The Project Gutenberg eBook, What the Judge Saw, by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

WHAT THE JUDGE SAW

WHAT THE JUDGE SAW

BEING

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN MANCHESTER BY ONE WHO HAS DONE IT

BY

HIS HONOUR JUDGE

EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY

AUTHOR OF “DOROTHY OSBORNE’S LETTERS,” “JUDGMENTS IN VACATION,”
“THE SCARLET HERRING,” “KATAWAMPUS: ITS TREATMENT
AND CURE,” “BUTTER SCOTIA,” ETC.

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE

1912

[All rights reserved]

To

My Partner, Comrade and Wife

This Volume is dedicated

CONTENTS

NOTE

The origin of these reminiscences was the appearance of some papers I contributed to the “Manchester Daily Dispatch” in January of this year. These met with considerable favour, and many readers seemed to think that their story was worthy of being set down in a more permanent fashion. It was to meet this suggestion that I have largely added to and re-written the original essays and published them in book form.

EDWARD A. PARRY.

Sevenoaks,

September, 1912.

WHAT THE JUDGE SAW

CHAPTER I

FAREWELL MANCHESTER

I go—​but God knows when or why

From smoky towns and cloudy sky

To things (the honest truth to say)

As bad—​but in a different way.

Byron: “Farewell to Malta.”

(Amended by leave of the Court.)

“Some poet has observed that if any man would write down what has really happened to him in this mortal life he would be sure to make a good book, though he never had met with a single adventure from his birth to his burial.” Even Thackeray does not take the responsibility for the thesis, but with a light heart lays the burden upon the shoulders of “some poet.” And for my part I had never any intention of answering the poet’s challenge until after a quarter of a century of life in Manchester I found myself back again in my original domicile. I doubt if I had ever really acquired a domicile in Manchester. There was residence, but was there

intention? I think I must decide that somewhere at the back of my mind there was an intention if not a desire to return.

But when I did return, how many changes I found. Of course I had paid fleeting visits to London during the term of my exile; but here I was again for better or worse, and my mind made contrast of to-day with the memories of twenty-five years ago. Where were the familiar faces? Not all were gone certainly, but those that remained seemed to my eyes duller, grizzled and less alert than I had remembered them. And no doubt I was the same to them, and had grown rugged and provincial during my long absence. For when old friends met me in the Strand or the Temple they patted my shoulder in a kindly compassionate manner as if I were a pit pony who had just come to the surface after several decades of darkness. These Londoners who knew nothing of Manchester and the North seemed to fancy I was blinking and dazzled with the brilliancy of their converse, when in truth and in fact I was wondering why they all—​except the Jews—​spoke with a tinge of Cockney accent. When they congratulated me upon my “promotion,” as they called it, I could not help contrasting the trial of cases arising out of commercial contracts on the Manchester Exchange with the trespass of sheep among the turnip-tops, which is the nearest we have to a cause célèbre in the Weald of Kent.

But what caused me a greater sinking of heart was that, when I spoke of Manchester men and Manchester affairs, I spoke to deaf ears. Your Peckham

and Surbiton Londoner knows indeed that there is such a place as Manchester on the map, but intellectually and spiritually he is far nearer to New York or Johannesburg. The works and doings of these places interest and amuse him, but the annals of the great cities of the North are closed books to him. And when I was lamenting on such a state of things I came across Thackeray’s message and wondered if it was intended for me. I could not help thinking how many of us would like to have the reminiscences of the pit pony. How entertaining it would be to his fellow ponies below to know what the old fellow really thought of them, and how the story of a life underground would tickle the supercilious ears of the pony aristocrats who had spent their lives among surburban milk floats and butchers’ carts, or even let us say in the polo field. There was the personal pleasure, too, of remembering and setting down the story of the days that were gone and describing the highways and byways along which I had travelled so pleasantly, and the thought that some who were children in those years might like to know what sort of a world it was they used to live in.

Maybe Charles Lamb is right when he asks himself “Why do cats grin in Cheshire?” and tells us that “it was once a County Palatine, and the cats cannot help laughing when they think of it.” For my part as one who has been a “poore Palatine” in the adjacent county of Lancaster I confess that the very sound of its name will always induce a smile—​or

should I say a purr—​at the pleasant memories with which it is fragrant.

Attachment to places is quite irrespective of their pleasances. The fields and orchards of Kent, white with blossom in the spring, purple and golden with the heavy fruits of autumn, can never be as acceptable to me as the mud building land of South Manchester. The Embankment and the Strand—​even in its debased modern form—​and the Temple Gardens and the fountain will always be home to one who started life as a Londoner, and was educated in the cellars of Somerset House. But in solitary thoughts and dreams I shall glide in fancy down the flags of Oxford Road, and watch the rooks building on Fallowfield “Broo,” or strike across the fields of Chorlton’s Farm by the cottages with the old vine on them, and take the train from Alexandra Park to my work. When I come out of the Lambeth County Court into the Camberwell New Road it will always feel irksome to me not to be able to stride up Peter Street and push open the swing doors of a certain club in Mosley Street and find myself in an atmosphere of tobacco and good fellowship. You get so attached to the actual place in which you dwell that though things are better and more beautiful elsewhere your optic nerves do not respond at their call, or you suffer from a geographical deafness. I do not defend such narrow patriotism, I only assert that it exists. The other day I found myself in a fog in London—​one which Mr. Guppy would call a real London particular—​saying to a friend, “Call this a

fog? You should see a first-class Manchester fog.” I knew I was a boaster and a braggart, for Manchester fogs, though tastier in chemical flavour, have not the real woolly orange blanket appearance of the fog that rolls up white from the Nore and bronzes with the London smoke.

I think I have the place attachment—​a limpet-like characteristic, after all—​very highly developed. I remember a story of a little boy, about three years old or perhaps more, who moved with his family and their furniture into a new house. At first the affair excited him, but later on he wandered uneasily and miserably about his new quarters with an idea that he would never smile again, and that the sooner the world came to an end the better for everybody. Poor, doleful, little urchin, he climbed up long flights of stairs into a box-room, and there, finding a pile of old carpets, he selected one that had belonged to his nursery and laid him down to die. Forgotten in the turmoil, he cried himself to sleep, and was discovered by anxious domestics after prolonged search. I know a great deal of the story is true, because I have heard it from some of my more reliable relations, and as the hero of the story I believe I can remember hearing an agonised nurse calling my name in despair, and sullenly refusing to reply to her calls on the ground that I never wished to consort with the world again since I had discovered with Zarathustra that “all is empty, all is equal, all hath been.”

This attachment to places is a very animal virtue, or failing, whichever it be, and in my experience is

not so much a home-sickness as a nausea of novelty. One erects in one’s mind a standard of what ought to be, and applies that to the beloved place; and by constantly asserting to strangers that the place is in all particulars absolutely perfect, one begins by mere force of the repetition to believe in it oneself. In this way do myths become religions. There are many Manchester myths, all of which in my patriotism—​the more vehement because I cannot claim birthright in the great city—​I repeat, and shall continue to repeat, with the accuracy and fervour with which I still run over on occasion my “duty to my neighbour.” Thus a true Manchester man will tell you Manchester is musical, whereas, in truth and in fact, very few of her people care anything about music at all. Also he will speak with glowing pride of the marvellous municipal statesmanship of her governors, whereas, though we are very fond of them personally, we know they are about as ordinary a set of parish councillors as ever met in a village schoolroom. I myself have often reproved a mere Southerner for casting aspersions on our climate by saying “it was not half so black as it is painted,” when I knew that on oath I should have to admit that no ink could paint it black enough. These are lawful perjuries, and unworthy of Manchester would any citizen be who should hesitate to repeat them.

And yet I am not altogether sorry that I left Manchester. It is true that it was for purely personal and domestic reasons that I came south.

There was no financial gain in my move, and therefore there is no ecclesiastical precedent for pretending that I had received a spiritual call to a wider sphere of action. At the same time it is possible that the dignity and decorum of Lambeth may be perfected by that “wakkening up” spirit which the apostles of Manchester go forth to maintain.

I remember when I was moving south, Bishop Welldon asking me on the steps of the pavilion at Old Trafford, “And where is your diocese?”

“Lambeth,” I replied promptly. “It sounds ecclesiastical, doesn’t it?”

“It did until your name was connected with it,” said the Bishop with a merry laugh.

And I left him wondering whether that was the reason Providence had translated me to the Camberwell New Road.

As for myself, I never want my name to be connected with Lambeth; but in so far as it will ever be remembered at all, I pray that it may find its way into some niche in those cyclopædias and other mausoleums of the famous under the title “Manchester.”

And I am not alone in thinking that “Farewell Manchester” is a sad phrase to utter. For when Charles Edward left Manchester in 1745 after those pleasant weeks of revelry among the gentry of Lancashire and Cheshire, the legend is that he rode sadly over the Derbyshire hills chanting that mournful lament the music of which the old prebendary

of Hereford set down in later years and called “Felton’s Gavot” or “Farewell Manchester.” But I picture the Pretender cantering along and rallying his friends about the Lancashire lasses, whose hearts they had conquered and whose ribbons they wore in their bonnets, and I believe it was only in after years that the mournful ballad spread round the countryside and the ballad-mongers sang of the young prince whose “tear-drops bodingly from their prisons start.”

It would be absurd for modern visitors to Manchester, rushing away from the city in a luxurious dining car, plunging beneath the Disley Golf Links and emerging among the picturesque Derbyshire crags, to throw themselves into the romantic humour of the heroes of ’45 and mingle tear-drops with their soup. But alone with your thoughts, if you have lived in the midst of Manchester and her people and experienced their gracious hospitality to the stranger that is within their gates, you may find yourself crooning old Felton’s Gavot, and learn that the song vibrates in a minor key and that the tear-drops can only be kept back by control.

