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The Days Before Yesterday

L >> Lord Frederic Hamilton >> The Days Before Yesterday




In the early "sixties" the barbarous practice of sending wretched
little "climbing boys" up chimneys to sweep them still prevailed.
In common with most other children of that day, I was perfectly
terrified when the chimney-sweep arrived with his attendant coal-
black imps, for the usual threat of foolish nurses to their
charges when they proved refractory was, "If you are not good I
shall give you to the sweep, and then you will have to climb up
the chimney." When the dust-sheets laid on the floors announced
the advent of the sweeps, I used, if possible, to hide until they
had left the house. I cannot understand how public opinion
tolerated for so long the abominable cruelty of forcing little
boys to clamber up flues. These unhappy brats were made to creep
into the chimneys from the grates, and then to wriggle their way
up by digging their toes into the interstices of the bricks, and
by working their elbows and knees alternately; stifled in the
pitch-darkness of the narrow flue by foul air, suffocated by the
showers of soot that fell on them, perhaps losing their way in the
black maze of chimneys, and liable at any moment, should they lose
their footing, to come crashing down twenty feet, either to be
killed outright in the dark or to lie with a broken limb until
they were extricated--should, indeed, it be possible to rescue
them at all. These unfortunate children, too, were certain to get
abrasions on their bare feet and on their elbows and knees from
the rough edges of the bricks. The soot working into these
abrasions gave them a peculiar form of sore. Think of the terrible
brutality to which a nervous child must have been subjected before
he could be induced to undertake so hateful a journey for the
first time. Should the boy hesitate to ascend, many of the master-
sweeps had no compunction in giving him what was termed a
"tickler"--that is, in lighting some straw in the grate below him.
The poor little urchin had perforce to scramble up his chimney
then, to avoid being roasted alive.

All honour to the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist,
who as Lord Ashley never rested in the House of Commons until he
got a measure placed on the Statute Book making the employment of
climbing-boys illegal.

It will be remembered that little Tom, the hero of Charles
Kingsley's delightful Water-Babies, was a climbing-sweep. In spite
of all my care, I occasionally met some of these little fellows in
the passages, inky-black with soot from the soles of their bare
feet to the crowns of their heads, except for the whites of their
eyes. They could not have been above eight or nine years old. I
looked on them as awful warnings, for of course they would not
have occupied their present position had they not been little boys
who had habitually disobeyed the orders of their nurses.

Even the wretched little climbing-boys had their gala-day on the
1st of May, when they had a holiday and a feast under the terms of
Mrs. Montagu's will.

The story of Mrs. Montagu is well known. The large house standing
in a garden at the corner of Portman Square and Gloucester Place,
now owned by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu by James
Wyatt at the end of the eighteenth century, and the adjoining
Montagu Street and Montagu Square derive their names from her.
Somehow Mrs. Montagu's only son got kidnapped, and all attempts to
recover the child failed. Time went on, and he was regarded as
dead. On a certain 1st of May the sweeps arrived to clean Mrs.
Montagu's chimneys, and a climbing-boy was sent up to his horrible
task. Like Tom in the Water-Babies, he lost his way in the network
of flues and emerged in a different room to the one he had started
from. Something in the aspect of the room struck a half-familiar,
half-forgotten chord in his brain. He turned the handle of the
door of the next room and found a lady seated there. Then he
remembered. Filthy and soot-stained as he was, the little sweep
flung himself into the arms of the beautiful lady with a cry of
"Mother!" Mrs. Montagu had found her lost son.

In gratitude for the recovery of her son, Mrs. Montagu entertained
every climbing-boy in London at dinner on the anniversary of her
son's return, and arranged that they should all have a holiday on
that day. At her death she left a legacy to continue the treat.

Such, at least, is the story as I have always heard it.

At the Sweeps' Carnival, there was always a grown-up man figuring
as "Jack-in-the-green." Encased in an immense frame of wicker-work
covered with laurels and artificial flowers, from the midst of
which his face and arms protruded with a comical effect, "Jack-in-
the-green" capered slowly about in the midst of the street,
surrounded by some twenty little climbing-boys, who danced
joyously round him with black faces, their soot-stained clothes
decorated with tags of bright ribbon, and making a deafening
clamour with their dustpans and brushes as they sang some popular
ditty. They then collected money from the passers-by, making
usually quite a good haul. There were dozens of these "Jacks-in-
the-green" to be seen then on Mayday in the London streets, each
one with his attendant band of little black familiars. I summoned
up enough courage once to ask a small inky-black urchin whether he
had disobeyed his nurse very often in order to be condemned to
sweep chimneys. He gaped at me uncomprehendingly, with a grin; but
being a cheerful little soul, assured me that, on the whole, he
rather enjoyed climbing up chimneys.

