthyr Tydvil, which remained faithful to him until his death. He was for many years chairman, and throughout his political career the obvious leader, of the Socialist body known as the Independent Labour Party. When the Labour Party became a distinct group in the House of Commons in 1906 he was elected its first chairman, and held the position for two Sessions.

For over 20 years Mr. Keir Hardie was regarded as the most extreme of British politicians. The hard and narrow environment of his youth predisposed him to take a gloomy view of the state of society, and sympathy for suffering humanity, he was one of those men who spend their lives in expressing the views of a minority. He certainly spent his public life in advocating unpopular causes. He did not hide his republican opinions; he was one of the strongest opponents of the South African War; he made speeches during a tour in India in 1907 which, in view of the unrest prevailing at the time, could only be branded as mischievous; and he was the most pronounced of all the pacifists before the outbreak of the European War. He was probably the most abused politician of his time, though held in something like veneration by uncompromising Socialists, and no speaker has had more meetings broken up in more continents than he.

Although showing courage in some of his earlier adventures in the House of Commons, when he constituted a Socialist party of one, he never caught the ear of that Assembly, and was an ineffective leader of the independent group which owed its existence in great measure to his unflagging energy. He did much good and unselfish work for Labour causes, but did not at any time gain the complete confidence of the working class. The Labour Party disappointed his hopes. He was out of tune with the more moderate views of the trade unionist majority for a considerable time, and his views ceased to have any influence in the councils of the party with the coming of the war. His health was declining and his voice has been hardly heard since the collapse of International Socialism in August, 1914. He seems to have accepted the war with resignation, and the bitter passions which he aroused in his life were in great measure forgotten before his death.


Dr. Elsie Inglis



Founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, whose work in Serbia made her a legendary character



28 November 1917



We regret to announce the death of Dr. Elsie Inglis, M.B., C.M., Commissioner of the London Units of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, which took place at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Monday. She had just returned from Russia.

Miss Inglis, to whom belonged the honour of originating the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, was pre-eminently a Scottish woman. As a medical woman she specialised in surgery, and for many years held the post of joint surgeon to the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children, and was also Lecturer on Systematic Gynæcology in the Royal Colleges School of Medicine, Edinburgh. She had a large practice in Edinburgh, and took an important part in connection with the medical education of women in Scotland.

On the outbreak of war Dr. Inglis felt that the medical services of women should be given to the country. She conceived and carried out with marked success the idea of forming the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, staffed entirely by women. Unfortunately the British War Office refused to consider hospitals staffed entirely by women, and Dr. Inglis and her committee offered their services to the Allies, and they were at once accepted.

In April, 1915, Dr. Inglis left for Serbia to act as Commissioner to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals established there. The typhus scourge was at its worst. She took with her a splendid group of colleagues of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Her splendid organizing capacity, her skill, and her absolute disregard of her own comfort, month after month, drew forth the love and admiration of the whole Serbian people, which they were not slow to express. The typhus epidemic carried off one-third of the Serbian Army Medical Corps, and the situation was desperate. About that time, Lady Paget was struggling against fearful odds in Skopje, in the south of Serbia. Dr. Elsie Inglis set to work in the more central districts of Serbia, organizing four big hospital units where the need was greatest. Her grasp of detail was wonderful, and she had indomitable resolution. Yet she was above all a woman. Never will the Serbians forget her cheerful and kindly greetings and her complete composure in the very worst circumstances. Never can they forget that most characteristic remark of hers which was heard so often at the Serbian Medical Headquarters Staff: − “Tell me, please, where is the greatest need for hospitals, without respect to difficulties, and we shall do our best to help Serbia and her valiant soldiers.” Among the Serbian peasants, in the very heart of the Shumadija, the stories gathering round her name assume almost a legendary character.

Thanks to the devotion and sacrifices of a band of British and French and American relief workers, the typhus epidemic was mastered. But tragedy deepened when the united hordes of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians assaulted an already shattered nation. Perhaps it was then that Dr. Inglis’s most heroic work was done. At Lazarevatz her hospital was overcrowded. Later, by Kragujevatz, the same state of things existed; wounded soldiers were lying in the streets. She gave up her own beds and rugs, and she and her colleagues passed whole nights in alleviating the sufferings of the men. Next, she was found at Kraljevo, where, declining to leave her Serbian wounded, she was captured with her staff at Krushevatz by the enemy. After enduring many discomforts as prisoners of war, she and her staff were finally released and sent home. She at once volunteered with a Scottish Women’s unit for service in Mesopotamia, but again War Office obstruction frustrated her plan. Giving herself no rest, she worked on for Serbia in this country, and took a leading part in the organisation of the Kossovo Day celebrations, in June, 1916. The equipping of a Southern Slav Volunteer Corps for the Dobrudja front was the occasion of yet another act of sacrifice on her part. She set out for the Dobrudja, and was attached, at her own request to the Southern Slav Division that fought alongside the Russian troops. She went through the Rumanian retreat with the Southern Slav Division, and remained with it till her recent return from Russia. The insanitary Dobrudja came after a long period of strain. Her work, however, was still as spirited and enthusiastic as ever, and she returned to England with new plans for service. For the splendid service which she rendered to Serbia the Crown Prince conferred on her the Order of the White Eagle. She is the only woman on whom such an honour has been conferred.

Apart from her war activities, Dr. Inglis was known throughout Scotland as one of the keenest supporters of all forms of women’s work, and her interest in the advancement of women was untiring. All who came in contact with her carried away with them the impression of energy, courage, indomitable pluck, and a most capable and striking personality.

The following tribute is paid to Dr. Inglis by a fellow-worker of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals: −

“Every one will hear with the deepest regret the death of Dr. Elsie Inglis, that splendidly brave woman, to whom belongs the honour of originating the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. She had not been well for several months, but she would not give in, and worked to the very end. After landing in England from Russia she had a collapse and passed quietly away.”