It is a hard thing to say “Farewell!” in the right key. Many, many kindly letters I received when I went away, and all were full of gracious messages; but the one I best remember as saying the just word of complimentary reproof was a valedictory letter from the Secretary of the Crematorium, in which he wrote, “our committee feel very grieved that you should be leaving us in this manner.” I

quote from memory, and of course the wording may not be exactly accurate. But the idea was beautifully and delicately expressed, and to the hidden indictment in the letter I plead guilty and throw myself upon the mercy of the Court.

CHAPTER II

HOME

It may be a hut with a thatch on

In a garden where roses grow,

Or built of bad bricks with a patch on

Of stucco, and twelve in a row;

It may be a palace of crystal,

With a splendid sparkling dome,

But what does it matter whatever it is,

It is Home.

“Pater’s Book of Rhymes.”

I do not want to anger my readers at the threshold with heraldic learning of the couching lions and ramping cats to which the Parrys of Nerquis are by right entitled, but I claim a Welshman’s privilege of setting down so much of genealogy as is necessary to the understanding of my story. And truly one of the temptations that lured me to this task was a desire to write down what I could remember of my father, John Humffreys Parry—​Serjeant Parry—​who died more than thirty years ago, and left so fine a memory among his comrades in the battles of old in Westminster Hall.

And I often heard my father talk of his Welsh ancestry, though he himself was a Londoner born in 1816, and he would tell us what he remembered of his father, John Humffreys Parry, the Welsh antiquary and writer who was called to the Bar in 1811,

and died when my father was a boy of sixteen. He was the writer of the “Cambrian Plutarch” and editor of the “Cambro Briton,” a journal of Celtic folk-lore and the ancient literature and history of Wales. Nowadays he would probably have been a professor at a Welsh University, but in those days people cared for none of these things. I remember reading in some Welsh account of his career—​and among Welshmen he is far better known than my father—​how he was educated at Mold Grammar School and articled to Mr. Wynne, solicitor, of that town, and married a daughter of John Thomas, solicitor, of Llanfyllin, which is away down in the wilds of Montgomeryshire. This biographer wound up his story with the compendious statement that “he went to London, was called to the Bar, took to literature and dissipated his estates.” But if he had any estates, which is at least doubtful, he wasted them not in riotous living, but in the printing and publishing of the Welsh literature he loved. From the earliest he was an eager and ready writer. I have a small brown scrapbook, the leaves of which are saffron-tinged with age, in which are pasted with proud care the author’s letters and verses contributed to the Chester Courant in the early part of the century, when he was a youth in Mr. Wynne’s office in Mold.

Some years ago curiosity led me into the land of my forefathers, and I climbed the steep hill between Mold and Ruthin to reach Llanferres, going past “The Three Loggerheads,” the sign of which

Richard Wilson, R.A., the landscape painter, is reputed to have painted. It is the old jest of two heads grinning at you—​the third you supply for yourself. And if Wilson painted it, as they say he did, it was probably done in his early days, for he came from Mold, and as he died in 1782 the sign must have been there in my great-grandfather Edward Parry’s time, when he became rector of the little hill village of Llanferres in 1790. And doubtless he often saw it as he walked down the hill to visit his wife’s relatives in Mold, or went across to Nerquis to see his father Edward Parry, the tanner.

And at Llanferres I searched the church registers, and finding that the rector was carried home to his native village of Nerquis, I turned my steps along the narrow roads down the side of the hill where his funeral must have passed and found a little village church at the foot-hills on the English side, so much away from the bustle of the world’s traffic that I think it must be much the same to-day as it was when my great-grandfather was carried back to his early home. And when the little churchyard of Nerquis gives up its collection of Parrys it will relinquish a goodly number who lived and died in this quiet, solitary place, and from what one reads on marble slabs and the like, they were a godly, honest and well-doing people. But to my regret I find that Edward the tanner’s father was the Rev. Canon Edward Parry, M.A., Vicar of Oswestry in 1763, and his father was Thomas, an attorney of Welshpool who lived near the bridge, so that as we reach the

seventeenth century it dawns upon me that I do not belong to North Wales at all, and I cease my researches into the past, in dread that I should discover after all that I am no better than a South Wales man, a “Hwntw” in good northern speech, or “man from beyond.”

My very earliest personal recollection of my father was in the days of my childhood, when we lived at No. 1, Upper Gloucester Place, overlooking Dorset Square. In the interests of the committee of the society that busies itself placing decorative lozenges on the birth-places of the famous it is well to record that I have it on hearsay evidence that this is where I was born.

I can well remember, and as it were visualise, my father in that house, but only on one day of the week—​the Sunday. On other days I cannot remember to have seen him at all. But I can recall many details of the house itself, and well remember that the library window looked on to New Street, in which lived our chemist and druggist; and of an evening I would go into the library and climb on a chair to enjoy the glory of his huge coloured bottles in the window, and then meanly pull faces at the nauseous shop in revenge for the wrongs I had suffered at its hands.

My brother and I took our morning walks in Dorset Square. In the early sixties Dorset Square was a vast jungle. Speaking from memory, it contained well-accredited lions and bears in its fastnesses. I saw Dorset Square the other day. It has sadly

shrunk. Those giant shrubs that towered over your head, hiding you securely from a distracted nurse, are no longer there. Regent’s Park was my other playground or, rather, that part of it opposite Sussex Terrace called “The Enclosure,” to which we had a right of entrance and a key. I do not know that it is a matter of importance now, but it was of the essence of happiness in those days that our good nurse ex abundanti cautela carried the key of “The Enclosure” in one hand, and my brother and I contested for her other hand, as a prize of great worth. Regent’s Park retains more of its size than Dorset Square, but it is not the illimitable veldt that it was. “The Enclosure” was snobbish, and its snobbery has been very properly curtailed. I well remember how we envied the nurseless urchins in their freedom of the real park across the water. It was on that treacherous lake some forty people were drowned in a terrible ice accident. I remember being hurried out of “The Enclosure” past the tent into which they were carrying the drowned. For many months afterwards there was the draining, levelling, and then the refilling of the lake. All this work I superintended from the banks, and at last watched the water come bubbling up from a huge pipe into the new-made lake with as deep a satisfaction as the chief engineer himself.

But in all these childhood’s scenes I do not recall that my father had any part. He was, of course, at this time a very hard-worked man, but Sunday morning he always devoted to his children. I can

picture his solid, kindly face and see his commanding figure wrapped in a dressing-gown of many colours—​an old friend—​as he sat at the end of the breakfast-table when we were brought down from the nursery. The only other member of the party was Tiger, a favourite tabby cat of whom my father was very proud. He had a great love of cats, and at one time possessed three, which he named Hic, Hæc, and Hoc. The appositeness of the names came to me with the Latin grammar and years of discretion. Two journals were his Sabbath reading—The Spectator and Athenæum, but he laid down his paper when we arrived, and took that real interest in our affairs which is the only key to children’s hearts. One great task was the skilful arrangement of all the animals of Noah’s Ark on the breakfast-table, which was rewarded with buttered toast. In a spirit of fairness Tiger was requested to walk among the animals. This if he did without mishap earned him the guerdon of cream. Then there was a careful examination on our weekly studies of the pages of Punch, which my father held rightly to be the earliest nursery text-book of history and sociology for the English child. This was followed by dramatic recitals of Mr. Southey’s “Three Bears” and some of Jane and Ann Taylor’s original poems, and other childhood’s sagas. And then when the nurse’s fateful knock was heard at the door to take the young gentlemen for a walk, off went my father’s huge dressing-gown, two wildly excited urchins sprang into the limitless depths of the arm-chair and

were covered up by the garment, and my father with dramatic breathlessness shouted “Come in!” and was “discovered”—​to use a phrase of the theatre—​calmly reading the paper at the table. The same dialogue was always maintained. The nurse inquired where the children were; the father expressed his astonishment at their disappearance; Tiger was asked if he had seen them, and remained silent. Then an elaborate search with hopeless ejaculations of the searchers was received with ill-concealed shrieks of amusement by the hiders. At last they are discovered, and the curtain falls on the most glorious hour in the whole week. For just as men and women love the old plays and the old ideas of drama, so children will have the same game of hide-and-seek or what not, and play it in the same way with the same absurd ritual religiously carried out, and he alone is worthy of fatherhood who can take an honourable part in such affairs with real solemnity and enthusiasm.

But these baby days departed, and the Sunday mornings had to be passed in Christ Church, Marylebone, surely the most unsociable church I have ever entered. I used to shudder for fear that after all heaven might turn out to be something like Christ Church, Marylebone. It still haunts me in dyspeptic dreams. It was a huge classical building, as cheerful as a family vault, with one painting over the altar—​how many hours have I spent gazing at it—​and no other memorable decoration. The congregation were penned apart in high boxes. Our box had tall red hassocks. I used to be allowed to stand on

one of these, until I fell off it into the bottom of the pen audibly and demonstratively. After that I was consigned to the floor, from which you could not see even bonnets, and from this limbo I only emerged by gradual growth. The preacher wore a black gown. My earliest meeting with him must, I think, have been at the font. I remember his grave tones, clear voice and dignified presence. I know now he must have preached excellent sermons, for he was the Rev. Llewelyn Davies. But in those days my brother and I fully believed he was the anonymous “righteous man” in the Psalms whose doings and sayings are so carefully chronicled.

