CHAPTER VIII

Athletic Sports at Eton—A “Scrap”—Lord Newlands—An Old Boy on Eton of To-day

Henley Regatta was an event which was always eagerly looked forward to by us boys. I used to go there with Mr. James and Mrs. Bower and some of the boys in our house. Sometimes we went by river all the way; at others by rail. One year, while sitting in the Grand Stand, I overheard a conversation between a boy named Kirklinton-Saul and his mother. Said the latter:—

“I don’t always expect to hear from you, my dear, but when you want money, be sure and write, won’t you?”

To which request the young gentleman gave the answer which might be expected.

I could not help thinking at the time: “What a nice mamma! I wonder if there are many such mammas about?” The dinner at Henley used to consist of duck and green peas with beer, which the boys used to enjoy greatly; but there was such a crowd at the regatta, that there was always a tremendous scramble to get to the tables. Mr. James did not take dinner with him when we went to Henley, as it was so far from Eton. The toilettes of the ladies were very elaborate, though hardly equal to those one saw at the Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s. Nevertheless, there were some very pretty dresses, and—what was still more important—some very pretty faces. For many young girls came with their mothers to see their friends and relatives compete for the Ladies’ Plate, which in those days Eton used to win year after year in succession.[13] The light blue of Eton was worn by the boys and by the pretty girls who accompanied them.

The Athletic Sports at Eton were always interesting to watch. The steeplechase course was a most severe one, some very big natural jumps having to be negotiated, ending with the brook, which was the biggest jump of all. H. M. Ridley was the fastest runner at Eton in my time.

I recollect one day having a try at the brook in the “field,” which I succeeded in jumping. The late Lord Lonsdale and his brother, the present Earl, were standing some way off, and must have thought I could not do it, for the former shouted out when I landed safely on the further bank:—

“Well done, Black-eyed Susan!” _Black-eyed Susan_, I may mention, was the name of a popular burlesque, by Douglas Jerrold, which had a great run at that time at the Strand Theatre. One morning, before breakfast, I ran John Lister-Kaye one hundred yards for a bet of five shillings, he giving me five yards start, and managed to win, though he had felt very confident about beating me. I ran one year in the Hundred Yards for boys under sixteen at the Sports, and Holdsworth, who was acting as umpire, told me afterwards that I might have won it, had I not stopped a yard short, through mistaking the boundary line. He often asked me why I had done so, but the only reason I could give was that I was so short-sighted.

We had a play-room at James’s, where we used to practise the high jump, and there were some boys who could clear a jump higher than themselves. In this room stood a large blackboard, upon which all the names of the boys who had been at James’s were carved, with the year they came and the year they left.

The cricket match between Eton and Winchester was played in alternate years at either school. When the match took place at Eton, the band of the Life Guards or the “Blues” would play on the ground, where there was always a large attendance of visitors, including a great number of ladies. But it was never so fine a sight as the Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s. At one Winchester match I remember seeing Miss Evans (George Eliot), who had come as the guest of one of the masters, and whose presence created quite a sensation.

Once at Lord’s, during the Eton and Harrow match, I was invited on to the drag of a friend of mine named C. N. Ridley, who was in my own division, where I had an excellent lunch, washed down by champagne. Ridley was a good-looking boy, with fair, curly hair and blue eyes, and his two sisters, who were exquisitely dressed on this occasion in light blue satin dresses with white lace, were considered remarkable beauties in London. They were quite young and very fair, like their brother, with the most lovely blue eyes of the shade of the myosotis. They might often be seen in the season riding in the Park, and were greatly admired by the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII., who invited them to Marlborough House. Unhappily, both these beautiful girls and their brother were consumptive, and I heard that they all three died of consumption not very long afterwards.

In those days, the Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s was a far more pleasant function than it has since become. Only people interested in Eton or Harrow were there, and a good view of the game could easily be obtained. Nowadays people go who do not know one school from the other, and the whole space is reserved for the M.C.C., so that if you do not happen to be a member, you cannot see the game at all. One constantly hears people say at Lord’s now:—

“I don’t know anything about cricket and care less, but I have come to see the ladies’ toilettes.”