She was the second daughter of John Forbes David Inglis, of the Indian Civil Service, Chief Commissioner at Lucknow. She was born in India, and for some years lived in Australia. She was educated in Edinburgh and Paris, and received her medical training in Edinburgh, but she walked a hospital in Ireland.

The funeral will be at St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, on Thursday next, at 2. The date of a memorial service in London will be announced later.


Andrew Carnegie



Steel magnate who became one of the greatest of all philanthropists



11 August 1918



Mr. Andrew Carnegie died at 7.30 this morning at Lenox, Massachusetts. The cause of death is given as bronchial pneumonia. Mr. Carnegie had been living at his summer home at Lenox ever since the wedding of his daughter.

Andrew Carnegie was born in the ancient Royal Burgh of Dunfermline, in the county of Fife, Scotland. He himself gave the date of his birth as November 25, 1837, but local authority gives 1835 as the correct year.

The chief industry of his native town was then the hand-loom weaving of fine linen. The weavers were highly intelligent and disputatious, and Dunfermline was a centre of Chartist agitation and passionate Dissent. Carnegie’s father owned four hand-looms and employed apprentices. He was a revolutionary politician, a street orator, and an agitator against the industrial conditions which, by a singular irony, the son was destined to turn to such enormous profit. His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached until her death at the age of 80, was the daughter of Thomas Morrison, a man of mark in Dunfermline as an orator, lay preacher, reformer, and agitator.

The introduction of the power-loom ruined the business of Carnegie, senior, and was the cause of the emigration of the whole family to America when Andrew was about 12 years old. He had been taught by his mother and had been to a day school, but that was all the education he had until at the age of 30 he took courses of study in New York.

On their arrival in America in 1848 the Carnegie family settled in Alleghany, opposite Pittsburg, on the other side of the Ohio river. There they all found work at once, Andrew as a bobbin boy at 4s. 10d. a week in the cotton mill in which his father worked at the loom. Their next-door neighbour was a shoemaker named Phipps, who had a son a little younger than Andrew. This was Henry Phipps, after-wards second partner in the Carnegie steel and iron companies, the oldest of Carnegie’s early associates; and the only one who remained with him till the end, but even they quarrelled after 50 years of friendship.

From the cotton mill Andrew passed to a small factory where he fed the furnace in the cellar and tended the engine. That was all the manual work he ever did, for he was soon taken into the office. Next, by the patronage of a Dunfermline man who knew his father, he became a telegraph messenger under the Ohio Telegraph Company. He mastered the code, risked taking a message against rules, and was rewarded by being made operator at £60 a year. Then by the help of Colonel T. A. Scott he passed to the telegraphic service of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with another rise of salary.

He remained for 11 years in the employ of the railway company and got together a small capital by engaging in modest commercial enterprises more or less connected with the railway and under the benevolent advice of Colonel Scott, to whom he became private secretary. The whole region was humming with activity. There were oil companies, manufacturing enterprises, railways, and banks, and Carnegie, who was put in charge of important works during the Civil War, and became superintendent of the line in 1863, acquired friends and business experience, as well as money.

Carnegie thus was ready for the vast expansion of the iron and steel production which began about 1864. The protective tariff of 1861 was the general background; the local factors were the development of the Pennsylvania coalfields near Pittsburg, the substitution of coal and coke for charcoal in producing pig iron, the opening up of the Lake Superior iron ore deposits, the development of transport by rail and water, and the introduction of the Bessemer steel process.

Carnegie was responsible for none of these, but took advantage of all of them. He was neither inventor nor creator, like Krupp or Armstrong or Westinghouse, but a manipulator with a quick eye for opportunities and a rare sagacity in utilizing men. He used men of all sorts, raw youths or those of standing and influence, to their advantage when it served his purpose. He made many millionaires, but there is no record of those that he exploited and cast adrift.

In 1864 Carnegie bought his first interest in iron works, forming with his younger brother, old companions of his boyhood, and a German named Kloman, who had technical knowledge, the Union Iron Mills Company. Soon afterwards he secured the backing of the president and vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the greatest local magnates, for a new venture the Keystone Bridge Company. He resigned his railway appointment and devoted himself entirely to his private interests.

The Union Mills Company was not very successful, but Carnegie showed tenacity in holding on, and astuteness in buying out his senior partner when things were at their worst. His own part was to run about and get orders while the partners ran the works and the local business. He maintained this division of labour throughout his career, in all the successive enterprises being the travelling and publicity manager, but insisting on constant reports and keeping a firm grip on the actual works.

In 1873 he went into the steel business, employing as capital £50,000 which he had earned as commissions from Colonel Scott for placing the stock of a new railway on the European market. This was his share in the new company of Carnegie, McCandless, and Co., the total capital of which was £140,000. There were 11 partners. Twenty-six year later, when the business was sold for over £90,000,000, all Carnegie’s partners save one had died or gone out, and Carnegie’s personal share was more than one-half of the colossal total.

The story of the fortunes of the company is long and tortuous. It involved many commercial transactions of a mysterious nature. But the amassing of this portentous wealth is a most remarkable achievement. He went through no long-drawn struggle against adversity, nor is his story one of incessant toil and application. He escaped the daily grind and left it to others. The secret of his success in great measure lay in his withdrawal from the daily worries that beset the men on the spot and his consequent leisure to see the large movement of affairs and steer his course accordingly.

But he was a thorn in the flesh to his partners and the working officials, continually goading them to further efforts, playing off the output of one furnace or mill against that of another. He was insatiable. Even when in 1889 the profits rose to £4,000,000 the effect on him was determination to have them doubled next year. But this was not greed, but a love of winning the game, a game in which the measure of success was money.