From Regent’s Park we moved away to Kensington, and thence to Holland Park. Here it was that in the seventies, during the last few years of my father’s life, I heard in snatches from himself and his older friends something of the story of his career. I was then at King’s College School, which at that time was situated below Somerset House, and as I travelled up and down in the Underground—​often with my father—​and did my home-lessons in his library and dined with him nearly every night, and often went to the play with him of an evening, I had the good fortune to see more of him than I should have done had I been away at school.

He must have had a keen struggle in his early days to reach the position he did at the Bar. Born in London in 1816, he was only sixteen years old when the sudden death of his father made it necessary for him to earn his own living. He was then

being educated at the Philological School, an old foundation in Marylebone, but he left school at once and went into a merchant’s office. Edwin Abbott, the head-master of the Philological School, continued his firm friend, and years afterwards his daughter Elizabeth married my father, who was then a Serjeant. But I do not propose to write of my mother in these pages, since I could not do justice to the grace of her memory, and the dim vision of it is my own affair.

The Abbotts were, as I understand, an old family of yeomen and farmers in Dorsetshire. I have seen a pamphlet concerning the great George Abbott, Archbishop of Canterbury, who bravely withstood James I. in the matter of the Essex divorce, showing that he was of the same family. I hope it may be so. My father used to laugh at genealogy, but for my part I rather like to speculate on pedigrees and family history. It is pleasant to trace one’s line back to tanners and farmers and attorneys, even with a dash of the Church thrown in. The ancestry of the horse and the greyhound is a study for every gambler on the course, and why should not a student of eugenics be interested in the evolution of the entries for the human race?

Whilst he was in a merchant’s office my father attended classes at the Aldersgate Institution, a valuable educational society promoted by Lord Brougham, and he became a constant attendant at a debating club held there. He was a great believer in orderly debate as a method of education,

and was always ready to discuss with me the subject of debate in my School Society. The art of speaking he thought should be equally a part of elementary education with reading and writing, and his view was that if such were the case the charlatan and the windbag would have less chance of capturing the ear of the public.

From the merchant’s stool he found his way to the British Museum, where he was an assistant for some years, and formed a lasting friendship with Anthony Panizzi, who was then keeper of the printed books. I remember Richard Garnett showing me one of the slips in the catalogue in my father’s handwriting in the days before that great work was printed. All this time he was reading for the Bar and taking an active interest in the political movements of the day. George Jacob Holyoake remembers him as a young law-student at No. 5, Gray’s Inn Road. He describes him as a stalwart, energetic platform speaker, and notes that he ultimately acquired two styles like O’Connell, the more gaseous of which he retained solely to illuminate electors.

In 1842, the year before he was called, he was one of the most active members of the Moral Force Chartists. Hanging on my walls in a dark, old-fashioned veneered frame is a large print in many colours of the famous Charter—​a harmless exploded torpedo nowadays no doubt—​but in 1842 the symbol of a grave reality. For Chartism, as Carlyle pointed out, was “the bitter discontent grown

fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore, or the wrong disposition of the Working Classes of England.” With the ring of the true prophet in his words he foresaw in 1842 that Chartism “did not begin yesterday; will by no means end this day or to-morrow … new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder or less mad have to continue.”

My father’s part at this time was the editing of a magazine called the National Associations Gazette. The problem it set itself out to deal with was why when all kinds of property were recognised and protected the property which a man has in his labour was to be unsupported and unrepresented. The political programme, in the “order of going in,” so to speak, was (1) the Charter; (2) Universal Suffrage of men and women; and (3) National Education. I have often heard my father in argument with other reformers laying down—​too dogmatically as I thought—​that National Education before Suffrage was the cart before the horse. If you educate masses to think and deny them the power of practically endeavouring to translate their thought into national action it is bound to break out into anti-national actions. Who shall say in regard to recent events in England and India that there was not much good sense in his reasoning.

From my very earliest childhood I seem to have heard of Chartists and Chartism and the “Condition of England,” question which, after all, remains with

us to-day turbulently unanswered. Very often of a Sunday afternoon we would drive over to some obscure lodgings in Paddington to see Mr. William Lovett. I remember him as a mild, amiable, white-haired old gentleman who had a wonderful facility for making models, and whilst he and my father talked of the old days of the National Complete Suffrage Union and Birmingham meetings, I used to inspect with ardent curiosity some ingenious model of Windsor Castle upon which Mr. Lovett was at work. I think my father and some others assisted Mr. Lovett, and I know that he had a great admiration and affection for him, which continued until his death in 1877. I stood in great awe of Mr. Lovett, for I knew that he had been heavily fined for refusing to serve in the Militia in days long ago, and had suffered imprisonment in Warwick gaol for his protest against the unconstitutional employment of the Metropolitan police in Birmingham. This frail, delicate old man, with the cunning fingers building quaint models in a back parlour in Paddington, the sweetest and friendliest of human beings, had been, in the eyes of the government, a revolutionist. I was always ready to go with my father to see him. I liked the mystery of him.

The energy my father displayed in his early years at the Bar must have been considerable. He was much in demand as a lecturer, and as he told me, for a year or two his main source of income was the delivery throughout England of his lectures on the Oratory of the Bar, the Pulpit and the Stage, and

another interesting series on the French Revolution, a subject in which he was deeply read.

I came across a gentleman in Manchester who well remembered his lecturing at the Athenæum in 1844, and gave him great praise for his dramatic recitals on the Oratory of the Stage. But his practice at the Bar must soon have made lecturing tours unnecessary and impossible. When he was called he said in fun to some friends he was entertaining, that as soon as he was earning a thousand a year he would give them all a far better feast. The banquet took place within four years of the invitation.

His interest in politics never diminished. But when he had made his great name as an advocate, all invitations to contest a seat in Parliament were refused. In 1847 he contested Norwich unsuccessfully against Lord Douro and Sir Samuel Peto, and in 1857 stood for Finsbury against Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was returned by a large majority. In this election he used to say his chances were seriously interfered with by a charge—​not true, in fact—​that he had signed a petition to open the Crystal Palace and British Museum on Sunday. As he explained, the only reason he had not signed such a petition was that he had never been asked.

I have often heard my father speaking in Court, but it was at a time when I could understand very little of the merits of the dispute or the quality of the advocacy. He was one of the leaders of the Home Circuit, a veritable nest of giants, with Bovill,

Ballantine, Hawkins, Lush and Shee. In those days the Home Circuit was a reality. It was before the abolition of local venue, and every case had to be set down in the assize town of the county in which it arose. Thus at Guildford, Kingston or Croydon, all Surrey cases had to be tried, and the lists took a fortnight or more to finish. My father sometimes took a furnished house at Guildford in the summer, and we all moved down there, and on occasion I was taken into Court to hear him speak. In later years I heard him in several cases, but in no speech of first-rate importance, and I never heard him defend a prisoner, at which, I have been told by good judges, he had few equals. I should say his great asset as an advocate was his honesty and openness. There is no such thing as first-rate advocacy without a large measure of frankness. He was very smooth and good-natured in cross-examination, recognising that to make your way through the defences of the enemy requires, if the enemy is alert, more strategy than force. He never indulged in those snappy interjections and quarrelsome interferences which are but too common, and which, to my mind, are the very badge and stamp of incompetent advocacy. I fancy to-day his speeches to the jury would be too ornate, too eloquent and too full of oratory, but in his own day, and among the juries he had to address, it was more true of him than of any other that “persuasion hung upon his lips.” Nor can I be very clear that his style was really too flamboyant, for I was brought up myself in the school

of Russell and Holker on the Northern Circuit, where there was a passion for business methods, and curt address and the use of the bludgeon, rather than the rapier, in cross-examination, which has not even to this day penetrated to the more leisurely south. For I find that even in southern county courts advocates are known not only to demand the presence of juries, but to address them with great complacency on any subject at any distance from that subject. County court juries are nearly unknown in the North, where a trial is regarded more as a matter of business than an affair of display.

When my late brother Judge Willis, K.C., was a junior he was a constant visitor at my father’s house at Holland Park, and I well remember him telling a capital story of Holker’s wit as an advocate. Holker was cross-examining a big, vulgar Jew jeweller in a money-lending case, and began by looking him up and down in a sleepy, dismal way, and drawled out, “Well, Mr. Moselwein, and what are you?”

“A genschelman,” replied the jeweller with emphasis.

“Just so, just so,” ejaculated Holker with a dreary yawn, “but what were you, Mr. Moselwein, before you were a gentleman?”

The answer was drowned in a roar of laughter.

“Capital story, Willis, and very clever,” said my father as he finished laughing, “always supposing Holker didn’t want to get any admissions out of the fellow afterwards.”

It is a pleasant and fairly easy thing for an advocate to score off a witness, but it does not always mean business, and nothing is nearer to the gospel of the matter than this, that every unnecessary question in cross-examination is a blunder and every question the answer to which you have not foreseen is unnecessary.

Affairs of conscience at the Bar and the duty of the advocate were often discussed between my father and his legal friends, and in the late seventies, when I was at King’s College School, I heard many interesting conversations on these themes.

As an illustration of his argument someone told a story of an old special pleader whose name I forget. Special pleaders, I may remind the reader, did not address the Court, but drafted the “pleadings,” as they are called—​that is to say, the documents in which the parties state their respective cases and endeavour to settle the issue. In the old days these pleas were very technical, and special pleaders who signed and settled the claim, defence, rejoinder, sur-rejoinder, rebutter and sur-rebutter made good incomes out of constant but small fees.

The Pleader was in his chambers in King’s Bench Walk, when late one night a young Hebrew clerk of a firm of City solicitors rushed in, and throwing down half a guinea and some papers said, “I vant a plea.”

“But what sort of a plea—​what is the defence?” asked the Pleader.

“There is no defence,” said the candid clerk, “but

the governor says he vould like a set-off. He vants to gain time.”

