| Potential Prime Minister—Breeder of Derby winners—Churchill and Lord Derby—Racing and hunting—Irish sport—“Ladies of title would jump on ye.” |
These commanders in France were confronted with something quite new in warfare, as for instance when direct hits were scored on the city of Paris by a gun fired at a range of twenty-five miles. What would Napoleon Bonaparte have made of that? All that can be said here is that, of the two men, Haig inspired the greater confidence among the troops in South Africa.
And this brings us to the consideration of another celebrity in Lord Derby, a man who was in the running for the prime ministership of England. Born in the purple, an inheritor of coal-mines, town houses, country seats, and one of the most successful studs in England, he was the typical John Bull, solid, serene, and gifted with the clear common sense of the unimaginative man. He might never have made such a prime minister as Lloyd George, for Lord Derby’s outlook on life was that of the golf professional—there was only one right way to play each shot. I worked under his orders when he was chief press censor for Lord Roberts in South Africa; and though he knew nothing about the Press when he began his job, nor about censoring either for the matter of that, he soon made a success of it. Any correspondent could wake him up at any hour of the night and get a message censored; and he worked on such methodical lines that we soon found out what could go and what could not. He was like Jim Bludso in the wreck of the Prairie Belle, “he seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, and he went for it there and then.”
I once woke him up at three o’clock in the morning, to get a message censored, and he read it by the light of a lanthorn while lying in bed. He passed it back, approved, with the remark, “Churchill will curse. He thinks he’s the only correspondent that got through with this news.”
Lord Derby was about the only man among the great ones who had no fear whatever of Churchill. He wasn’t afraid of this big bad wolf, for the press-censorship job meant nothing in his young life, and he would not have cared if Churchill had tried to write him out of it, nor do I think that he worried much about the prime ministership. Why should he? He was Lord Derby, and any attacks on him by Churchill or by similar small destroyers would be like trying to take Gibraltar with a rowing-boat.
A little affair that occurred over a press message may throw some light on the man who might have been prime minister. Through the influence of Gwynne, then head serang of Reuter’s correspondents and later on editor of the Morning Post, I had been appointed an extra man for Reuter’s to report especially on the doings of Australians and New Zealanders. Dropping accidentally on a small fight, I sent away a report of it and began to think myself a sort of second Archibald Forbes. The next thing was a message that Lord Derby—or Lord Stanley as he then was—wanted to see me.
“Look here,” he said, “I gave Gwynne an extra man to look after these Australians and New Zealanders because nobody else knows anything about them. Now the other correspondents complain that you have been sending messages that don’t concern the Australians and New Zealanders at all. I don’t know whether I oughtn’t to send you home.”
Here was grief with a capital G, for these potentates are not good at listening to explanations; but Gwynne had never told me that I was to ignore everybody but Australians and New Zealanders. I thought that I was free as air to deal with the others.
Having listened to this explanation Lord Stanley said: “Well, I’ll have it out with Gwynne, then. My orders to him were clear enough. He should have told you. I’ve no doubt he can explain it somehow, but don’t let it occur again.”
The affair had a queer aftermath: for when Kimberley was relieved there were five thousand English troops in the affair and only about four hundred Australians and New Zealanders.
We could get nothing away from Kimberley, except a few words by helio, so I rode down to the Modder River and sent a thousand words from there. This got to England straight away, and appeared in The Times, and scores of other publications, and was cabled back to South African papers.
When these appeared there was hot time in the old town, for I had represented that Kimberley was relieved entirely by Australians and New Zealanders. I had said hardly a word about the other troops! Exasperated generals were rushing about waving these papers and asking who could have been fool enough to send such a message, and who could have been fool enough to pass it. My message had gone through the local censor at Modder River, so Stanley was not responsible, and instead of giving complicated explanations to anybody he imitated Brother Terrapin—he sat tight and said nothing. Anyhow, the Australians and the New Zealanders got a fine advertisement out of it.
I saw Lord Derby once in England when he was more concerned about breeding Derby winners than about politics, racing and hunting. Racing and hunting. Empires come and empires go, but these go on for ever.