Carnegie’s naturally kind and generous disposition and the memories and traditions of his Dunfermline proletariat days came into conflict with his consuming ambition. The business side always won. He would pay large wages because that paid him, but otherwise he was a relentless and unthinking employer. Notwithstanding the views in his book, Triumphant Labour, he fought strikes with bitterness, and in the great Homestead strike of 1892, the cause of which was the determination of the masters to force a return to the killing double shift, he was entirely against the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Encouraged by Carnegie’s benevolent theories, the association had come to interfere more and more with the management of the works. Carnegie insisted, even against his partner, Mr. Frick, on making it a fight to a finish. After the most sanguinary of all labour conflicts, amounting to civil war on a small scale, in which in one day 10 men were killed and over 60 wounded, Carnegie won. He fought, however, from the safe distance of Atlantic City, leaving to his partners and managers the dangers of the battle.

In his “Gospel of Wealth” Mr. Carnegie stated his opinion that “surplus wealth was a sacred trust which its possessor was bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community”. How far he succeeded in divesting himself is not yet known, but the total amount of his benefactions is prodigious. In 1908 it was estimated that he had given over £57,000,000 in America, over £7,000,000 in Great Britain, and £1,000,000 in Europe. Education, public libraries, organs, peace movements, and the Hero Funds were the best known of his objects. The two conspicuous omissions from a set of objects thought out with much care were hospitals and churches.

There has been much difference of opinion as to the utility of his beneficence. His endowment of the Scottish universities, in particular, has been singled out for adverse comment. But it is to be remembered that the introduction of the system of options and several other important changes, such as the reflex effect of the endowments on secondary schools, were the work of the Carnegie Trustees and their advisers, rather than of Carnegie.

From boyhood Carnegie was a reader, and in middle age he developed an inclination to write. His first two books, An American Four-in-Hand in Great Britain and Round the World, were very obvious descriptions of luxurious travel. Triumphant Democracy, published in 1886, was an echo of political ideas imbibed in boyhood and a scream of eulogy of American democratic institutions, to the disparagement of his native country. Wealth, published in 1886, and The Empire of Business, which appeared in 1902, contained naïve but rather engaging egotism mingled with his philanthropic aspirations. Problems of To-day, published in 1908, is his best book. It consists of nine social-economic essays on wealth and labour, informed with his own experience and written from an anti-Socialistic point of view.

Carnegie’s private life was simple, wholesome, and unostentatious. He had no vices and eschewed luxury and display. He was a bachelor until he was 50, when he married Miss Whitfield, of New York. Thereafter he never wearied of extolling domestic life. He has one child, a daughter, whose recent marriage was one of the great events of American life.

His principal amusements were entertaining, fishing, and golf. There were few distinguished persons whose acquaintance he did not make, and no one could come in contact with him without being impressed by the strong and shrewd character underlying a superficial but real good nature.

In later life he lived chiefly at Skibo Castle in Sutherlandshire, and his early detestation of British institutions could not be maintained when he voluntarily made his residence there. One of his dreams was the union of Great Britain and the United States. The other great dream, the abolition of war, received a great shock in 1914. During the conflict he relapsed into complete silence and seclusion.


Alexander Graham Bell



Inventor of the telephone, whose interest was the mechanism of speech



3 August 1922



The whole world owes a great debt to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, whose death is announced on another page, for his invention of the telephone as it exists to-day. He will assuredly be remembered among the great inventors whose pioneer work has profoundly affected the daily life of all civilised peoples.

The telephone is an electrical instrument, but Bell was not an electrician nor primarily even a physicist, but rather a physiologist whose interest centred on speech and the mechanism of speech. This interest offers a remarkable example of heredity, for his father, Alexander Melville Bell, was an authority on physiological phonetics, and his grandfather, Alexander Bell, one on phonetics and defective speech. Both of them were Scotsmen, and he himself was born in Edinburgh, on March 3, 1847, and was educated at the High School and University of that city. When quite a young man he removed across the Atlantic with his father, and he was only twenty-five when he was appointed professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. The germ of the great invention with which his name is associated came to life white he was at Brantford, in Canada, and his first instrument was made at Boston, though it was descended, perhaps a little irregularly, from observations he had made when he was a pupil teacher in Elgin, Scotland.

At Brantford, in the middle of 1874, he was working on a tuned system of multiple telegraphy, and had attained the conception of an undulatory current, realizing that speech could be transmitted if an armature could be moved as the air is moved during the passage of a sound. At the same time he was studying, by means of a dead man’s ear, the movements of the air during the utterance of a sound, and it struck him that as the small membrane that forms the ear drum can move the comparatively heavy chain of bones in the ear, a larger membrane ought to be able to move an iron armature. By the linking up of these two branches of inquiry the telephone was evolved.

Bell made his first rough speaking telephone in 1875, and the first long-distance transmission of speech dates from August, 1876, when the Dominion Telegraph Company lent him their wires for experiments, the transmitting apparatus being in Paris, Ontario, and the receiver in Brantford, eight miles away. At first transmission was in one direction only, but a few months later, after his return to Boston, reciprocal conversations were carried on between two persons at a distance from each other.

To begin with, the invention was received with a certain amount of incredulity, which on some occasions was perhaps not entirely unjustified. There is a story that when Sir William Preece, at the Royal Institution, was exhibiting some of the earliest specimens brought to this country, he arranged for a wire to Southampton, where he stationed a man with a cornet, who was to play during the lecture. Members of the audience in London were invited to listen to the strains from Southampton, and a little doubtfully admitted that they heard them, but it was afterwards found that the cornet-player had mistaken the day. Even when it was beyond doubt that the apparatus would work, there were shrewd financiers who missed fortunes through regarding it as a mere toy, and Bell told how, in the early days of the commercial exploitation of the telephone, he “created a great smile” by outlining the central exchange system which exists to-day.

Bell was also the inventor of the photo-phone and the graphophone, and he made some experiments in artificial flight. He served as president of the American Association to Promote Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and was the author of a memoir on the formation of a deaf variety in the human race, and of the census report on the deaf of the United States, 1906. He held various honorary degrees, and was the recipient of the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1902, and of the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society in 1918. The freedom of his native city was conferred on him during a visit he paid to this country at the end of 1920.