It was my father and mother's custom in London to receive any of
their friends at luncheon without a formal invitation, and a
constant procession of people availed themselves of this
privilege. At six years of age I was promoted to lunch in the
dining-room with my parents, and I always kept my ears open. I had
then one brother in the House of Commons, and we being a
politically inclined family, most of the notabilities of the Tory
party put in occasional appearances at Chesterfield House at
luncheon-time. There was Mr. Disraeli, for whom my father had an
immense admiration, although he had not yet occupied the post of
Prime Minister. Mr. Disraeli's curiously impassive face, with its
entire absence of colouring, rather frightened me. It looked like
a mask. He had, too, a most singular voice, with a very impressive
style of utterance. After 1868, by which time my three elder
brothers were all in the House of Commons, and Disraeli himself
was Prime Minister, he was a more frequent visitor at our house.

In 1865 my uncle, Lord John Russell, my mother's brother, was
Prime Minister. My uncle, who had been born as far back as 1792,
was a very tiny man, who always wore one of the old-fashioned,
high black-satin stocks right up to his chin. I liked him, for he
was always full of fun and small jokes, but in that rigorously
Tory household he was looked on with scant favour. It was his
second term of office as Prime Minister, for he had been First
Lord of the Treasury from 1846 to 1852; he had also sat in the
House of Commons for forty-seven years. My father was rather
inclined to ridicule his brother-in-law's small stature, and
absolutely detested his political opinions, declaring that he
united all the ineradicable faults of the Whigs in his diminutive
person. Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his
elders, I derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs
and their traditional policy. I gathered that, with their tongues
in their cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not
themselves believe, should they think that by so doing they would
be able to enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in
office: that, in order to extricate themselves from some present
difficulty, they were always prepared to mortgage the future
recklessly, quite regardless of the ultimate consequences: that
whilst professing the most liberal principles, they were absurdly
exclusive in their private lives, not consorting with all and
sundry as we poor Tories did: that convictions mattered less than
office: that in fact nothing much mattered, provided that the
government of the country remained permanently in the hands of a
little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit
under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some
member of those favoured families. In proof of the latter
statement, I learnt that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as
Prime Minister, had been to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-
at-Arms of the House of Commons, and to offer to another of his
brothers, the Rev. Lord Wriothesley Russell, the vacant Bishopric
of Oxford. Much to the credit of my clergyman-uncle, he declined
the Bishopric, saying that he had neither the eloquence nor the
administrative ability necessary for so high an office in the
Church, and that he preferred to remain a plain country parson in
his little parish, of which, at the time of his death, he had been
Rector for fifty-six years. All of which only goes to show what
absurdly erroneous ideas a child, anxious to learn, may pick up
from listening to the conversation of his elders, even when one of
those elders happened to be Mr. Disraeli himself.

Another ex-Prime Minister who was often at our house was the
fourth Earl of Aberdeen, who had held office many times, and had
been Prime Minister during the Crimean War. He must have been a
very old man then, for he was born in 1784. I have no very
distinct recollection of him. Oddly enough, Lord Aberdeen was both
my great-uncle and my step-grandfather, for his first wife had
been my grandfather's sister, and after her death, he married my
grandfather's widow, his two wives thus being sisters-in-law.
Judging by their portraits by Lawrence, which hung round our
dining-room, my great-grandfather, old Lord Abercorn's sons and
daughters must have been of singular and quite unusual personal
beauty. Not one of the five attained the age of twenty-nine, all
of them succumbing early to consumption. Lord Aberdeen had a most
unfortunate skin and complexion, and in addition he was deeply
pitted with small-pox. As a result his face looked exactly like a
slice of brown bread, and "Old Brown Bread" he was always called
by my elder brothers and sisters, who had but little love for him,
for he disliked young people, and always made the most
disagreeable remarks he could think of to them. I remember once
being taken to see him at Argyll House, Regent Street, on the site
of which the "Palladium" now stands. I recollect perfectly the
ugly, gloomy house, and its uglier and gloomier garden, but I have
no remembrance of "Old Brown Bread" himself, or of what he said to
me, which, considering his notorious dislike to children, is
perhaps quite as well.