Thomas Carlyle would no doubt have called Lord Derby a dilettante and a do-nothing aristocrat; but if he had known him he would have said that he was a man who stood four-square in a world peopled largely by weathercocks.
Another celebrity in his own line, and a very important line it is in England, was Edward Kennedy of Straffan Stud, Ireland; racing man, hunting man, and breeder of that great racehorse The Tetrarch. It is said that after the Napoleonic wars a Frenchman was found who had never heard of Napoleon, but it would have been hard to find an Englishman who had never heard of “Cub” Kennedy.
While waiting a chance to get to the war, I crossed over to Ireland on a visit to Edward Kennedy’s stud near Dublin. Landing in Dublin I was driven across the town by an Irish car driver. I asked him how things were.
“The only people,” he said, “that are makin’ any money in Ireland is Guinness’s brewery an’ the horse-dealers.”
I could understand Guinness’s brewery, but I was puzzled about the horse-dealers, so I asked him how the horse-dealers managed it.
“They buy the cast horses,” he said, “that the army officers has bought and rejected whin they found they was unsound. So these dealers buy these cast horses and they give them a rest till they get over their lameness; thin they hearten thim up a bit and they sell thim back to the army for three times what they gave for thim. There’s min here has sold the same horse to the army so often it’s a wonder the horse wouldn’t shake hands with the officers whin he goes in to the sale.”
I asked him if he knew Mr Kennedy the big breeder.
“Sure I do,” he said. “He’s one of the quality and yet he’ll go into the sale yards an’ buy an’ sell cattle an’ horses till he has the dealers terrified of him. What that same gentleman don’t know about a horse wouldn’t be worth knowin’. He bought a blind mare for eight pounds an’ the man that sold it thought he was takin’ the money off Kennedy, like takin’ it off a child. An’ Kennedy bred one of the best horses Ireland ever saw from that same mare!”
When I paid the driver off, I must have treated him rather well, for after looking at the money, he asked me where I came from. I said that I came from Australia.
“Well,” he said, “I could tell by yer talk ye wasn’t anny sort of bloody Saxon annyhow.”
December 16th 1914—At Straffan Station Stud, Ireland. I am very anxious to know how these English and Irish can breed such good horses. Certainly they have had any amount of practice at it, for they started breeding in the days of King John who was a large importer of Eastern-bred horses. The War of the Roses scattered these studs. But Henry VIII in the intervals of getting married reimported a lot of the blood and raced and bred in competition with Cardinal Wolsey: which perhaps accounted for the strained relations that arose between them.
Elizabeth raced. She had at least five training establishments including stables at Greenwich, Hampden Court, Richmond, Windsor, St Albans, Waltham, and other places. No doubt she stirred her trainers up. When Raleigh put down his over-coat to keep her feet dry, she was probably inspecting a training stable.
After three hundred years of breeding in the United States the sons of Uncle Sam had to come to England and offer over forty thousand guineas for Solario a year or so back in order to get a really good horse; and even then they did not get him.
Kennedy’s paddocks are covered in green grass, long and perhaps a trifle washy, but wonderful grass for the depth of winter. The boundaries are rough-looking hedges; a hungry cow or a long-wooled sheep (hungry or otherwise) would go through them almost anywhere. There is nothing visible to the naked eye that would explain why these pastures produce such horses. Kennedy himself, is sturdy, square, stiff-built and full of energy. I don’t think he has ever read a book on breeding in his life. It is just an instinct with him. He would have made a good cavalry officer; for in type he resembles “Hell-fire Jack” Royston whom our readers have already met, a sort of embodiment of perpetual motion.
The place is full of trouble, with armed police at every hedge corner; but nobody has tried to interfere with Kennedy’s horses. Of an old Irish family himself, he understands the Irish and they understand him. He talks to them in a way they wouldn’t tolerate from a Saxon. After hearing a dialogue between Kennedy and one of his men, one wonders that the relationship of master and servant can exist for a day longer; but it has been going on for ten years.