It was during that visit also that he gave to The Times an interesting account of the romance of the telephone, which appeared on November 25 in that year. He then made the following comment when asked what he thought of the British telephone system: −

I do not want to say too much about it. I think you do very well, but you do not compare well with the United States, and I think recent history in the United States reveals the cause. We had the best system of telephony in the world before the war in the United States. Then we came into the war, the telephone was taken out of the hands of private companies and run by the Government. Immediately the efficiency of the service fell. Now the control has been returned to the companies, and I hope the efficiency will improve. The decrease in efficiency in consequence of Government ownership is found elsewhere. I visited Australia some years ago, and the telephone system, which was in the hands of the Government, could not be compared to ours in America. I am afraid that the comparatively low state of efficiency in this country as compared with our system in the United States must be attributed to Government ownership. Government ownership aims at cheapness, and cheapness does not necessarily mean efficiency.

Our experience in the United States, now that the control has been returned to the private companies, will form a good test of the value of private ownership. We have hardly a house without the telephone, but in Scotland a few days ago, looking through the telephone lists in our large cities, I was struck by the small number of private individuals with telephones. The telephone certainly has not gone into the homes here as it has in the United States. We do not mind paying for a good service, but we certainly object to pay a big price for a poor service.

Bell married in 1877 Mabel Gardiner, daughter of D. D. Hubbard, by whom he had two daughters.


Andrew Bonar Law



‘One of the best-loved figures in our parliamentary history’



31 October 1923



The death of Mr. Bonar Law removes from the political stage, if not one of the greatest, certainly one of the best-loved figures in our Parliamentary history. As Prime Minister, he held office for only a few months, but the House of Commons has had few more successful leaders, and he will be remembered not so much for his brief career as Prime Minister as for the important part he played as a member of the Cabinet during and after the Great War. He was the first Prime Minister, as Mr. Baldwin was the second, who had the qualification of a career in business.

His active life may be divided into three unequal periods. The first is that of the forty-two years which separated his birth, in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1858, from his entry into Parliament in 1900. The second was spent in the House of Commons as a follower and then a colleague of Mr. Balfour in his Ministry, and subsequently in Opposition. The third dates from November 13, 1911, when on the retirement of Mr. Balfour he was unanimously elected leader of the Unionist Party in the House of Commons; and was concluded by his resignation of the Premiership on May 21, 1923.

Andrew Bonar Law was not born to hereditary wealth, like so many of our Prime Ministers, nor was he, like all of them before Disraeli, brought up in contact with the great political world, and in full view of its activities and ambitions. He had neither family connexions nor Eton friendships nor Oxford distinctions to smooth his path to political success. Nor had he the literary and social genius which made Disraeli well known when he was little more than a boy.

Young Law, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a Glasgow mother, spent his earliest years in Canada, but was soon sent to the High School in Glasgow, and, when school-days were over, placed in business with a Glasgow firm of iron merchants, who were of a family related to his own. He had a marked success as a man of business, and, if that had been his ambition, he might no doubt have become one of the magnates of the industries of the Clyde.

Like Joseph Chamberlain, with whom he was soon to be so closely connected, he decided, comparatively early in life, that he had made as much money as he needed, and that it was time to gratify the political ambitions which he had entertained from boyhood. The result was that in 1900 he retired from business and entered Parliament as Conservative member for the Blackfriars Division of Glasgow.

Few men have made their mark more quickly. His first speech, a reply to an attack by Mr. Lloyd George on the conduct of the South African War, attracted attention, not only by its argumentative power, but by its exhibition of his extraordinary gift, conspicuous throughout his career, for dealing with a complicated series of facts and arguments without the assistance of a single note. This speech won for him the warm congratulations of his leaders and the admiration of the House. But the Press Gallery was not equally complimentary; and in later years he would tell the story of his disappointment when, conscious of his success, he looked to see what the newspapers would say of him, and got no better reward for his trouble than the remark that “the debate was continued with characteristic dullness by Mr. Bonar Law.” To the very end his great qualities were far more clearly perceived and appreciated by members of Parliament than they were by the world outside.

He became Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade in 1902, and when, during the following year, Chamberlain proposed the policy of Tariff Reform and resigned in order to preach it, Bonar Law was perhaps his most active, convinced, and convincing supporter.

The country, however, did not respond to the appeals either of Chamberlain or of Bonar Law. Mr. Balfour, who struck an uncertain note, resigned, and the Unionist Party was routed at the General Election which followed in January, 1906. Bonar Law lost his seat, but soon returned to Parliament as member for Dulwich. The failure of Chamberlain’s health increased Bonar Law’s importance among Tariff Reformers, who saw in him the ablest exponent of their views.

At the second General Election of 1910, Bonar Law, abandoning his safe seat, came near to victory in a gallant fight in North-West Manchester. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party grew more and more dissatisfied with Mr. Balfour’s leadership, and he resigned in the autumn of 1911. The Conservative members of Parliament seemed almost equally divided between the claims of Mr. Long and Mr. Austen Chamberlain to the succession. All but those who were very much behind the scenes were surprised when the difficulty was solved by the retirement of both in favour of Mr. Bonar Law, who had returned to the House as member for Bootle. One of the reasons in his favour was, no doubt, that, though at least as convinced a Tariff Reformer as Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he had a name less alarming to those who did not love that policy. The rest was done by his ability in debate, and by the general liking which his unpretentious kindliness, simplicity, and common sense had won from his party, and, indeed, from the House as a whole.

Bonar Law held the Leadership for over nine years, and the first three and a half of these were spent in Opposition. Naturally enough, having come in to make good what was considered Mr. Balfour’s weakness, he was more tempted to exhibit the opposite fault. No leader of Opposition has ever taken up a more uncompromising attitude than Bonar Law assumed as against all the policies of the Asquith Ministry. No doubt he was fortified by the probably well-founded conviction that not one of these policies would have been ratified by the electorate if it could have been submitted as a single issue. It was with this feeling that he declared that a meaner Bill, or one brought forward by meaner methods, than the Welsh Disestablishment Bill had never been introduced into Parliament.