Of a very different type was another constant and always welcome
visitor to our house, Sir Edwin Landseer, the painter. He was one
of my father and mother's oldest friends, and had been an equally
close friend of my grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.
He had painted three portraits of my father, and five of my
mother. Two of the latter had been engraved, and, under the titles
of "Cottage Industry" and "The Mask," had a very large sale in
mid-Victorian days. His large picture of my two eldest sisters,
which hung over our dining-room chimney-piece, had also been
engraved, and was a great favourite, under the title of "The
Abercorn Children." Landseer was a most delightful person, and the
best company that can be imagined. My father and mother were quite
devoted to him, and both of them always addressed him as "Lanny."
My mother going to call on him at his St. John's Wood house, found
"Lanny" in the garden, working from a ladder on a gigantic mass of
clay. Turning the corner, she was somewhat alarmed at finding a
full-grown lion stretched out on the lawn. Landseer had been
commissioned by the Government to model the four lions for the
base of Nelson's pillar in Trafalgar Square. He had made some
studies in the Zoological Gardens, but as he always preferred
working from the live model, he arranged that an elderly and
peculiarly docile lion should be brought to his house from the Zoo
in a furniture van attended by two keepers. Should any one wish to
know what that particular lion looked like, they have only to
glance at the base of the Nelson pillar. On paying an afternoon
call, it is so unusual to find a live lion included amongst the
guests, that my mother's perturbation at finding herself in such
close proximity to a huge loose carnivore is, perhaps, pardonable.
Landseer is, of course, no longer in fashion as a painter. I quite
own that at times his colour is unpleasing, owing to the bluish
tint overlaying it; but surely no one will question his
draughtsmanship? And has there ever been a finer animal-painter?
Perhaps he was really a black-and-white man. My family possess
some three hundred drawings of his: some in pen and ink, some in
wash, some in pencil. I personally prefer his very delicate pencil
work, over which he sometimes threw a light wash of colour. No
one, seeing some of his pen and ink work, can deny that he was a
master of line. A dozen scratches, and the whole picture is there!
There is a charming little Landseer portrait of my mother with my
eldest sister, in Room III of the Tate Gallery. Landseer preferred
painting on panel, and he never would allow his pictures to be
varnished. His wishes have been obeyed in that respect; none of
the Landseers my family possess have ever been varnished.

He was certainly an unconventional guest in a country house. My
father had rented a deer-forest on a long lease from Cluny
Macpherson, and had built a large house there, on Loch Laggan. As
that was before the days of railways, the interior of the house at
Ardverikie was necessarily very plain, and the rooms were merely
whitewashed. Landseer complained that the glare of the whitewash
in the dining-room hurt his eyes, and without saying a word to any
one, he one day produced his colours, mounted a pair of steps, and
proceeded to rough-in a design in charcoal on the white walls. He
worked away until he had completely covered the walls with
frescoes in colour. The originals of some of his best-known
engravings, "The Sanctuary," "The Challenge," "The Monarch of the
Glen," made their first appearance on the walls of the dining-room
at Ardverikie. The house was unfortunately destroyed by fire some
years later, and Landseer's frescoes perished with it.

At another time, my father leased for two years a large house in
the Midlands. The dining-hall of this house was hung with
hideously wooden full-length portraits of the family owning it.
Landseer declared that these monstrous pictures took away his
appetite, so without any permission he one day mounted a ladder,
put in high-lights with white chalk over the oils, made the dull
eyes sparkle, and gave some semblance of life to these forlorn
effigies. Pleased with his success, he then brightened up the
flesh tints with red chalk, and put some drawing into the faces.
To complete his work, he rubbed blacks into the backgrounds with
charcoal. The result was so excellent that we let it remain. At
the conclusion of my father's tenancy, the family to whom the
place belonged were perfectly furious at the disrespect with which
their cherished portraits had been treated, for it was a
traditional article of faith with them that they were priceless
works of art.