Walking round the paddocks we see a load of gravel deposited in the fairway, so to speak; whereupon Kennedy, who in forcibility of gesture and emphasis has few equals and no superiors, opens up the discussion. His head groom’s son is the person in fault but head grooms mean nothing to Kennedy. He eats ’em alive. “Kelly,” he roars, “what does your son mean by leaving that gravel there? I told him to leave it on the drive!”
“He had to go draw hay, your honour, so he lift it be the gate.”
“Left it at the gate. What does he mean by leaving it at the gate? If he doesn’t want to do what I tell him he can pack up and out of this, and you with him.”
“Yes, your honour.”
The next thing is a patient ass, picturesquely tied up with odds and ends of rope, grazing on a lawn. To me he looks quite a symbol of felicity; but to Kennedy—no.
“Heavens above,” he says, “look at this will you! These damned people they did what they liked in Clonmel’s time. Mrs Mulhane, Mrs Mulhane! It’s an ass is it you’ll tie up here, so as visitors can see what sort of a place we run. It’s a wonder you wouldn’t tie up a pig. Out of here with him, and out of here yourself if I ever catch sight of him again——”
“Sure he must have strayed yer honour, and got his rope cot in the fince some way.”
“Yes, I suppose so; and took two half-hitches round a post. Must have been in a circus. Take him into your own yard and see can he tie himself up. But if I see him here again——!”
A land of trouble, and yet would anyone wish to live anywhere else if he could live here? The huge old stone house has a wide entrance hall and a double stairway of polished oak leading up on either side of the hall to the floors above. One can picture the old-time Irish beauties standing half-way up that staircase, and exchanging Leveresque witticisms with the gallants below. Are we too sophisticated or too stupid for that sort of thing nowadays? Around the house there are lawns, carriage drives, and gardens sleeping in the soft Irish sunlight. Lord Clonmel, the last owner said that it cost him £800 a year in wages alone to keep the place up empty. The main stud stables cost £10,000; and there are also houses for employees, outlying boxes for stallions and foaling-boxes for mares. From the front of the house we can see over the paddocks dotted with young thoroughbreds each a potential Derby winner. Here was bred the great Tetrarch, possibly the fastest horse that ever lived; and the excitement of the game is waiting for another.
December 17th—We went through the paddocks and saw the horses. Old Roi Herode, a great vast grey horse, looked as coarse as a stockhorse except for his delicate ears. The other stallion, Symington, is a wicked old villain and not even Kennedy dared go into his yard with him. His boy coaxed him into his box with a tin of oats and we admired him in safety from the door of the box. The Tetrarch’s full sister, a beautifully balanced chestnut filly, walked like a deer, and was evidently a very precocious young lady. Unfortunately she went wrong in her training. Still, there was nothing in the look of the horses to show why these English and Irish breeders lead the world in bloodstock. The Tetrarch’s dam, for instance, was a great, big, coarse mare with harpoon shoulders, just the sort that anyone would select to ride on in a cattle-camp. The idea of her breeding the world’s greatest sprinter seemed ridiculous.
“Kennedy,” I said, “what’s the secret of all this? Why have the Americans got to come back here to buy a horse.”
“I suppose it is the soil and the climate,” he said. “There’s something in the soil that’s good for horses and the soft weather gives us green grass all the year round to keep their insides clean.”
“Do you give the foals crushed oats,” I said.
“Yes, as soon as they’ll eat ’em, and as much as they’ll eat. You have to force the growth of young thoroughbreds. I hear you have some big studs in Australia.”
“Yes,” I said. “We have a couple of studs that’ll send fifty or sixty yearlings down for sale. At one stud they drive their yearlings loose along the road forty miles to the train.”
But Kennedy wouldn’t have this at all.
“Drive them loose, is it,” he said. “That’s just one of your Australian stories. Who ever heard of such nonsense!”
“They do.”
“Well, all I can say is that if I tried it, my yearlings would run slap into the Irish sea. Come along and we’ll go and look at Clonmel’s horses.”
“What are they doing here.”
“I bought the place from him. He was in Short Street—hard up you know—and as soon as the war came along, he went off to the trenches and left his creditors to fight it out. I had to stick to a man that’s in the trenches, so I have about twenty mares and a couple of stallions and all his grooms and hangers-on here.”