On the Irish question, no prominent Conservative, except Sir Edward Carson, went further than the Leader of the party in uncompromising resistance to the proposals of the Ministry. He went over to Belfast, and at a great demonstration of Ulstermen advised them to trust to themselves, prophesying that if they did so they would save themselves by their exertions and save the Empire by their example. And in July, 1912, he said, in a speech at Blenheim, that he could imagine no lengths of resistance to which the Ulstermen might go in which he would not be prepared to support them, subsequently declaring in Parliament that these words were deliberate and had been written down beforehand.

There is this at least to be said with confidence about his Irish attitude. He fixed his attention on what the history of the next ten years proved to have been the real point, though Mr. Asquith’s Government attempted to ignore it till their blindness had led the country to the verge of civil war. The World War prevented the possibility of the Irish war, but when the question again became alive it had become clear to all that Bonar Law had been right in always regarding the problem of Ulster as the vital one.

The moment it became obvious that the risk of war was acute and immediate, Bonar Law gave an assurance of Opposition support to Mr. Asquith. And the promise was more than fulfilled. All that a leader of Opposition could do to encourage the King’s Government and strengthen its hands was done by Bonar Law from the eve of the declaration of war.

Ten months later, he and his friends were invited by Mr. Asquith to share the responsibilities of office. The post which Bonar Law took was that of Colonial Secretary but his most important work as a Minister was not departmental. He showed admirable loyalty to the Prime Minister, as Mr. Asquith frequently testified.

But he became gradually dissatisfied with a certain lack of vigour in the conduct of the war, and in December, 1916, he supported Mr. Lloyd George in his demand that it should be entirely entrusted to a Committee of four, of whom the Prime Minister was not one. The strangest thing about this strange proposal is that Mr. Asquith considered accepting a slight modification of it. It was made on December 1. By the 5th Mr. Asquith had definitely rejected it, and first Mr. Lloyd George and then Mr. Asquith resigned.

The King naturally invited Mr. Bonar Law to form a Ministry, but Mr. Lloyd George was plainly the man of the moment, and he became Prime Minister on December 7. He formed a War Cabinet of five, of whom, of course, one was Bonar Law, who, taking the lead of the House of Commons, was not expected to attend the Cabinet as regularly as the other four, but was effectively Leader of the House of Commons, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a member of the War Cabinet.

In this third capacity he played a less conspicuous part; but he knew what he wanted and meant to get it. “We are fighting for peace now,” he told the Pacifists, “and for security for peace in the time to come; you cannot get that by treaty. There can be no peace till the Germans are beaten and know that they are beaten.”

The Ministry decided to appeal to the country directly after the Armistice, and to make their appeal as a Coalition, though most of the Labour Ministers resigned and the Labour Party had their separate election programme. Bonar Law, who was himself returned for Central Glasgow, a seat which he held till his death, joined with the Prime Minister in issuing a manifesto to the electors which was completely successful in winning the election, but had disastrous results when it was won.

There can be little doubt that its general suggestion of a new heaven and earth after the war came rather from the somewhat shallow optimism, or from the electioneering instincts, of Mr. Lloyd George than from the Scottish caution and common sense of Bonar Law. It is likely that Bonar Law was more pleased with the overwhelming victory which the manifesto produced than alarmed at the unrealisable expectations which it was certain to arouse.

The principal business of the new Ministry, in which Bonar Law ceased to be Chancellor of the Exchequer but remained Leader of the House of Commons, was the making of the Peace. But with that Bonar Law, though appointed one of the Plenipotentiaries, had little to do, as his duties in Parliament seldom allowed him to attend the Paris Conference. He had, indeed, enough to do at home. On the whole, Bonar Law and his colleagues, inspired by Mr. Lloyd George, may be said to have met the difficulties, for which they were partly responsible, with a mixture of sympathy and firmness which gave time for illusions to wear themselves out, and for economic realities to assert themselves in the minds of all parties.

In March 1921, Bonar Law was suddenly taken ill, and at once resigned and went abroad. He returned in time to support the so-called Treaty of December, 1921, constituting the Irish Free State. For that Agreement Bonar Law had no responsibility, but he returned to his place in the House of Commons to give it his support and urge Ulster to accept it, insisting that England would never allow her to be invaded or coerced by the rest of Ireland.

Bonar Law had a great reception in the House on his reappearance. But he at once resumed the retirement which his weak health continued to make necessary. However, he was now watching events more closely, and, as even the speech on the agreement showed, with more detachment. The position, amounting to something like a dictatorship, which Mr. Lloyd George had assumed was regarded with more and more dislike by a large number of Conservatives, and Bonar Law, no longer in daily touch with the wand of the magician, gradually became critical of it. Matters came to a crisis in the autumn and, finally, on October 19, 1922, a meeting of Conservative members of the House of Commons was held at the Carlton Club, at which a motion was carried declaring that the Conservative Party should fight the election “as an independent party with its own leader and its own programme.” This motion Bonar Law had, the day before, been persuaded to come and support. The result was that Mr. Lloyd George resigned and Bonar Law became Prime Minister on October 23.

The election campaign almost immediately followed, and the new Prime Minister’s speeches sharply marked his departure from the Lloyd George system and atmosphere. He declared for a policy of tranquillity and economy, reduction of our commitments, so far as our obligations allowed, both abroad and at home, and abandonment of the practice of constant personal intervention by the Prime Minister in the work of the Departments. Never was an election a greater contrast to its predecessor. Instead of a flood of promises, there were no promises at all. But the electors were tired of them, and in 1922 Bonar Law, with his simplicity and tranquillity, was as much the man of the moment as Lloyd George had been in 1918 with his magniloquent promises and programmes. The elections resulted in the return of 344 Conservatives, giving the new Ministry a sufficient majority even if all sections of the Opposition combined against them.