“Hm!” said the Pleader, “a merely dilatory plea to gain time. I don’t approve of such a thing; but still----”

He drew out his “Bullen and Leake” and copied out the first plea he came to, which was to the effect that by agreement made by and between the plaintiff and defendant, the defendant bargained and sold to the plaintiff certain Russian hemp, to arrive by and be delivered by the ship Sarcophagus, at the price of £15 per ton, and after further formalities the defendant sought to set-off the price of this Russian hemp against the plaintiff’s claim. This he handed to the boy, who took it away.

A year afterwards the same lad returned with another set of defenceless papers and another half-guinea, and asked for a similar plea to be drawn. The Pleader looked at him doubtfully.

“What became of that last case?” he asked.

“Ve proved your plea! Ve proved it!” cried the young clerk in triumph. “It vos magnificent! Ve vant another. Ve cannot prove the same plea twice.”

The moral verdict seemed to go against the special pleader, who had not, it appeared, been properly instructed in the Russian hemp affair, and it led my father to a curious story of a case in which he had recently appeared in an inquiry de lunatico. I had driven down with him one Saturday some time before to Dr. Tuke’s private asylum, where he went

to interview his client. The gentleman had great wealth and was very eccentric, and had recently announced in public that he was our Saviour. He was certified as a lunatic and had demanded an inquiry. When we arrived at the house he was playing a game of billiards with his coat off, but he shook hands very amicably with my father and put his coat on, and he and the solicitor went along for a conference whilst I had a hundred up with a young doctor. I had never seen anyone who was supposed to be insane before and could not understand, how such a thing could possibly be suggested of the gentleman I had just met. My father told me on our way home that he had asked him all manner of questions, which he answered in the most businesslike manner, and then he said, “I found I must ask him a question, about his mania. ‘Have you or have you not,’ I asked, ‘maintained that you are our Saviour?’”

“I have,” he said, “and I can give you proofs,” and he proceeded to ramble incoherently and foolishly. “When he had finished,” continued my father, “all I said was ‘Well, Mr. X., no doubt you believe in it, and if you are asked about it you must speak the truth, but in my humble opinion it is not a strong point in our case.’

“‘You think not?’ asked Mr. X. eagerly.

“‘I am sure of it,’ said my father. ‘Absolutely convinced of it.’ Mr. X. nodded his head thoughtfully, and so the conference ended.”

When the case came on, Ballantine for the

relatives cross-examined Mr. X., who gave him very admirable, straightforward answers, until the jury shifted about uneasily and wondered why the man’s liberty had been interfered with. At last Ballantine came to the conclusion he must get to grips with him, and suddenly asked him very sternly: “I put it to you, that on several occasions you have proclaimed yourself to be our Saviour? Is that so? Yes or no.”

Mr. X. smiled.

“I have consulted my legal advisers on that point,” he replied in a firm, quiet voice, “and they are all clearly of opinion that it is not a strong point in my case, and under those circumstances I must decline to answer any questions about the matter.”

Ballantine could not get him to move from his resolution, and he was restored to his liberty and his estates.

My father and Ballantine were great rivals at Westminster and on Circuit, and I remember my father coming home with a capital story against himself which he used to tell with much glee. He and Ballantine were engaged in a case before Baron Martin, and he heard a Scots clerk in whispered tones pointing out to a friend from beyond Tweed the various celebrities.

“Who is yon?” whispered the visitor, pointing to the judge.

“Martin! Baron Martin,” replied the cicerone. “He’s a grand mon, a great mon!”

“And the mon that’s speakin’ the noo!”

“That’s Ballantine. He’s a great advocate. He’s a grand mon!”

“And the big mon sitting next him?”

My father pricked up his ears intently. The guide’s voice fell a semitone to a minor key. “That! Oh, that’s Porry! Serjeant Porry. He’s a highly over-r-rated mon.”

I wish my father could have lived long enough for me to have heard him at his best at one of those Garrick dinners, where he loved to get two or three gathered together in the right place and enjoy pleasant discourse over the walnuts and wine. Good port and good stories were his hobbies. There may be better ones, but I doubt it. And anyhow “so long as a man rides his hobby-horse peacefully and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind him—​pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” But if I had had the sense or foresight to play the Boswell, what a collection of good stories even I might have chronicled. Years after he was gone I was brought up to a London county court to fight an employers’ liability case, and the counsel against me was Mr. Wildy Wright. Good-natured, obtrusive and antique were his methods of advocacy, but I was glad to have met him in the flesh, for he recalled to my mind my father returning from Croydon Assizes bubbling over with delight about a story of a “certain judge” recently appointed and Mr. Wildy Wright.

The judge had been puzzled by a fierce objection to evidence made by Mr. Wildy Wright, and reserved

his ruling on this point until he had consulted his brother judge at the adjournment.

During the luncheon interval he put the point to his brother, who was deeply puzzled.

“And who raised the point?” he asked after a few moments of complicated thought.

“Wildy Wright.”

“Oh!” replied his brother with a sigh of relief, “Wildy Wright! Overrule it. And if he makes any other objections, overrule them too.”

The learned judge, much relieved, went back to Court, and in courteous, silvern tones said, “Mr. Wright, I have carefully considered the objection you raised before the adjournment and consulted my learned brother, and we are both agreed that I ought to overrule it. And I may say for your assistance that if in the course of the case you make any other objections, I shall feel it my duty to overrule those also.”

Now I begin to remember those old days and that very happy home, I feel I should like to try and paint many pictures of its happiness, but it would be far from my purpose. All I wish to set down is that from the very first, like Mr. Vincent Crummles’s pony, who, you will remember, went on circuit all his life, I was brought up among briefs and the talk of law shop and the traditions of the profession. It was always one of my ambitions to go to the Bar, but I had very little hope then that it would be realised. My elder brother, John Humffreys Parry, who chose afterwards to go on the stage and, after

playing in America with Richard Mansfield, died at the beginning of a brilliant career, was far better equipped than I was to wear my father’s robes when he should lay them down. Moreover, in early life, to use a north-country phrase, I “enjoyed” bad health. I had nearly every fever known to physicians and fell into the surgeon’s hands twice, breaking a collar-bone and nearly losing my left hand with an accident arising out of and in the course of my employment by running a chisel through it whilst building a toy theatre. In these and other ways my school-days were often interfered with, and I have been “backward” as the phrase is ever since.

And how things might have shaped themselves had my father lived, I cannot say. But that was not to be. For in January, 1880, with little warning, a tragedy swept away the home that in my young seeming was the one beautifully permanent, solid fact in the whole world. My father and mother died within a day of one another and were buried on the same morning. And there was no home, only a memory.

CHAPTER III

STUDENT DAYS

Ah, you have much to learn; we can’t know all things at twenty.

Clough: “The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich.”

As a great writer says, “I am naturally averse to egotism and hate self-laudation consumedly,” and yet I must tell this story once again, for it seems to me the natural motto of my undertaking. I was passing up Peter Street away from my Court when I heard two railway clerks discussing a case I had just decided. This was their dialogue, with formal parts, as we say in the law, omitted.

“1st Clerk: How the —— did he get to £5?

“2nd Clerk: I don’t know.

“1st Clerk: I think he’s a —— fool.

“2nd Clerk: I think he’s a —— fool (a long pause, then as an afterthought), but I think he did his best.”

In the evening of the day on which I overheard that excellent saying I was at a public dinner with no reporters present—​not that their absence or presence ever worried me very much, for the Manchester reporters were all kind friends of mine, and stacked the wild oats of my after-dinner chatter into very

neat sheaves of morning print. The fact, however, enabled Dean Maclure to be expansive. In proposing my health, after many sarcastic and amusing allusions to my varied virtues, he expressed the hope—​alas! not fulfilled—​that, as he alone could do justice to the subject, he might live long enough to write my epitaph.

That was the cue for the story, and I shall never forget the Dean’s genial roar of laughter as I pictured him unveiling in his beloved cathedral a little white marble plaque, on which was cut in severe black letters:—

HE WAS

A —— FOOL,

BUT

HE DID HIS BEST.

I remind my readers of this story here at the beginning of things, because, looking forward to the round unvarnished tale I have to tell, I am very conscious that I shall convince them of the justice of the first part of the epitaph, and if I nothing extenuate and set down naught but what is strictly accurate, I am by no means sure that when the faculty is applied for in the Ecclesiastical Court to erect that little marble tribute to my memory someone will not enter an appearance with these recollections of mine exhibited to an affidavit, and move to strike out the last line of the epitaph as embarrassing and irrelevant.

The first foolish thing I did in connection with my twenty-five years sojourn in Manchester was to come there at all. I remember Henn Collins—​then a leader on the circuit—​telling me, with very clean-cut emphasis, what he thought of my folly only a week after I had settled down. It was the Peter Street verdict, without the adjective, and this was repeated to me by very many of the kind friends I made in the first few months after my arrival. Everyone asked me, “Why had I come to Manchester?” and for the life of me I could not give them a coherent and logical answer.

But there I was, a very junior barrister, with a very junior wife and a still more junior daughter, all desirous of being comfortably provided for; and to my eternal gratitude and surprise, Manchester rose to the occasion and not only—​to use the slang of the tables—“saw me,” but “went one better” than my best hopes in contributing to my career.

What little accidents determine the course of a man’s life! We start like streams from the mountain source, intending to fight our way down into the valleys where our fathers have preceded us. But on the upper slopes at the outset of our career we meet some boulder or bank of earth and are turned west instead of east, and so away into quite other valleys and along towards another sea. If anyone had told me when I was eighteen that I should be County Court Judge of Manchester within fifteen years I should have put a sovereign on the other way or given the long odds in a hopeful spirit.