“Anyway I’ll see him through; he might be able to collect that three hundred for me from the German Emperor.”
So much for Kennedy. Now for the hunt. An Irish Hunt is a thing to be remembered: with the soft turf underneath, the grey skies overhead, the dewdrops on the grass, and the flakes of mist drifting over the blue hills in the distance. It was all very beautiful. Everything seemed set for one of those rollicking Irish Hunts described by Dorothea Conyers in which everybody rides along exchanging witticisms, and the beautiful daughter of the impoverished Irish chieftain steals the young English millionaire from under the very claws of her flamboyant and unpleasant rival.
(It is strange, by the way, how these women writers never let up on their unpleasant characters. A male writer will allow the villain or villainess to triumph for a few brief moments—sometimes; but a woman writer will never let them win a single round.)
However, to resume. In the absence of Kennedy, who had met with an accident, I was put in charge of a strong-minded Irish lady, a sort of understudy for Lady Knox in that deathless book, The Experiences of an Irish R M. By virtue of some distant relationship I was told to call her “Cousin Norah.” Somewhere about forty, fresh complexioned, weighing in the neighbourhood of fifteen stone and beautifully turned out, she scanned me from head to foot:
“That hat of yours,” she said “is it all right? It looks so damnably wrong that it must be all right, or nobody would dare wear it. Tell me now, would the Prince of Wales wear that sort of hat?”
Here I was—in trouble again! I had hurried into a crack London hat shop and bought this hat without giving the matter due consideration. It was an excellent hat, of the true hard-hitter type; but instead of being the regulation black or grey colour, it was a sort of blend in which the black and the grey contended for supremacy: possibly the only hat of its sort ever made. No doubt the salesman, when he saw me coming, said: “Thank God, here’s some one that’ll buy that hat.” I knew, in a vague sort of way, that a man had better be seen with the wrong wife than with the wrong hat in England; I did not know that it would matter so much in Ireland. I had yet to learn that while the world persists in regarding the Irish as comic strips the Irish themselves have quite other views.
“I don’t know whether it’s right or not,” I said. “Anyhow, it wouldn’t matter very much here, would it?”
“Ho, wouldn’t it!” said my Cousin Norah. “People think anything will do in Ireland. They’d come here and hunt in sheepskins I suppose. Watch yerself annyhow. They’ll get ye down if they can.”
“Get me down. Why?”
“Just devilment. Half the comic stories in the world begin ‘There was an Irishman named Mick;’ and the other half begin ‘There was an Irishman named Pat.’ An’ the boys don’t like it. Whin they see a stranger they say to thimselves: ‘We’ll give ye some Mick and Pat for it, me bold lad, before ye’re much older.’ Ivry one makes ’em out to be monkeys, and they’ll act like monkeys.”
“But I never told a story about Mick and Pat—never in my life.”
“No. And if they can get ye a good fall, ’twill be a lesson to ye niver to tell one.”
Arrived at the meet, people did not gather together in groups and chat in the usual manner. They circled slowly round looking at my hat; and me Cousin Norah said darkly:
“If they don’t have sport one way, this day, they’ll have it another.”
I was riding a fine, bold-going, four-year-old; but when the hounds settled down after a fox I did not try to distinguish myself. The Master was a big heavy man and I followed him as accurately as though I were towed behind him by a piece of string. I reckoned that wherever he went I could go. Thrusters on fast horses cut in in front of me and dashed away, looking over their shoulders as though challenging me to follow. Not a bit of it. I had read the adventures of Soapy Sponge and how the members of the Flat Hat Hunt either ran across him at a jump, or tried to lead him into a bog. The Master for me every time!
We lost that fox. While jogging across to another covert the Hunt Secretary and one of the whips placed their horses just in front of me, and before I knew what I was doing I was following them. Nobody else followed.
“Come across here,” they said. “It’s a short cut.”
We came to quite a harmless-looking hedge and the whip gathered his horse together, popped over it, and disappeared from sight. The Secretary followed him, and then it was my turn. My four-year-old rushed it eagerly and not knowing the place he jumped very big. When we were in the air I found that there was a drop of at least seven feet to the field below. A lovely place!