Mr. Bonar Law’s Premiership was one of the shortest on record. It was with many fears that he had gone to the Carlton Club meeting, but he had been given reason to hope that he might be able to bear the strain of office for at least a year. He bore it only for about six months, when his voice failed and he had to go away for a complete rest. When he returned, on May 20, 1923, he was too ill to do anything but resign.

In so short a Premiership, interrupted by a General Election, he had obviously little opportunity to leave any great mark on public affairs. The chief problems with which he had to deal were unemployment at home and Franco-German relations abroad. His refusal to receive a deputation of the unemployed, whom he referred to the Minister of Labour, was a courageous illustration of his determination to leave each Department to do its own business, and, after some agitation, was vindicated by success. For the rest Bonar Law maintained his old popularity in the House of Commons, of which his qualities both of mind and of temper made him a born leader. Indeed, he held the affections of his colleagues and of members of Parliament as very few leaders have. When his daughter married almost every member of the House subscribed to a present for her; and the same kind of feeling was shown when he finally retired in such tributes as that of his successor, Mr. Baldwin: “Of Mr. Bonar Law I cannot trust myself to speak: I love the man.”

No man could have played the part which he played during the five most strenuous years of English history without being possessed of very rare qualities. “Character, character, character,” said one of those who had known him longest. That, and his modesty and simplicity, his life of duty and austerity, his complete indifference to pomps and vanities and privileges of power, combined to give him a place in hearts of his friends and in the confidence of the nation which men of more dazzling genius have been able to win.

Mr. Bonar Law married in 1891 Annie Pitcairn, daughter of Harrington Robley, of Glasgow. She died in 1909, leaving several children. Two of the sons were killed in the war; one of the daughters is the wife of Major-General Sir Frederick Sykes.


Douglas Haig



‘The greatest soldier that the empire possessed.’

His qualities were industry, coolness, and tenacity



31 January 1928



The greatest soldier that the Empire possessed has passed away suddenly, while still in the fullness of his powers. Lord Haig not only shouldered the heaviest military burden that any Briton has ever borne, but, when the War was over, and with the same foresight that distinguished him in his campaigns, he took up a task which probably no other could have accomplished, and devoted all his time and energy to the service of his old comrades in the field.

Haig’s great characteristic was thoroughness. From his boyhood he seemed almost to foresee what destiny had in store for him and was constantly preparing himself for it. Among his contemporaries none could rival him in the knowledge of his profession. He had worked up through every grade of the Staff and had commanded every unit, so that, when he reached the position of Commander-in-Chief of the greatest Army that the Empire had ever put in the field, he was known to all his subordinates as being a master of every detail.

As a young man in South Africa, and in 1914, when he commanded the I Corps, Haig showed that he was able to manœuvre troops in a war of movement. By the time he became an Army commander the front in France had become stabilised, and he then showed his ability to adapt himself to the changed conditions of trench warfare. It was he who was responsible for planning the operations that were to be undertaken at Neuve Chapelle, and so well did he foresee the character of the new struggle that his dispositions and orders for that battle became in their essential details the model of all future British attacks during the War, except in regard to the length of the preliminary bombardment.

To thoroughness he added coolness, optimism, and an intense tenacity of purpose. In the darkest days of the First Battle of Ypres and of the March offensive he never became ruffled, but continued to carry on his duties as though he were at manœuvres. His judgment was sound; he never failed to appreciate the difficulties of his situation; but at the same time he saw those of his adversary, and was always able to distinguish the factors favourable to himself. His bulldog tenacity was remarkable. Once he had taken a decision nothing would move him from it, and, though at times he was severely criticised for persisting in operations long after their advantages had passed, he held strongly to the opinion, expressed in his celebrated order of April 11, 1918, that “Victory will belong to the side which holds out the longest … There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.”

In spite of this tenacity he was always willing to listen to his allies and to cooperate with them. One of the most striking features of the First Battle of Ypres was the manner in which he worked with the French − with Dubois, who commanded the IX Corps, and with D’Urbal, the commander of the Eighth Army. Later on, too, when he was Commander-in-Chief, he was in the closest cooperation with both Foch and Petain. He resisted, however, to the utmost all attempts to commit him to enterprises which he considered dangerous, and where he considered that the public good required it he was always willing to subordinate his own interests. He gave a notable example of this characteristic at Doullens, for it was due to him more than to anyone else that Foch was appointed without opposition and without friction to the supreme command. It was he, too, who, after Lord Milner had proposed that Foch should be appointed to co-ordinate the action of the Allied Armies on the Amiens Front, urged the inadequacy of this step, and had Foch’s authority extended to cover the whole of the Western Front.

Douglas Haig was born in Edinburgh, June 19, 1861, the youngest of the sons of John Haig, of Cameron Bridge, Fife, sixth in descent from Robert Haig, who was the second son of the 17th laird of Bemersyde, Roxburghshire. He was educated at Clifton Bank School, St. Andrews, Clifton College, where he played Rugby football, and Brasenose College, Oxford, whence, as University candidate, as was the custom then, he passed not direct into the Army but into the R.M.C., Sandhurst. There he exhibited altogether exceptional zeal for a cadet, not only listening to the instruction but writing out notes of it each day. Commissioned into the 7th Hussars in 1885, he went out to India, and soon became known as a polo player and breaker of polo ponies. But sport did not interfere with his duties, and in the course of time he was appointed adjutant of his regiment. His first step on the ladder was his selection to be A.D.C. to the Inspector-General of Cavalry in India.

With his eye on the Staff College, Haig had begun to resume military study seriously. He qualified at the entrance examination for the College in 1894 and was given a nomination by the Duke of Cambridge in the following year. Thus he entered Camberley in the same class as Field-Marshal Lord Allenby and with Captain (Sir Herbert) Lawrence, his future Chief of General Staff, in the class above him. During the second year Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, the historian, then one of the instructors, said one evening to a group of students, “There is a fellow in your batch who will be Commander-in-Chief one of these days,” and then, without hesitation, said “Haig.”