For there was nothing of Manchester in my thoughts when, after my father’s death, I left King’s College School and gave up for ever those pleasant journeys in the old underground railway, where we learned our lessons by inferior gas-light in an atmosphere of sulphur. Honestly, looking back on that school in the underworld of Somerset House, I have an uneasy feeling that there was no health in it. But there were pleasant companions, and, if you cared for such things, much classical learning and Church doctrine. It did not occur to the boy mind that light and air were necessary to healthy life, and of course it had never entered the thoughts of the pastors and masters responsible for that scholastic warren. Whilst I was there I carried away with me a few prizes and a broken nose, and a knowledge of those portions of the Church Catechism which fitted in with the place in class where I sat of a Monday morning. I was sixteen when I left school, and for the first time in my life began to seriously consider the desirability of studying things. I have been some sort of a student ever since.

My first idea was to study mathematics with a view to trying for a scholarship at Cambridge. I wonder if I had followed that stream into what dead sea it would have carried me. I know as a fact that I was accounted fairly good at the subject, but that is difficult for me to believe to-day, for anything more complicated than very simple addition I always refer in a thankful spirit to the

Registrar. Afterwards I fancied I would be an artist, and joined the Slade School and drew in the “Antique” for a few months. I got very little encouragement there. Legros once looked at one of my drawings, and took up a piece of charcoal as if to show me some of the errors of line in my work; but his heart failed him. He sighed, shook his head, grunted a guttural French grunt of despair, and turned on his heel. However, I can boast that I am a pupil of Legros, and if he treasured my piece of charcoal it may yet be a valuable lot at Christie’s—​who knows?

At the end of 1881 I had made up my mind that it was time to commence a career with money in it. I chose the Bar because I knew no other. I went down to the old courts at Westminster, and, finding one of my father’s clerks, got him to take me to Sir Henry James, as he then was. He was a very old friend of my father, and not only signed the necessary papers with pleasure, but introduced me to Sir Farrer Herschell, who was sitting next to him, and he signed as well. With such godfathers, I was cordially received into the ancient house of the Middle Temple, after satisfying two reverend benchers that I knew enough Latin and history to make it unwise for them to expose the amount of their own knowledge of these subjects by asking me further questions.

Thursday, January 19, 1882! More than thirty years ago. And yet the memory of my first dinner at the Temple is here to-day,

winnowed out of the myriad happenings of all these years.

I see a thin slip of humanity shrinking among his elders into that historical Elizabethan hall and asking the old mace bearer with whispering humbleness where he may sit. Unknowingly, he chooses the place of captain of a mess—​the arbiter of the feast of four—​and, taking courage from the unwonted gown, brazens out his position until his want of knowledge of the ceremonies concerning the first glass of wine exposes him as a newcomer.

I know that there was plenty of genial talk and laughter at that table, but I remember none of it. For in my heart of hearts I was wondering why I had come there at all, and feeling that the ghosts of all the great Templars of the past were chuckling among the rafters at my folly, and that, truly, I was honest food for their mocks. But among all my hopes and fears and forebodings Manchester certainly had no place. Yet the “writing on the wall” was there, or, rather, he was sitting with his back to it on my left-hand side. His name was Smith, and he came from Manchester.

Richard Smith, who sat next to me on the occasion of my first dinner in hall, was my earliest experience of Manchester, and indeed if I had never met him I cannot suppose that I should ever have joined the Northern Circuit. He had come to the Temple late in life and was nearing his call. I believe he had already been a bleacher, a dealer in pictures, and a clerk to a public body. I know he had been at

Oxford, because in an unlucky moment on circuit in a heated discussion after dinner he had called in aid of his argument his University degree, and was ever afterwards known as “Smith, B.A.” But for me it was sufficient that he was the only man I ever met in the Temple who could talk lovingly and intelligently about pictures. He had the square face of a lion, wearing in those days a heavy beard. He barked and growled at you in argument and was cocksure he was right. That is a very Manchester virtue. I write of it with jealousy, for it is an attribute I have vainly striven to acquire. You know the story of one of Manchester’s most eminent sons who was always in the right. Some friend remonstrated with him gently, saying, “Why be such an egoist?”

“Egoist!” was the calm reply. “I’m not an egoist—​I know!”

And so it was with Dick Smith. He knew! But, Micawber-like, he failed to persuade others to take him at his own valuation. His venture at the Bar was not a fortunate one. I like to remember him, full of hope and enthusiasm spending a day or two with me in the summer, sketching on the Thames at Datchet, or playing chess in the common room in the winter and laying down the law on every conceivable subject in his rough, Manchester tongue. When he left the Temple to start his practice in Manchester, the Middle Temple common room seemed to me for some days “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.” But this was only a passing

mood. Dick Smith and his pride of Manchester became a fading memory, and I continued to thoroughly enjoy my three years’ work in the Temple.

I cannot help thinking that men make a mistake in rushing up from the University to eat their dinners and getting called to the Bar directly they leave college. Law is, at least, as uncertain and dangerous a science to the patient as medicine, and the student of law should be compelled to “walk” the courts, as the medical student is compelled to “walk” the hospitals. For my part, I attribute what success I had at the Bar to the fact that I worked at the practical business of the profession for three years before I was called. I read in different chambers, and during the last year of student days had the privilege of reading with my Danckwerts, who was and is, no doubt, one of the greatest lawyers of our day. It is curious to remember that in 1884 the gossip of the Temple was concerned in discussing whether Danckwerts or Asquith would succeed R. S. Wright as Treasury “devil,” so blind are the quidnuncs to the throw of the shuttle of fate.

A junior with such a heavy practice as Danckwerts’s cannot do much more than give you the run of his chambers, but that, as Loehnis said, was like “turning a team of asses into a field of oats.” Loehnis devilled for Danckwerts in those days. He was a shrewd, sound lawyer and a kind-hearted senior to our pupil room, and the Bar lost

an honourable and learned brother by his untimely death. Considering the work he did and the hours he worked, it was wonderful how much personal attention Danckwerts gave to his pupils. He would often call one of us into his room and discuss some opinion or pleading we had drawn. I remember on one occasion, having pointed out to me the hopeless errors of the legal opinion I had given, he wound up his remarks by saying: “And suppose, when you are called, you get a case of that kind, what is going to happen to you?”

“When I get a case of that importance,” I replied, “I shall certainly insist on having you as a junior.”

The great man laughingly agreed that I had made a wise resolution.

Bertram Cox was undoubtedly the ablest pupil in my time. He neglected an ordinary career at the Bar and specialised on heavy public legal work, and was rightly rewarded by being appointed legal Under-Secretary to the Colonial Office—​a position which I believe Mr. Chamberlain invented in order that the office might have the benefit of his services. He is now the solicitor to the Inland Revenue. Another pupil was Bartle Frere, who is a legal luminary at Gibraltar. Danckwerts seemed to instil into his pupils the capacity to arrive. Frere was one of the merriest fellows in the world, always doing some careless and amusing thing, on the strength of which Cox and I built up apocryphal stories about him which we insisted upon as traditions of the pupil

room. Thus it was asserted to be Frere who, after carefully studying the papers in an action for seduction, had drafted a defence of contributory negligence. I believe, however, there was some foundation for the story that in his early days he wrote an opinion to the effect that, as every step taken up to date on behalf of the plaintiff was useless, the best thing he could do was to drop his present action and commence an action for negligence against his solicitor.

“Excellent advice, no doubt,” said Danckwerts dryly, “but you seem to forget that we are advising the solicitor.”

The last time I met Frere was in Norwich, about 1896. I had gone to sit as judge for Addison, and took my seat in the old Castle Court with great dignity, bowing to the Bar, when I looked up and my eye caught Frere’s.

“Good heavens, it’s Parry!” he cried out in an audible voice, and laughed heartily at the idea of finding me on the bench. The Court did not hear the interruption, but Parry did, and enjoyed it hugely. We dined at the Maid’s Head that evening, and had a pleasant crack together, recalling many stories of the old pupil room in New Court. No doubt memory brightens o’er the past, but certainly no youngsters ever learned their business under pleasanter auspices than we did.

Outside the pupil room there were lectures to attend, scholarships to be read for, dinners in the old hall, and debating clubs meeting on several evenings

in the week. Mindful of my father’s advice, I had always kept in touch with an old boys’ debating club at King’s College School, and now I joined the Hardwicke and a very pleasant and more social club, the Mansfield. The Hardwicke was a conservative institution, and I remember startling the ancients of our benches by raising a debate on the effect of the Pre-Raphaelite movement on the art of the country. Everyone spoke on it, and the frank expressions of dogmatic ignorance and the enthusiastic denunciations of the works of the school were thoroughly healthy and entertaining. Still, we mustered a stalwart minority, and a little later gained a practical victory over the Philistines. I was elected on the committee of the Hardwicke, on which Clavell Salter—​now a K.C. and M.P. for the Basingstoke division—​was an important official. The society was in funds, and we resolved to spend them in creature comforts; not in olive draperies and sunflowers, perhaps, but in reasonable luxuries. Our meeting room was at that time floored with boards, the door opening from the road banged violently whenever anyone entered, and the uncovered gas-jets in the centre glared and hissed at you distressingly during your oration. Without a word of our purpose to the general body of members we adorned the room with a carpet, a screen to hide the door, and some glass globes for the gas. Incensed with indignation and breathing fire and war, the hosts of the Old Bailey came down upon us in wrath. Geoghan the eloquent, Cagney the

persuasive, and the subtle Burnie closured our debate, carried the suspension of the standing orders, and on a motion to surcharge the upstart members of the committee rent the air with denunciations of our malversation of the funds and our want of patriotism in destroying the ancient amenities of their beloved Hardwicke. It was with difficulty that our side continued the debate, which was of an earnest and fiery nature, until the hour of the adjournment. By next week we whipped up our supporters, who were base enough to prefer comfort to tradition, and we remained in office. The prophecies of decadence and disaster came to naught. The Hardwicke survives in prosperity. Long may it flourish.