In the old days this was not so. Lord’s has certainly not improved since.[14]

The boys at James’s used often to go into the pantry, where William, the butler, would give them a glass of claret, and water Mr. James’s wine well for him afterwards. Often the butler would exclaim: “Ha! spider up there!” and while we were looking for it, he watered the claret. It was in the butler’s pantry that I had the only fight I ever had at Eton, the day before I left for good. My opponent was the Hon., afterwards Lord, Henry Vane-Tempest, a son of the Marquis of Londonderry, who was a little lower down in the school than I was. I don’t think either of us really wanted to fight, but we were egged on by others whose respective parts we had taken in a quarrel, and after a very short “scrap,” which I got the best of, we shook hands and made friends. When I went down to Eton again, I met Vane-Tempest at my tutor’s, and he told me that he was then leaving to enter the “Blues.” He has since joined the majority, quite young in life.

Of the boys at James’s, I may mention that Sir John Lister-Kaye married Miss Yznaga, an American lady, one of two sisters celebrated for their beauty and toilettes in Paris, where I often met them in society. Sir John was a gentleman in attendance on the late King Edward VII. Lord Mandeville, who was in the Grenadier Guards, and afterwards became Duke of Manchester, married the other sister. Cecil Lister-Kaye married the sister of the Duke of Newcastle, who was himself at Eton. Cecil Lister-Kaye told me recently that his son was at Eton, and that he often went down to see him. He, no doubt, on these occasions, thinks with some regret of the happy days of his youth at James’s. I have come across some of those who were with me at Eton in quite unexpected places. For instance, I met the present Earl of Northbrook in Bombay. He was on his way to visit his uncle, then Viceroy of India, and had come to Bombay, he told me, to buy Arab horses. He was in the same division with me at Eton, and afterwards served in the Rifle Brigade and Grenadier Guards. Although I may have forgotten many of my schoolfellows at Eton, I can never forget those who were in my division. Among them was Henry de Vere Vane, then a very clever, fair-haired boy, whom I remember envying because he learned everything so quickly. He was the late Lord Barnard, and inherited the Cleveland estates on succeeding to this title. I had been told that in the hall of Raby Castle, his country-seat, a fire had been lighted two hundred years ago and had never been extinguished since. But Lord Barnard informed me that this is a legend, and sent me an account of a similar one:—

“_Fire kept in for two hundred years._

“One of the loneliest spots in England, where there are only four cottages in an area of thirty thousand acres, was described at Brampton (Cumberland) Revision Court. The Conservative agent, Mr. Mawson, said he had visited the farm, which was situated on a remote fell between Bewcastle and Haltwhistle, on the border of Northumberland. Members of the farmer’s family had lived in this particular cottage for six hundred years, and there was a tradition that the kitchen fire had never been out for two hundred years. The claimant slept in a bedroom eight feet square. There was a child there that had not seen another child for two years.”

[Illustration: The Duke of Rutland

[_To face p. 98._]

Another who was in my division was the Hon. V. A. Parnell, a good-looking boy, with black hair with a blueish reflection in it, and fine eyes. He was a good cricketer and clever in school. At times, when we were up to Mr. Thackeray, Parnell, as he reminded me recently, would, _faute de mieux à faire_, be engaged in shinning matches with a boy who sat next to him called Dobson. The latter was a very good-humoured fellow, who retaliated without losing his temper, though at times he could with difficulty refrain from betraying the pain which he endured so stoically with a smiling face.

The present Duke of Rutland, then Henry F. B. Manners, was at Eton with me, but higher up in the school, and if my memory does not deceive me, was in the Boats when in the Fifth Form.

The present Lord Newlands, then known as J. H. C. Hozier, was very high up in the school, and I can remember when he was in my tutor’s division, as the latter used to say how clever he was, and he frequently came to the pupil-room at James’s. Mr. James would often tell us about those who were up to him, but it was rarely that he bestowed praise on any boy.

When Doyne left Eton, I had his room, which commanded a view of the fine lime-trees, which in the summer looked very charming. On the wall hard by the boys used to stand or sit to criticize all the people who passed along the road running through Eton. This must have been a rather trying ordeal for some of the latter, for I remember that I used to find it a very trying experience when I happened to be late for chapel, particularly when I first came to Eton, to be obliged to run the gauntlet of a double row of boys, who never failed to pass remarks on everyone. The choir at Eton, which was the same as that of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, was a very good one, and one of the boys who sang in it, named Hancock, was paid, I was told, one hundred and fifty pounds a year. Hancock sang occasionally the solo part in Mendelssohn’s anthem, “O, for the wings of a dove,” in a marvellous manner, his high notes being wonderfully clear; but his voice lacked expression, and, as boys and girls generally regard certain things purely from an æsthetic point of view, the impression it made upon us was one rather of surprise than of admiration. Some of us used to go on Sundays to St. George’s, Windsor, and sit in the organ loft, where Dr. Elvey, who was a remarkably fine organist, played most beautifully.