On the conclusion of the course in December, 1897, Captain Haig was attached to the Egyptian Army and took part in the Omdurman Campaign, receiving a brevet majority. Returning home at its close, he was appointed Brigade Major of the Aldershot Cavalry Brigade.

In September, 1899, he was sent out to Natal and took part as Staff Officer of Sir John French in the Natal operations, just escaping from being shut up in Ladysmith. As Chief Staff Officer of the Cavalry Division during the advance he added greatly to his reputation. He was given a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy and appointed to the command of the 17th Lancers, which, however, he did not take up until the end of the war. From October, 1903, to August, 1906, he was Inspector-General of Cavalry in India, being promoted major-general in May, 1904, and marrying the Hon. Dorothy Vivian, daughter of the third Lord Vivian, during a visit home in 1905.

By the outset of the Great War, he was General Officer Commanding the Aldershot Command with the First and Second Divisions under him. He commanded these formations as a corps at the Army Manœuvres in 1912 and 1913, being created K.C.B. in the latter year.

In August, 1914, he went with the B.E.F. to France. After the First Battle of Ypres Sir Douglas Haig was promoted full general for distinguished service, and in December, on the formation of armies, was selected to be the commander of the First Army, then newly formed. In that command, under the orders of Sir John French, he fought Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert, and Loos.

When, on December 22, 1915, Sir Douglas Haig took over the command of the British Armies in France, on the removal of Sir John French, he had many great problems to face. His first efforts were directed towards the reorganisation, training, and reinforcement of the British forces in the France and Flanders theatre of war. Nothing from without − political, military, or popular − diverted his purpose from the prosecution of direct war while he remained the commander. He could be dismissed, but that was the affair of higher authority. His duty was for the day and the days to come.

His powers were set to a test at an early date. The Germans, ever alive to vital points in war, began an intensive attack on Verdun, a citadel recognised as of primary importance in the War on the Western Front. In the defence of that place the French had to exert the greatest military effort they made in the War. That effort was great in every sense of the word, but it was not sufficient to avert disaster to the Allies if it was to be fought alone. A support for the French in that defence was obviously necessary, and that support was promptly given by Sir Douglas Haig.

In cooperation with Joffre, with whom he was always in the closest sympathy, he began his preparations for the great series of the battles of the Somme. The sector of attack was selected with a high degree of military wisdom that relief might be given to Verdun, that the Allies in other theatres of war might be assisted, and that the German strength in front − never slight in the face of British troops − might be worn down. His former skill as a Staff officer was displayed in his direction of the very complicated preparations for battle. With a full knowledge of the great issues, he gave his firm support to those engaged in matters which those outside might consider to be minor detail, and yet are in themselves the seed of victory. There were then no solutions for the apparent deadlock of siege warfare, save, possibly, direct attack. The method of direct attack was chosen, accompanied by an artillery support previously unknown in the annals of war.

The great effort failed in many ways, but its failure was in the main due to climatic conditions. Yet the effort was in one important sense not a failure − it served to save Verdun, and it broke the spirit of the German Army, which entered the battle at the zenith of its efficiency and enthusiasm. It was a great venture, and it cost many lives − a cost which humanity is apt to remember without admitting the profit. In the judgment of history it may be that the country will recognise the wisdom and discount the cost. The Somme over, there was a disposition on the part of those who did not understand its effect on the enemy to criticise the Commander-in-Chief. He was accused of being reckless of life; and he was blamed for his supposedly premature use of the tanks on September 15.

Immediately after the Somme, Haig began his preparations for a new offensive. He still believed that a “break-through” was possible. The Arras offensive, designed for the early spring in that year, was modified into a relatively minor attack over a front of 15 miles from Vimy Ridge southwards to Croisilles. The same attention to initial preparations was made, and the same early success was attained. The weather again took its share in the decision, and an early burst of success ended in a dreary series of days of heavy bombardment, in which the vast losses outweighed the territory gained.

Arras over, the long-contemplated attack on Messines was undertaken. It was admittedly a perfect battle of its kind, and the Commander-in-Chief deserves his share of credit in an enterprise which needed the support of his authority at a time when his popular reputation was declining. Success − complete success − attended the effort, and there was a general revival of spirit throughout the armies in France.

Yet at this moment of success a period of gloom was beginning for the Allies. Certain French troops, dissatisfied with their leaders, failed, whole divisions refusing to go to the front and to obey the orders of their officers. It was an ugly episode, but it was overcome by tact and decision. In the task of maintaining the line and keeping the Germans engaged, Haig and the British troops took a great part. In June, 1917, prompt preparations were made for the series of operations now known as the Battles of Ypres, 1917. Here, again, there was a minor degree of tactical success attended by very great loss. Miles of territory were nibbled away in nearly three months of action, but the German reserves were sent to the Dutch frontier to meet the expected arrival of the British from that direction. The weather again played its deadly part, the ground became a quagmire, and the mechanical weapons on which, properly, so much store was set failed in their task.

In March, 1918, came the great test of the War. The Germans, aided by climatic conditions − the weather, it seemed, never failed them in the operations of war − overran large sectors of the British front. At each point the Allied troops fell back, and there was consternation among the general public. On the other hand, there was definite confidence at General Headquarters. It was known that in so swift an advance the Germans must overreach themselves, and that ultimately, after two or three such offensives, victory must be in the hands of the Allies. To ensure complete cooperation of the Allies, at Haig’s suggestion Foch was now given supreme command. At the darkest hour, on April 12, in the second German offensive, on the Lys, against Kemmel, Sir Douglas issued his “backs to the wall” order.