This habit of debate and discussion naturally led us to desire to try our strength in a wider field of battle. Some took one side and some another, but for myself, from hereditary example perhaps, I have always been fond of belonging to a minority; and now that I have been a total abstainer from politics for many years, I may freely admit that in the eighties I was an ardent Radical, and, naturally, a disciple of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who in that day was preaching the reforms that Mr. Lloyd George is now putting on the Statute Book. I was a member of the Eighty Club, then a Whig institution, and as Radical speakers were greatly in demand I got many opportunities of political speaking all over the country. As a very young Radical in a minority among many superior persons, it was, of course, part

of my duty to criticise my elders and betters whenever I got the opportunity. As an artist friend said of me, I had an unfortunate habit of “getting out of drawing,” even outside the studio, and I remember very well an instance of this at a dinner given in the autumn of 1895 to Trevelyan. It was the custom of the club for a senior to propose and a junior to second a vote of thanks to our guest. On this occasion Haldane was the senior and I was the junior. I had made up an eloquent little speech, but in accordance with my usual habit—​then and now—​I made another. Haldane had—​as I thought rather unnecessarily—​made a great many allusions to the “nephew of Lord Macaulay,” as though Trevelyan bore no other claim to fame. When my turn came I got a round of applause for welcoming our guest as himself, a personality far more interesting to the working politician of to-day than the mere nephew of a Whig peer. Trevelyan himself seemed to enjoy the joke, and wound up the proceedings by an appeal to the younger members for missionary work, in which he referred very pleasantly to some of my father’s Radical fights of old days, and congratulated me on belonging to the true faith.

I was naturally rather elated as I walked home along the Embankment with our energetic honorary secretary, J. A. B. B. Bruce—​the Busy Bee, as we called him.

“No doubt, Parry,” he said in his quiet, thoughtful way, “you think you’ve been jolly clever, but what I’m wondering is when Haldane is Lord

Chancellor, and you want a County Court judgeship, will you get it?”

I hope it is not lese-majeste for me to repeat this story to-day, when at length the hopes of the Temple have been fulfilled and the double event which Bruce foresaw has come to pass. It was a commonplace of Temple talk that some day Haldane would be Lord Chancellor, but it required the deep foresight of Bruce to hazard the suggestion that I should ever be in a position to apply for a judgeship of the County Court.

And I cannot look back on those old days without seeing the figure of one dear friend—​the bravest and kindest of men, Archie Stewart. I know this, that no one who came within his sway can have forgotten his memory, and there must yet be many in the Temple who will be glad to recall it. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered and erect, swinging with a curious gait across the courts of the Temple, one could not but be attracted by his presence. His frank, engaging smile, his cheery voice all alike evidenced the joy of life. And yet when he entered the library and the attendant stepped up to him and lifted off his coat with its heavy cape, you saw at a glance the tragedy that his brave heart never acknowledged. Both his arms were paralysed and deformed from childhood and were practically useless. He could write slowly and with difficulty, pushing the pen by a movement of the shoulder, but in nearly every ordinary movement in life, in eating, dressing, carrying and lifting,

he required assistance. And yet he would start away from Kensington in the morning and come down to the Temple, leaving his servant at home in the knowledge that throughout London he would always find someone to help him. When you got used to his movements you did not seem to notice his deformity, so little did he make of it himself, and so cleverly did he use the little strength and capacity there were in his hands and arms. The things that he could do were wonderful. A light wineglass he could lift with his lips, drink from it and replace it almost gracefully, and he could pick up a weighted chessman—​it was his favourite game, and he played above the ordinary—​in his mouth and hurl it accurately on to any square on the board. His favourite method was to steer the men along with his pipe, but in moments of triumph and enthusiasm he seized them in his lips. He was a constant speaker at the Hardwicke—​clear, shrewd and learned. How he read so much and had conquered his enormous difficulties it is hard to understand. Among other things achieved, he had learned to swim, and he could cast a bowl from his instep with cunning, skill and accuracy. In due course he was called to the Bar, and whenever I came to town I used to turn into our old chambers in Pump Court, and find Stewart smoking like a furnace and laying down the law to some junior in large practice who had come round to have a few words with him about a difficulty. It was curious how many men accounted learned in the law were well pleased to have

their views ratified or reformed by Archie Stewart. I remember hearing him hold at bay a Divisional Court, consisting of Coleridge, C.J., and R. S. Wright, J., with a learned argument about a demand for rent at common law, in which he gave them an interesting dissertation on the legal history and archæology of the matter, with few notes and, of course, without books, for he was unable to hold them. The Court rightly complimented him on his performance, and thinking ahead in those days I used to imagine what a great judge my friend would have made, with his bright logical Scots mind and his deep sympathy with human nature down to the lowest, which he had learned from the respect and kindness shown to his misfortune. He told me that in all his wanderings about London day and night alone no one had ever offered to rob him, though he was in the habit of asking any stranger to take his money out of his pocket to pay railway or other fares. I was not the only one who predicted for Stewart some position of honour in his profession. But it was not to be. Very suddenly one summer holiday he was taken. It was at his home at Rannoch. He belonged to an ancient race of Stewarts, and in his quaint way used to boast that if he were to sue for the Crown in formâ pauperis there would be flutterings in high places. Some years afterwards I made a pious journey to his resting-place. In his ancestral park, on which the blue peak of his beloved Schiehallion looks down, there, surrounded by grey stone walls and tall

fir trees, he lies among cross-legged knights in armour, tall well-limbed warriors of his race, but among them all there is not one who fought the fight with a braver heart than the last comer.

It begins to dawn upon me that all these beckoning shadows and calling shapes which throng into my memory when I begin to write of my student days in the Temple are keeping me too long from the main purpose of my story, but in my next chapter I will at least get called to the Bar, and then, as there will be no work for me in town, I shall have to pack up my bundle and go into the wide, wide world to seek my fortune.

CHAPTER IV

CALLED TO THE BAR

—​is it not well that there should be what we call Professions, or Bread-studies (Brodzwecke) pre-appointed us? Here, circling like the gin-horse, for whom partial or total blindness is no evil, the Bread-artist can travel contentedly round and round, still fancying that it is forward and forward, and realise much: for himself victual; for the world an additional horse’s power in the grand corn-mill or hemp-mill of Economic Society.

Carlyle: “Sartor Resartus.”

In 1884 I was appointed by Mr. Justice Mathew to the first legal office I had the honour to hold, and went with him on the Oxford Circuit as judge’s marshal. Mr. Justice Mathew was a very old friend of my father, and was one of the team that prosecuted Arthur Orton for perjury. Of those five, three survivors now remained; Hawkins, Mathew, and Bowen, and all were on the bench. A judge’s marshal has one official duty; he swears in the grand jury. His other duties are to act as the judge’s secretary, to see that everything in the judge’s lodgings runs smoothly, and to suffer admonition gladly if anything goes wrong. At the end of the circuit Mathew said at least this in my favour—​that I was the only marshal he had ever had who could carve a chicken and open a soda-water bottle without injuring the carpets.

We went the Oxford Summer Circuit. Butt was our brother judge. It was a delightful and valuable experience. Mathew was an ideal judge in criminal cases, and I have never forgotten a maxim he was very fond of quoting and acting upon: “When the prisoner is undefended the judge must be his advocate.” In altered terms, it is a counsel of perfection for a County Court judge or any magisterial person who has the poor always before him. To see him double the part of prisoner’s advocate and judge was to witness a masterpiece of subtle wit and honesty. There has been much discussion of late about the bias of judges. To my thinking a judge without bias would be a monstrosity. Mathew was an Irishman and a Liberal. But I never remember his bias interfering with a straight delivery; unless, indeed, it was on the trial of an undefended Irish poacher at Oxford. There truly the Liberal disappeared in the judge, but I think the Irishman swerved a little from the true line. Anyhow, Mercy had her way, and the poacher was acquitted.

There were many who regarded Mathew with something like terror, and for the life of me why one with so kindly a heart should have rejoiced on occasion in appearing as a man of wrath I cannot say. Perhaps it was that if he followed on all occasions his humane instincts he felt that discipline would not be maintained, and that he was really, as it were, taking gymnastic moral exercise in working himself into histrionic anger about nothing in particular. There was generally a sense of humour

in these displays which the sufferer was often too agitated to enjoy. I remember on one occasion an unfortunate sheriff had spelt and printed and published Mathew’s name on the calendar with two t’s. The judge sent for him and received him in the drawing-room of our lodgings in grave state. He explained to the High Sheriff, who stood quaking before him in a yeomanry uniform, that the offence he had committed might well be regarded not as petty treason, but as high treason, being in effect an insult through him as Judge of Assize to Her Majesty herself. He sent for Butt and solemnly discussed with him whether he was not in duty bound to fine the unlucky sheriff at least £500. Butt, who was never more delighted than when he could play his part in a jest, for some time seriously agreed with Mathew, and the two discussed whether imprisonment was necessary as well. Then Butt began to think the fun had gone on long enough, and took the sheriff’s side and begged his forgiveness. But Mathew, who was really vexed at slovenliness of this kind, dismissed the sheriff and adjourned his decision until the morning, “for,” said he in Cromwellian phrase and intention, “the fellow must be taught his place.”