Towards the end of his life Landseer became hopelessly insane and,
during his periods of violence a dangerous homicidal maniac. Such
an affection, however, had my father and mother for the friend of
their younger days, that they still had him to stay with us in
Kent for long periods. He had necessarily to bring a large retinue
with him: his own trained mental attendant; Dr. Tuke, a very
celebrated alienist in his day; and, above all, Mrs. Pritchard.
The case of Mrs. Pritchard is such an instance of devoted
friendship as to be worth recording. She was an elderly widow of
small means, Landseer's neighbour in St. John's Wood; a little
dried-up, shrivelled old woman. The two became firm allies, and
when Landseer's reason became hopelessly deranged, Mrs. Pritchard
devoted her whole life to looking after her afflicted friend. In
spite of her scanty means, she refused to accept any salary, and
Landseer was like wax in her hands. In his most violent moods when
the keeper and Dr. Tuke both failed to quiet him, Mrs. Pritchard
had only to hold up her finger and he became calm at once. Either
his clouded reason or some remnant of his old sense of fun led him
to talk of Mrs. Pritchard as his "pocket Venus." To people staying
with us (who, I think, were a little alarmed at finding themselves
in the company of a lunatic, however closely watched he might be),
he would say, "In two minutes you will see the loveliest of her
sex. A little dainty creature, perfect in feature, perfect in
shape, who might have stepped bodily out of the frame of a Greuze.
A perfect dream of loveliness." They were considerably astonished
when a little wizened woman, with a face like a withered apple,
entered the room. He was fond, too, of descanting on Mrs.
Pritchard's wonderfully virtuous temperament, notwithstanding her
amazing charms. Visitors probably reflected that, given her
appearance, the path of duty must have been rendered very easy to
her.

Landseer painted his last Academy picture, "The Baptismal Font,"
whilst staying with us. It is a perfectly meaningless composition,
representing a number of sheep huddled round a font, for whatever
allegorical significance he originally meant to give it eluded the
poor clouded brain. As he always painted from the live model, he
sent down to the Home Farm for two sheep, which he wanted driven
upstairs into his bedroom, to the furious indignation of the
housekeeper, who declared, with a certain amount of reason, that
it was impossible to keep a house well if live sheep were to be
allowed in the best bedrooms. So Landseer, his easel and colours
and his sheep were all transferred to the garden.

On another occasion there was some talk about a savage bull.
Landseer, muttering, "Bulls! bulls! bulls!" snatched up an album
of my sister's, and finding a blank page in it, made an exquisite
little drawing of a charging bull. The disordered brain repeating
"Bulls! bulls! bulls!" he then drew a bulldog, a pair of
bullfinches surrounded by bulrushes, and a hooked bull trout
fighting furiously for freedom. That page has been cut out and
framed for fifty years.





CHAPTER II


The "swells" of the "sixties"--Old Lord Claud Hamilton--My first
presentation to Queen Victoria--Scandalous behaviour of a brother--
Queen Victoria's letters--Her character and strong common sense--
My mother's recollections of George III. and George IV.--Carlton
House, and the Brighton Pavilion--Queen Alexandra--The Fairchild
Family--Dr. Cumming and his church--A clerical Jazz--First visit
to Paris--General de Flahault's account of Napoleon's campaign of
1812--Another curious link with the past--"Something French"--
Attraction of Paris--Cinderella's glass slipper--A glimpse of
Napoleon III.--The Rue de Rivoli The Riviera in 1865--A novel
Tricolor flag--Jenny Lind--The championship of the Mediterranean--
My father's boat and crew--The race--The Abercorn wins the
championship.

Every one familiar with John Leech's Pictures from Punch must
have an excellent idea of the outward appearance of "swells" of
the "sixties."

As a child I had an immense admiration for these gorgeous beings,
though, between ourselves, they must have been abominably loud
dressers. They affected rather vulgar sealskin waistcoats, with
the festoons of a long watch-chain meandering over them, above
which they exhibited a huge expanse of black or blue satin,
secured by two scarf-pins of the same design, linked together,
like Siamese twins, by a little chain.

A reference to Leech's drawings will show the flamboyant checked
"pegtop" trousers in which they delighted. Their principal
adornment lay in their immense "Dundreary" whiskers, usually at
least eight inches long. In a high wind these immensely long
whiskers blew back over their owners' shoulders in the most
comical fashion, and they must have been horribly inconvenient. I
determined early in life to affect, when grown-up, longer whiskers
than any one else--if possible down to my waist; but alas for
human aspirations! By the time that I had emerged from my
chrysalis stage, Dundreary whiskers had ceased to be the fashion;
added to which unkind Nature had given me a hairless face.