After Dr. Hornby became Head Master, the custom of giving leaving books was abolished. Personally, I regretted this innovation, not because I did not receive any, but because I liked to make presents to my friends who were leaving Eton; and the expense was a small one, to which, I am sure, none of our parents objected.

Most of us look back upon our school days as the happiest part of our lives, for, to the schoolboy, the cares and anxieties which weigh upon us as we grow older are unknown, and, given good health, an Eton boy’s life ought to be _par excellence_ the very sum of earthly happiness. Lord Rathdonnell, late of the Scots Greys, who, when at Eton, as McClintock-Bunbury, stroked the Eight at Henley, and excelled at football and at most games, besides being very high up in the school and very popular, wrote to me some years ago, saying that the years he spent at Eton were by far the happiest of his life, and that he always looked back to them with intense pleasure. The Captain of the Boats at that time was Edwards-Moss, now a baronet. Horace Ricardo (now Colonel Ricardo, C.V.O.), whom I remember quite well, was then in the _Monarch_, and his brother Cecil rowed in the _Victory_ and was Captain of the Boats in 1871. After leaving Eton, both brothers entered the Grenadier Guards, and each of them commanded a battalion before retiring from the Service. I remember that Doyne, who was never high up in the school and for whom Latin and Greek were somewhat of a torture, telling me years afterwards that he looked back with regret to the happy days he had spent at Eton, which, all things considered, were perhaps the happiest of his life. Yet Doyne was not one of those who had any trouble in after life; on the contrary, he had everything which a man could possibly desire, besides enjoying good health. But the joyous, irresponsible days of school life were gone for ever, and, as he confessed to me, he would only too gladly have returned to them and lived them over again.

In regard to Eton at the present day, I heard not long ago from an old schoolfellow, the late Colonel Sir Josceline Bagot, a distinguished officer of the Guards and author, who had had a boy there, and who wrote as follows:—

“It all seems much the same, though, to my mind, not improved in some ways. They have got more room certainly, but, for such a big place as it has become, I think the traditional freedom of the boys is overdone altogether. Much too much importance is given to boys in ‘Pop,’ and allowing them and Captains of Houses to smack boys with canes for certain offences more or less officially is, to my mind, a great mistake, and starts the rotten system of many public schools of ‘monitors,’ ‘prefects,’ etc. No boys should have that power, and it is much worse for them to have it than for the boys who get smacked. It all comes from the masters thinking themselves too grand to swish boys as in the old days; and the Head Master smacks them on rare occasions with a stick, whereupon they put on two pairs of trousers, etc., and merely laugh at it and him, and they barely touch their hats at all to the masters. They all smoke now to a great extent, far more than we ever did, and, though the Head Master is wild about it, he is powerless to do anything sensible to stop it; and some of these rich Jew boys and foreigners have far too much money and spoil things. If I were Head Master, I wouldn’t have them at the school at all. I was next to Lyttelton in school for a year or so, and like him, but he has no respect and control at all for such a position. Still, if drawbacks have crept in, it is still the best school in the world.”

As time goes on, one hears everywhere, and always in a louder whisper, the serious, dangerous word, “decadence.” But let us allow the evil question whether our culture is really going to ground to rest, and rather attempt a very naïve example: Suppose a true son of classical Greece—Socrates, for instance—were conducted in a dream into the midst of our modern culture. He would look with amazement at the marvellous means of locomotion, the production of the factories, the luxurious comfort of private houses, the magnificence of our theatres and so forth; but the question whether we ought to be proud and happy he would answer in his usual way:—

“In my country I knew Pericles and heard the dramas of Sophocles. I knew Alcibiades and saw Phidias at work, and my pupil was Plato. Now show me your living masters.”

The next day Socrates would relate:—

“I dreamt this night I was in Persia. Everything is greater there than you can imagine. Immensely great are the treasures, the armies and navies, the towns and houses, the machinery employed. In short, everything is inconceivably great; only the people are very small....”