But on another and more amusing occasion he caused grave fright to Lister Drummond, my brother marshal. Drummond was an ardent Catholic—​a convert, I believe—​and of course Mathew belonged to a very old Catholic family. I fear we marshals must have been somewhat of a trial

to our respective judges, and every now and then Mathew would put his foot down. One morning we both arrived at breakfast rather later than usual. Mathew was reading the paper and eating his bacon alone, and looked at us in a very Johnsonian and surly manner, and only grunted a reply to our greetings. Breakfast proceeded in silence until the judge had finished, when he put down his paper and said:

“Whose bedroom is next to mine?”

“I believe mine is, Judge,” I said with hesitancy.

“Hm! Then who on earth was talking to you until two in the morning?”

“Well, you see,” I replied more cheerfully, seeing a mischievous retreat, “it was Drummond, but I’m sure you will approve of it when I tell you that he wants to convert me to the Holy Faith!”

“Does he?” roared Mathew, banging his fist on the table and glaring at Drummond. “Then you may take it straight from me, Drummond, that if you continue to convert Parry in the small hours of the morning, I leave the Church.”

He swept out of the room, leaving Drummond as limp as the jackdaw of Rheims.

Mathew had a considerable power of acting, and could have taken a hand with the best in the old sport of quizzing or “smoking” the victim, which is known to the moderns under the name of the game of spoof. I remember well when we were travelling to some cathedral town I was specifically ordered to get copies of a ribald and amusing local paper

called the Bat, or the Porcupine, or the Jackdaw, or some such sarcastic beast or bird. This I did, and the two judges thoroughly enjoyed an open letter in it to my Lord Bishop of the diocese. The next evening the Lord Bishop dined with us in state, with other dignitaries of the city. When we retired to the drawing-room, there on the table, duly arranged with the Times, the Spectator, the Law Journal and other staid prints, were the blatant covers of the offending papers. They caught the Lord Bishop’s eye. He frowned and looked gravely on the carpet. Mathew, with his ready observation, noticed the episcopal uneasiness. He stepped to the table in sudden anger. He seized the offending copies and turned to me with a look of grave sorrow, illuminated by a tactful quiver of the left eyelid.

“Isn’t this disgraceful? I can’t hinder you from wasting your money on such trash. But to bring them into the judges’ rooms and leave them lying about here——” He stepped to the fireplace and threw them into the fire with a sigh. “Surely, Parry—​surely you do not need to be told not to do such things.”

And once more the Bishop smiled a smile of righteousness and peace.

It was only a few weeks’ experience, but it stands out as one of the times when I learned something of the technic of advocacy. I was only a “walker on” to the stage of the Court, it is true, but I was on all the time, and could take note of the courses of the stars. Henry Matthews, Q.C., and Jelf, Q.C., were

doing constant battle in the Civil Court, and Darling was defending poachers and other offenders on the Crown side. There was plenty of good example for the apprentice to study. And in between whiles we rowed our judges down the Wye to Chepstow and nearly spilled them in the river, and journeyed to Edgbaston to kiss Cardinal Newman’s ring, and visited under the pleasantest circumstances the old houses and castles and cathedrals of the Midlands; as if all the world were playing holidays when you went the Oxford Circuit in summer.

At the end of 1884 I was married, and in January, 1885, I was called to the Bar. I determined to go my father’s old circuit, the South-Eastern, and went down to Cambridge and Norwich and Maidstone to look round, but came to the conclusion that there was woefully little to do and plenty of able men to do it. I took a room in Middle Temple Lane in the old wooden building on the left as you turn out of Fleet Street. My name was painted on the door, but I doubt if anyone read it but myself. I wrote some stories for the Cornhill, started a law book that was never finished, and began editing Dorothy Osborne’s letters. As the Bar did not require my services, and I thought the country did, I made many excursions for the Eighty Club.

I spoke several times for an old friend of mine, Tom Threlfall, head of the Salford Brewery, who had come out as a Liberal against the Hon. Edward Stanhope in the Horncastle Division of Lincolnshire. The agricultural labourer was coming into his own,

and the clergy often refused us the use of the schools, so we spoke from a wagon in a field. We had a knot of independent farmers who supported the cause, and we all drove together in a big brake to the place of meeting. I shall never forget a serious faux pas of Threlfall’s. We were passing between two fields heavily manured with the favourite Lincolnshire dressing, and all the farmers sniffed it up with smiling approval. It was too much for Threlfall, and he buried his face in an elegant cambric handkerchief. One of the farmers frowned slightly, and, by way of encouraging explanation, said: “Eh, man! Pig moock! Fine!”

The farmers were sorely puzzled at his want of appreciation, and I could not help feeling that Threlfall was not really cut out for a Lincolnshire member. Unfortunately, the voters thought so, too; but he made an excellent fight.

At the end of the year, at an old boys’ dinner at King’s College after the election Sir Richard Webster, as he then was, proposed my health as president of the debating society, and chaffed me for belonging to the wrong camp; but I was able to point out that I had done good work for both parties, for I had spoken for fifteen Radical candidates and not one of them had been returned.

The fact was that at that date the followers of Chamberlain and his “unauthorised programme,” as it was called, were under the grave disadvantage of working against the ill-concealed hostility of the moderate Liberals.

I expect when the history of the time is known it will be found that when Gladstone nominated Rosebery as his successor instead of Chamberlain he naturally destined his party to their long sojourn in the wilderness. Certainly in 1885 Chamberlain was as great a name to conjure with as it is to-day. I was present at Bristol at the Liberal Colston dinner just before the autumn election, and shall never forget the enormous enthusiasm with which his name was received.

With the exception of Gladstone, I have never heard a speaker who could play upon any given audience as a musician upon a great organ, pulling out first this stop and then another, and winding up with some diapason of eloquence, some grand swelling burst of harmony, that made speaker and audience, player and organ, one vast instrument of triumph.

The most wonderful instance of his magnetic influence and power that I ever witnessed was when he dined with the Eighty Club on April 28, 1885. It was an open secret that the majority of the club did not want him to be invited, but a Cabinet Minister could not be passed over. The audience was apathetic. They laughed awkwardly when he introduced himself as one “who certainly has never worshipped with Whigs in the Temple of Brooks’s.” He seemed to get no echo from his audience and became uneasy. He was speaking from notes piled up on a heap of oranges in a high dessert dish. Suddenly I saw him drop a page back on to the

heap—​he left his notes and his voice rang out amongst us in a graphic picture of a Birmingham slum and the children crying for milk, and the shameful contrast of the well-fed, sleek mob in front of him. Melodrama, perhaps, but rattling good melodrama. It made Radicals for the moment of every Whig in the room, and when he returned to his notes and quoted from the “Corn Law Rhymer,” in tones of triumphant fervour:—

They taxed your corn, they fettered trade;

The clouds to blood, the sun to shade;

And every good that God had made

They turned to bane and mockery—

cheers echoed and re-echoed, and there was not an ounce of Whig left in his audience.

Alas! the whirligig of Time brings in his revenges. In a few years Chamberlain had an entirely new set of politics, and I had none whatever.

Eighty-six dawned, but the sun did not shine very brightly in Middle Temple Lane. I had one or two briefs, certainly, but there seemed no outlook. The South-Eastern Circuit was a far too expensive amusement for my pocket, and, now that the election was over, there seemed nothing to do but to write stories that ungrateful editors did not want and to sit in chambers waiting for unintelligent solicitors who never came.

It was one winter afternoon. My boy was out at lunch. I was sitting in that upper chamber in Middle Temple Lane wondering if there would be

more room for my interesting personality in Australia than there seemed to be in the old country when I heard an eager, heavy footstep on the last flight. Footsteps generally stopped at the top of the flight before, where an eminent Old Bailey junior held out. These footsteps came upward and along; they were unknown and substantial. Evidently those of a solicitor—​of weight. I felt that something important was going to happen.

There was no knock at the door, and in a moment who should fling himself into the room but Dick Smith.

“Not a bit of good living up all these stairs; you should begin on the ground floor. Time enough to come up here when you are all the fashion and the solicitors must come after you.”

“What are you doing in town?” I asked.

“M‘Lachlan .v Agnew and Others. Rolls Court, before Anderson, Official Referee. Pankhurst leads me, but he has gone back to Manchester. Shiress Will, Q.C., and Lewis Coward against us. What are you doing?”

“Nothing whatever,” I answered somewhat dismally.

“Come along and take a note for me this afternoon.”

I had been feeling like a gambler eternally cut out of the table, and here was a hand in some sort of game dealt for me to pick up. I caught hold of my blue bag, and putting a note on my door with some pride to say I was to be found at the Official

Referee’s Chambers in Rolls Court, followed Dick Smith up Chancery Lane.

There is a geographical secret about Chancery Lane that I have discovered. It leads straight to Manchester.

M‘Lachlan .v Agnew and Others should never have happened at all. It came about mainly because Lachlan M‘Lachlan was a Scotsman and a photographer, and knew that he knew everything about art—​in which he mistakenly included photography—​whilst the defendants, Sir William Agnew, Sir Joseph Heron, and Mr. Alderman King, knew that they knew better than M‘Lachlan.

Each set out to prove his thesis to Mr. Anderson, Q.C., in his dingy chambers in Rolls Court. Neither succeeded, but perhaps Anderson learned something about art and the parties something about law.

Lachlan M‘Lachlan’s pet idea was that a camera not only could not lie, but that it could tell the truth, and even interpret new or historic truths pictorially. He conceived the loyal and patriotic idea of a great picture, to be entitled “The Royal Family,” which was to depict a group consisting of every member of the Royal Family surrounding our Gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria in one of the rooms at Windsor. Each individual was to be separately photographed, the room and its furniture were to be photographed in detail, and then the photographs were to be enlarged, cut out, and pasted on a huge canvas, from which was to be painted a picture of great size. When this was done the camera again came into play.