My uncle, old Lord Claud Hamilton, known in our family as "The
Dowager," adhered, to the day of his death, to the William IV.
style of dress. He wore an old-fashioned black-satin stock right
up to his chin, with white "gills" above, and was invariably seen
in a blue coat with brass buttons, and a buff waistcoat. My uncle
was one of the handsomest men in England, and had sat for nearly
forty years in Parliament. He had one curious faculty. He could
talk fluently and well on almost any topic at indefinite length, a
very useful gift in the House of Commons of those days. On one
occasion when it was necessary "to talk a Bill out," he got up
without any preparation whatever, and addressed the House in
flowing periods for four hours and twenty minutes. His speech held
the record for length for many years, but it was completely
eclipsed in the early "eighties" by the late Mr. Biggar, who spoke
(if my memory serves me right) for nearly six hours on one
occasion. Biggar, however, merely read interminable extracts from
Blue Books, whereas my uncle indulged in four hours of genuine
rhetorical declamation. My uncle derived his nickname from the
fact that in our family the second son is invariably christened
Claud, so I had already a brother of that name. There happen to be
three Lord Claud Hamiltons living now, of three successive
generations.

I shall never forget my bitter disappointment the first time I was
taken, at a very early age, to see Queen Victoria. I had pictured
to myself a dazzling apparition arrayed in sumptuous robes, seated
on a golden throne; a glittering crown on her head, a sceptre in
one hand, an orb grasped in the other. I had fancied Her Majesty
seated thus, motionless during the greater part of the twenty-four
hours, simply "reigning." I could have cried with disappointment
when a middle-aged lady, simply dressed in widow's "weeds" and
wearing a widow's cap, rose from an ordinary arm-chair to receive
us. I duly made my bow, but having a sort of idea that it had to
be indefinitely repeated, went on nodding like a porcelain Chinese
mandarin, until ordered to stop.

Between ourselves, I behaved far better than a brother of mine
once did under similar circumstances. Many years before I was
born, my father lent his Scotch house to Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort for ten days. This entailed my two eldest sisters
and two eldest brothers vacating their nurseries in favour of the
Royal children, and their being transferred to the farm, where
they had very cramped quarters indeed. My second brother deeply
resented being turned out of his comfortable nursery, and refused
to be placated. On the day after the Queen's arrival, my mother
took her four eldest children to present them to Her Majesty, my
sisters dressed in their best clothes, my brothers being in kilts.
They were duly instructed as to how they were to behave, and upon
being presented, my two sisters made their curtsies, and my eldest
brother made his best bow. "And this, your Majesty, is my second
boy. Make your bow, dear," said my mother; but my brother, his
heart still hot within him at being expelled from his nursery,
instead of bowing, STOOD ON HIS HEAD IN HIS KILT, and remained
like that, an accomplishment of which he was very proud. The Queen
was exceedingly angry, so later in the day, upon my brother
professing deep penitence, he was taken back to make his
apologies, when he did precisely the same thing over again, and
was consequently in disgrace during the whole of the Royal visit.
In strict confidence, I believe that he would still do it to-day,
more than seventy-two years later.

During her stay in my father's house the Queen quite unexpectedly
announced that she meant to give a dance. This put my mother in a
great difficulty, for my sisters had no proper clothes for a ball,
and in those pre-railway days it would have taken at least ten
days to get anything from Edinburgh or Glasgow. My mother had a
sudden inspiration. The muslin curtains in the drawing-room! The
drawing-room curtains were at once commandeered; the ladies'-
maids set to work with a will, and I believe that my sisters
looked extremely well dressed in the curtains, looped up with
bunches of rowan or mountain-ash berries.

My mother was honoured with Queen Victoria's close friendship and
confidence for over fifty years. At the time of her death she had
in her possession a numerous collection of letters from the Queen,
many of them very long ones. By the express terms of my mother's
will, those letters will never be published. Many of them touch on
exceedingly private matters relating to the Royal family, others
refer to various political problems of the day. I have read all
those letters carefully, and I fully endorse my mother's views.
She was honoured with the confidence of her Sovereign, and that
confidence cannot be betrayed. The letters are in safe custody,
and there they will remain. On reading them it is impossible not
to be struck with Queen Victoria's amazing shrewdness, and with
her unfailing common sense. It so happens that both a brother and
a sister of mine, the late Duchess of Buccleuch, were brought into
very close contact with Queen Victoria. It was this quality of
strong common sense in the Queen which continually impressed them,
as well as her very high standard of duty.

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