Before I had time to think of any suitable last words the big Irish colt landed on his knees, his nose, and his hoofs, distributing the shock among them, and making a perfect three point landing. Only a horse as clever as a cat could have done it. I heaved a sigh of relief, and decided that only a man with a revolver would get me away from the tail of the Master’s horse for the rest of the day.
Then the Secretary found out that I was an Australian, and he was full of apologies.
“Sure I didn’t know,” he said. “They’re great comic people, the Australians, I hear; always puttin’ men on buck-jumpers to get them a fall. I’d, like to go there and see them, they’re that comic. Come and I’ll introjuice ye to the Master.”
The Master was all dignity and deportment, though I think he knew more about the proceedings than he cared to admit.
“Are you making a long stay in Ireland,” he said.
I told him that I was only staying for a few days.
“Well,” he said, “you won’t want to buy any horses so I’ll tell ’em to keep off you.”
I said, “How do you mean keep off me?”
“Everybody here,” he said, “rich and poor, swell and peasant, they all have horses for sale. If they think you’re a buyer they’ll give you no peace. There’s ladies of title here so keen to sell their horses that if they saw you lying on the ground after a fall they’d jump on you just so as you’d have to notice their horse.”
Relieved of any fear of assassination I concentrated on navigating my four-year-old over such country as I had never met in Australia. Most of the jumps were banks about four feet high with a six-foot ditch each side; and the horses had to jump on top of the bank and then jump off again. The hedges were all thorns, with only one place where you could get at them, and that place all boggy and slippery. I thought I was doing wonders to get along at all, until I looked round and saw a little girl on a fourteen hand pony following me. It was very pretty to watch her. The pony would go at the first ditch and land about half-way up the bank; then he would scramble up to the top and slide half-way down the other side. Poising here for a moment like a chamois, he would gather his feet together and spring out over the second ditch. The little girl never interfered with him, beyond tapping him on the shoulder occasionally with a stick when she wanted him to make a spring. I said to a man riding next me that I had never seen jumping like it.
“Jump, is it,” he said. “Ye could hunt a cat on that one and wherever the cat’d go that one’d be treading the tail off it.”
Then came the catastrophe.
We arrived at a ditch about twelve feet across, six feet deep, full of water, and with steep slippery banks. We could only get at it in one place and had to take our turns and go at it one at a time. Someone spoke to me and distracted my attention for a moment and when the horse in front of me made his jump, my horse took me by surprise and jumped at almost the same instant. The two horses were in the air together, one exactly behind the other, and when the horse in front of me fell short and landed half in and half out of the ditch mine landed on top of him—climbed up his back one might say—knocking both horse and rider back into the ditch. It was an accident, of course; but my part in the affair looked like a combination of bad riding and bad manners, and I was in terror till the horseman rose from the ditch like Neptune rising from the sea, cursing fluently, while his horse made a heave and a scramble and got out also. Neither of them was hurt. As I did not know the proper etiquette under the circumstances I went away from there as quickly as I could and caught up with the Master.
“I’ve done a terrible thing,” I said. “I jumped on a man and knocked him and his horse into a ditch; but they’re not hurt.”
A Master of Hounds is entitled to say anything to anybody—he can even be-devil the Prince of Wales—so I knew that whatever was coming I had to sit and take it. We were only riding at a walk from one covert to another at the time, so the riders all crowded round, grinning, to hear the Australian told off.
Looking round to see that his audience were all attention the Master opened out.
“You jumped on a man, did youl” he roared. “Just because we’re poor Irish, you think you can come all the way from Australia and jump on us! In the Shires they’d stand you up against a wall and shoot you! But I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
Here he had another look round to see that nobody was missing it.
“There’s a lot of these lads here haven’t paid their subscriptions,” he went on. “I’ll point ’em out to you, and you can come along and jump on ’em to your heart’s content.”
When I got home, and handed over the horse to the head groom, I told him about knocking the man into the ditch.
“Ye done well,” he said. “They’d have felt hurted if an Australian hadn’t done something quare for ’em.”