Negatives of various sizes were to be taken, and the ultimate prints sold to the public.

I have very little doubt there was some artistic value in the original design of the group, for that was the work of that sincere artist Frederic Shields, and his sketch group, which was prepared in 1871, won the approval of her Majesty the Queen, who not only gave M‘Lachlan several sittings herself, but issued her mandate to the various members of the Royal Family that they were to be photographed in such dresses, uniforms, and attitudes as Lachlan M‘Lachlan desired. The various adventures of M‘Lachlan in pursuit of his Royal victims would fill a volume. This part of the work took some two or three years, and the great scheme nearly failed because a Princess who had in the meanwhile grown out of short skirts refused to put them on again to satisfy M‘Lachlan’s passion for historical accuracy. This matter was—​so M‘Lachlan used to tell us—​referred to her Majesty and decided in his favour.

In 1874 the first photographs were completed, but the plaintiff had exhausted his means in working on his great project, which required new capital before it could be finished. There is, I think, no doubt that the defendants were actuated in the first instance by the kindest motives, and through their influence about twenty guarantors found £100 apiece in order that the wonderful historical picture might be made.

M‘Lachlan had the faith and enthusiasm of a patentee. No expense could be too great, no time

too long to assure the perfection of his work. The defendants, on the other hand, regarded themselves as the kindly patron of the poor artist, ready to lend him some money, but eager to see it return again with that huge additional interest that is the modern Mæcenas’s expectation when he deigns to encourage literature or art. Such a combination could but end in one place—​the law courts, though it took many years to reach its natural destination.

I think it was nearly 1877 before the great canvas picture was produced. It measured 17 ft. by 10 ft. 6 in., and was insured by the defendants for £10,000. Even when the picture was finished there were long delays in producing the negatives of different sizes. More money was wanted, and deeds and agreements were drawn up, unauthorised prints were condemned by M‘Lachlan and issued by the defendants, and meanwhile the portraits were becoming more and more historical, and a picture that might have had some popularity in 1871 had little chance of success some ten years later.

It was in March of 1885 that the case was opened at Manchester Assizes. Dr. Pankhurst was for the plaintiff. No one on the circuit could have trumpeted forth the wrongs of M‘Lachlan with more eloquent indignation, and few juniors could have enveloped the court in a foggier atmosphere of financial complications. In tones of emotion and excitement the learned doctor’s voice would soar into a falsetto of denunciation of his opponents’ chicanery, winding

up in a cry to heaven—​or whatever Pankhurst put in its place—​that their villainy might be punished. It was not, indeed, wholly without justification that some wild circuit rhymer wrote in Falkner Blair’s “Lament on Going to India”:

When I hear in the midst of the jungle O

The shriek of the wild cockatoo,

I shall jump out of bed in my bungalow

And imagine, dear Pankhurst, it’s you.

It is, of course, easy enough to make fun of a great man’s mannerisms, but Dr. Pankhurst, as a witty conversationalist, an eloquent speaker who could keep his subject well before a mixed audience on a high plane of thought, and a man of earnest convictions in moral and political affairs, was honestly admired by all who had the pleasure of his friendship. But it must be admitted that at the Bar he was not at his best. He could not readily sink to the mundane problems by solving which so many disputes are decided. I remember on a Local Government Board inquiry, presided over by Colonel Ducat, the engineer of the Board, I appeared for one district and Pankhurst for another. We were opposing inclusion into a larger district. Pankhurst, as senior, started the harangues by throwing up his arms and shouting out on a top note, “I am here to justify the opposition of the down-trodden minority of the Stand District. I say I am here to justify the opposition of the down-trodden minority of the Stand District.”

And justify it he did in passages of great eloquence,

close reasoning, and apposite quotation from history and literature, which were a pleasure and privilege to listent to. When it was all over, and his adherents’ applause had died away, Colonel Ducat looked up from his notes and said: “I’ve listened very carefully, Dr. Pankhurst, but I’m not clear even now whether you are in favour of the 12-inch drains or the 9-inch drains.”

I should like to have heard Pankhurst open M‘Lachlan’s case. Mr. Justice Hawkins listened to it for three days. At the end of that time figures were mentioned, and Hawkins got frightened, and promptly referred the matter. What a waste of time and money to have started it at all. It was a year afterwards, in the middle of the reference, that I found the case rolling heavily along, a mass of negatives and photography and correspondence and confusion. Pankhurst was unable to continue in the case, and they gave me a junior brief to Richard Smith. I never really understood what the quarrel was all about, but I do not think anyone else did, unless it was Smith, who made an excellent reply for the plaintiff.

I only remember one smile during the many weary hours we spent in those dingy chambers in Rolls Court. Sir William Agnew was being examined. He was always somewhat pompous and well-to-do in his manner, and Smith did his best to annoy him. A question arose as to the authenticity of a letter written by the plaintiff on Agnew’s Bond Street letter paper.

“I suppose,” said Smith, “if any customer in your shop—​I beg your pardon, emporium—​were to ask one of your servants for a sheet of notepaper, he would give him one?”

“I hope not, sir,” said Sir William, with expansive dignity, “I hope he would hand him two or three.”

Old Anderson looked at Sir William in Scot’s surprise, and said in his broadest accent, “Do you really mean that, now?”

I do not think I ever saw the ultimate written judgment of the Official Referee. I believe both sides appealed from it, and no appeal was ever heard. It was, from the point of view of English litigation, one of our failures. There ought to be a compulsory conciliation court for troubles of this nature, at least to sift out what the quarrel and dispute really is. But I look back to the case with pleasure. I don’t think the result left M‘Lachlan worse than it found him, and it certainly did me a good turn. During those days I heard from Smith of the wonderful possibilities of the Bar in Manchester, and I made up my mind I would at least join the Northern Circuit. This I did without delay, and before the summer I had taken a little house in Heaton Road, Withington, and turned my back on London for ever.

Just to show what a lot I knew about Manchester, I moved down in Whit-week—​or tried to. For Manchester has an excellent and sacred custom in Whit-week. Nobody does any work.

CHAPTER V

EARLY MEMORIES OF MANCHESTER

I see the huge warehouses of Manchester, the many-storied mills, the great bale-laden drays, the magnificent horses.

“Towards Democracy.”

And by moving down to Manchester in Whit-week I found myself indeed plunged into a new world. For Whit-week, as I said, is a universal holiday among all sorts and conditions of people, and every man, woman and child has his or her share in the feast. For the shops close, the workman goes to Blackpool or the Isle of Man, and the employer to Paris or the West Highlands, or St. Andrews, or North Berwick as the mood suggests, and Lancashire and Yorkshire play cricket at Old Trafford and the races are run, and the children dressed in white, carrying their banners, move in procession through streets thronged with admiring parents. And that all may be at peace and good will the Protestant children “walk”—​that is the Manchester word—​on one day and the Roman Catholics on another, for fear the good Christian parents of either denomination should batter each other’s skulls whilst their little children are singing “Lead Kindly Light.” And if you want to see one of the prettiest sights

in the land, go and see the children “walking,” the little Catholics for choice, because their frocks are daintier and their banners more picturesque, and their parents in the crowd, among whom you should stand, are more Irish, enthusiastic and full of epigram. But by no means go to Manchester in Whit-week if you want to buy or sell. And if you have to move into a new house it is obviously not the right season to make the attempt, for at this season no money or entreaty will save your vans from being held up, and you may make up your mind to lay your carpets yourself. When you become a citizen of Manchester you recognise the sanity of the Whit-week festival. It comes at a time when days are long, weather favourable, the despair of winter behind you and the joy of summer at your feet. Some day all England will acquire the Whit-week habit, and it will cease to be the special luxury of Manchester.

As there was no possibility of work or any kind of progress in domestic affairs, I had ample leisure to survey the city and study its geography. My earliest impressions were not prepossessing. The town of Manchester seemed to consist of one long street—​Market Street—​which was far too small for the trams and lurries and men and women who wanted to use it. All the other streets seemed half empty, and this one was overcrowded. The costumes of the inhabitants struck me as grotesque. Men’s gloves were only to be seen in the shop windows, and I wondered why they were there at

all, but discovered afterwards that the devout carried them to church or chapel on Sundays. Top hats were worn, certainly, but generally with light tweed suits. Frock coats were surmounted by boating straws, and I remember the shock experienced by my Cockney mind when I met a native clothed in correct black coat and silk hat in Albert Square ruining his chances in life, as I thought, by the added blasphemy of a short pipe. It must not be thought that I sighed deeply for the Babylonish garments of the Temple, for I soon learned that in Manchester, of all places, you might

Gi’e fools their silks, and knaves their wine,

A man’s a man for a’ that.

And, for myself, I cared for none of these things, and no doubt Charley McKeand—​whose outspoken comments on men and manners were the joy of the circuit—​was fully within the truth when he insisted, as he always did, that I was the worst-dressed man on the circuit.

But truth compels me to say that my memory of the first aspect of Manchester was a scene of hustle, roughness, and uncouthness rather depressing to a stranger in a strange land not to the manner born. I discovered before long the kindness of heart and the real sense of independence that underlies and is the origin of the Manchester manner, but I still think that there are many natives who mistake incivility for independence, thereby lowering their fellow-citizens in the esteem of mankind.

I could quote many instances of what I mean, but one will suffice. An eminent Withington butcher, having delivered meat of exceptional toughness, my wife remonstrated with him about it, when he blurted out, “Nay, missis, it’s not my meat—​if anything’s wrong, more laikely it’s your teeth.”

It is this kind of greeting that puzzles the softer races of the South.