Thenceforward the tale is no less complicated, but it deals with victory. Haig had his plans, and, after due consideration, in almost every case Foch adopted them in preference to his own. There was a mass of heavy fighting, but in each stage it was inspired, so far as the British troops were concerned, by Haig. There were no mistakes, and future generations may turn to the military record of that year with pride, not only in the British troops, but in their commander, who had borne without complaint the stress of the years that had passed. There will be credit for Lord Haig in the earlier years of his effort, but in military achievement in the field his reputation may well rest on his share in the history of the last months of the War, when the fate of nations was in the balance, and when he never lost heart.

When Haig came home after the War was over he might have claimed any appointment in the gift of his fellow-countrymen. But he had marked out the course he meant to pursue – namely, to devote himself to the interests of ex-Service officers and men. He began a determined, and in the end successful, attempt to group together all ex-Service men into a single organisation, which should be non-political and non-sectarian, and in which officers and men should find a common opportunity of serving the country in peace as they had served her together in war.

The British Legion is essentially the work of one man, Haig. It is a work carried through in the face of no little doubt and suspicion in its early days, but the fact that the work of demobilisation, and after that the yet vaster work of absorption of the discharged millions of the Army, went through without active civil commotion is very largely due to the work that Haig did in 1919 and 1920 in giving the ex-Service men an object to work for; and thereafter, when the Legion had been formed, in directing its activities into right and worthy channels.

Sir Douglas Haig’s return with his Army commanders after the War, in December, 1918, was celebrated with great public rejoicings. In March, 1919, he was appointed to be Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief the Forces of Great Britain, a post which was abolished in 1920. Many honours were conferred on him. Twelve Universities gave him honorary degrees, including Oxford, where his old college, Brasenose, had already made him an honorary Fellow. He was installed as Rector of St. Andrews, and was later elected Chancellor. Many cities and boroughs conferred on him their honorary freedom. He had been made a Knight of the Thistle in 1917, the year of his promotion to field marshal, and in June, 1919, he received the honour of the Order of Merit, while all the Allies conferred on him high decorations. From France he received the Médaille Militaire, the greatest distinction available for a foreign general.

On August 6, 1919, a vote, including £100,000 to Sir Douglas Haig, was moved in the House of Commons by Mr. Lloyd George, then Prime Minister. In 1921 Bemersyde House and fishings, on the River Tweed, were presented to Lord Haig by his fellow-countrymen in the Empire in recognition of his services in the War, and he thus became 29th Laird of Bemersyde.

Lord Haig is survived by his widow and four children. He is succeeded by his only son, Viscount Dawick, who was born in March, 1918. His daughters are Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louise, for whom Queen Alexandra was sponsor, Lady Victoria Doris Rachel, for whom Princess Victoria was sponsor, and Lady Irene Violet Janet Haig.


Richard Burdon,

Lord Haldane



Lawyer, philosopher, and one of the greatest of all war ministers



20 August 1928



Lord Haldane, whose death we announce this morning, possessed one of the most powerful, subtle, and encyclopædic intellects ever devoted to the public service of this country. He was a lawyer whose profound learning broadened instead of narrowing his sympathies, a philosopher of distinction, an apostle of education, and an admin-istrator of equal courage and efficiency. The work for which, as Secretary of State for War, he was chiefly responsible is among the most important in the annals of the War Office, and his service on the Woolsack, which he occupied for two periods, gives him high rank among the long and distinguished roll of the Lord Chancellors of England.

Because his visit to Germany in 1912 did not lead him to anticipate the War of 1914, he was at the outbreak of hostilities, at the very moment when his work of Army organisation was bearing its most brilliant fruit, violently attacked, and his own sayings were distorted to give colour to the accusations. Extravagantly unjust though this campaign against him was, it did not fail of effect, and he became extremely unpopular. Some of those colleagues who shared with him responsibility for the advice offered to the nation and the conduct of its affairs between 1912 and 1914 failed to give him, when he most needed it, the support which he had every right to expect of them, and when the First Coalition was formed, with Mr. Asquith as Prime Minister, in 1915, Lord Haldane was not included in the Government. He did not return to power for eight years, emerging at last as the first Labour Lord Chancellor. His adherence was, at the outset, of considerable value to a party without administrative experience and his advice was continually sought, but his new associates were not bound to him by such strong ties of temperament, manner, or opinion as make for enduring confidence.

That he was, at more than one stage of his career, unfortunate in his friends, few will deny; that he was subjected, during the early stages of the War, to ignorant or malicious abuse, is clear to all who are able to distinguish between disloyalty and misjudgment. But he suffered more than most men would have suffered in the same circumstances, for he had a manner in his own defence which was the worst of weapons against the calumnies of the market-place, and did little to conciliate his more reasoning critics. This appearance of aloof tactlessness was due, in part, to his voice, which was not well suited to eloquence, but even more to something within himself which, while it raised him in intellect far above most of his contemporaries, made him almost a stranger to the workings of the general mind of England. He was a subtle thinker who found it hard to understand − and unfortunately allowed his audience to become aware of his difficulty in understanding − why others did not think as subtly as he.

By nature a metaphysician and by profession a lawyer, he had an exact and an exacting mind, and, though he was in private a kindly and generous man who was neither unduly puffed up by success nor soured by misfortune, he was, in public, singularly without those qualities, good and bad − qualities of ease and warmth and humour on the one hand, of flattery and smooth persuasion on the other − which endear a politician to the masses and, perhaps, to more exalted audiences as well. He had, in short, a seeming tendency, when engaged in controversy, to treat the world as a class-room which made it at once intolerant of his mistakes and less grateful than it might otherwise have been for his high administrative and intellectual services.

Richard Burdon Haldane was born on July 30, 1856, of Scottish and Northumbrian stock. His father, Robert Haldane, belonged to an old Scottish family, and was a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh. His mother, who died on May 21, 1925, in her 101st year, was a daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson, a country gentleman with property in Northumberland, and a great-niece of Lords Stowell and Eldon. Haldane was educated at Edinburgh and Gottingen Universities, obtaining first-class honours in philosophy at Edinburgh, and the Gray and Ferguson scholarships open to the four Scottish Universities.





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