The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Beresford. Beresford Charles William De la Poer Beresford

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СКАЧАТЬ with me in a cab towards Plymouth, when we met an old warrant officer, who was wearing a purple woollen waistcoat and green gloves. My friend, stopping the cab so suddenly that the horse slithered along on its haunches, leaped from the vehicle. The old warrant officer, his attention arrested, had halted and turned round. My friend went up to him. Then I perceived that he was stricken speechless with wrath; for, continuing to swallow nothing, as his habit was in these crises of emotion, he tapped the warrant officer's waistcoat and gloves. Glaring at him and still silently swallowing, he turned about and got into the cab. The old warrant officer stood staring with dropped jaw, like a man petrified.

      It was my friend who, being asked at a court-martial what he would have done in certain difficult circumstances, replied deliberately:

      "If I was where I was not I might have done something I did not do."

      In after years, when he was commander-in-chief at the Nore, he was walking along the road to Sheerness, dressed in plain clothes, when a bluejacket, who was slightly intoxicated, lurched against him.

      "Man, man," said my friend, with his picked elocution, "do you know what you are doing? Man, you are colliding with the commander-in-chief."

      "Ho," returned the seaman, totally unimpressed. "Har you, indeed? Then all I've got to say, is to say you've got a ruddy good billet – an' wha's more, you take care you don't lose it by getting drunk."

      Despite of my diversions, I did a good deal of hard work. As flag-lieutenant I was in charge of the signalling, a science which, as it was understood in those days, I mastered completely.

      My first independent command was the Goshawk gunboat, to which I was appointed as lieutenant-commander for the manoeuvres and for review in 1873, while I was still flag-lieutenant to Sir Harry Keppel. I had a narrow escape from disaster at the very beginning. Fortunately I noticed that the navigator was going the wrong side of the buoy off Drake's Island, and I was just in time to point out his mistake. I remember my feeling of horror at the prospect of running on a rock in Plymouth Sound in my first command.

      The first thing I did in the Goshawk was to get from the flagship a big working party of a hundred men to work at holystoning our decks until they were as clean as a hound's tooth. From that day onwards I set myself steadily against bright-work and spit-and-polish. My objection to bright-work is that you have first to dirty it with brick and oil in order to clean it afterwards. There are certain things in a ship which must be kept bright, and these I would burnish; but everything that could be painted I would paint, and then scrub the paint with soap and water. I remember the shock it was to the commander when I told him to cover the brass rails with canvas and paint it. Under the spit-and-polish system no doubt the men take a pride in keeping the ship bright, but such a process involves perpetual extra bother and worry and black-list, which are quite unnecessary. Cleaning bright-work makes the men's hands filthy at divisions; and after ten minutes of bad weather, the copper turns blue and the brass green, and the whole of the work must be done over again.

      At one time the bright-work system was carried to absurd extremes. I have known a ship actually to have a bright cable. I have known another ship with bright hammock hooks. The hatchways of some vessels were polished and decorated with inlay and all kinds of ocean ornament until the ship looked like a lady's boudoir or a transatlantic liner. The custom came in as the old sailing ships gave place to steam ships, when the time hitherto devoted to making a vessel all a-taunto, ropes taut, sail furling and mending and so forth, was given instead to polishing, burnishing and making bright-work shine, until the present system of gunnery and gymnastic training was introduced. Captains and officers used to spend on their ships large sums out of their private income, which very often they could ill afford. "Promotion by paint" was not unknown. A ship ought to be scrupulously clean, but she should have paint wherever possible, and soap and water should replace spit-and-polish.

      CHAPTER XIV

      POLITICAL EVENTS OF 1873-80 AND POSTSCRIPT

NOTE

      The following brief summary of political and international affairs is introduced for convenience of reference. It may be skipped by the reader, should he disdain politics.

      The Government of Mr. Gladstone, returned to power in 1868, began to disintegrate in 1873. The proximate cause was the Irish University Education Bill, announced in the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the session on 6th February, 1873. Irish affairs have always been the curse of the Liberal Party. But a popular Government would have survived even the Irish University Education Bill, which, designed to please all parties, failed of course to please any. The truth is that, as people soon or late weary of all administrations, so they turned from the Liberal Government. Mr. Disraeli summarised the history of the Government in a piece of invective which has become classic: "You have had four years of it. You have despoiled churches. You have threatened every corporation and every endowment in the country. You have examined into everybody's affairs. You have criticised every profession and vexed every trade. No one is certain of his property, and no one knows what duties he may have to perform to-morrow. I believe that the people of this country have had enough of the policy of confiscation."

      The Government were beaten on the Irish University Education Bill; Mr. Gladstone resigned; but Mr. Disraeli declined to take office. Mr. Gladstone was therefore compelled to carry on the Government. Early in 1874 he suddenly appealed to the electorate; which, however, chose to give his opponents a majority. Mr. Gladstone resigned, or partly resigned, his leadership, and plunged into the esoteric joys of a controversy dealing with the doctrine of Papal infallibility. It would seem that a great ecclesiastic was sacrificed, when the young Gladstone chose to give to politics talents which would have won him the Archbishopric of Canterbury.

      In Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet Lord Cairns was Lord Chancellor; Lord Derby, Foreign Secretary; Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India; Lord Carnarvon, Colonial Secretary; Mr. Cross, Home Secretary; Mr. Gathorne Hardy, Secretary of State for War; Mr. Ward Hunt, First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir Stafford Northcote, Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Duke of Richmond, as Lord President of the Council, led the Conservative party in the House of Lords. The Liberal leader, walking in the Gladstonian shadow, was Lord Hartington.

      In 1874 the Bill for the Regulation of Public Worship was passed. In the following year Mr. Plimsoll, by the exercise of that dogged determination and gallant defiance of Parliamentary conventions, by means of which Parliament can sometimes be goaded into acts of justice, forced the Government to pass the Merchant Shipping Bill. Mr. Cross, the Home Secretary, introduced the useful Artisans' Dwellings Bill, which was passed. Upon 25th November, 1875, the Government, at the suggestion of Mr. Frederic Greenwood, purchased from the Khedive of Egypt, 176,000 Suez Canal shares for the sum of £4,000,000.

      In the same year, the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII, went to India, whither he was accompanied by Commander Lord Charles Beresford, M.P., as A.D.C. (Lord Charles was promoted to the rank of commander on 2nd November, 1875.) The Prince received a telegram informing him of the purchase of the Suez Canal shares when his ship was passing through the Canal on the way to India. Lord Lytton was appointed Viceroy of India. In 1876 it was announced that the Queen was to assume the additional title of "Empress of India."

      In July, 1875, there was trouble in the Near East, which, nearly two years later, in April, 1877, resulted in the declaration by Russia of war against Turkey. The Mediterranean Fleet was ordered to pass the Dardanelles. In March, 1878, Lord Derby resigned, and Lord Salisbury succeeded him at the Foreign Office. Mr. Gathorne Hardy went to the India Office, Colonel Stanley to the War Office, and Mr. James Lowther became Chief Secretary for Ireland. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach had already succeeded Lord Carnarvon at the Colonial Office.

      In the Parliament of 1875-80, young Mr. Parnell began his career. Indomitable, subtle, cold and inscrutable, he speedily became a power. A Protestant in faith, he had his foot on the necks of the Irish Roman Catholic Nationalist members; half an Englishman by birth, СКАЧАТЬ