The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Beresford

"Threepence," said he.

"I'll give you sixpence for every plateful you eat yourself."

"Done," said he.

He finished two platefuls, and had begun a third, when he was overtaken by rebellion from within, swiftly followed by catastrophe.

"That's not fair," I said. "You can't count those two platefuls."

"O my Gawd," he said. "'Ave I got to begin again?"

To this time, too, belong my memories of a certain famous naval captain, who was extraordinarily particular both as to his own dress and the wearing of proper uniform by others. His regard for appearances, however, did not prevent his diving overboard in full and immaculate uniform, including white gloves, to save a seaman. Exceedingly precise in his speech, he owned the singular trait of becoming deprived of utterance when he was angry; and few things made him more angry than faulty attire in the Service.

He was driving 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, he was an implacable enemy of England. Utilising the tactics of obstruction, he succeeded in bringing discredit upon a Government which was powerless to control him and his led captains. He forced the Government to pass a Bill for University Education in Ireland; and as the measure was no better, if no worse, than the Gladstonian scheme which had been rejected, so the result upon the Conservative administration was equally injurious.

Mr. Gladstone emerged from his studies in Papal infallibility to denounce Bulgarian atrocities and the like. But the country declined to become excited on the subject. In the meantime the Russian army was approaching Constantinople. The British Government took public measures of military and naval precaution clearly implying that Russia would not be permitted to occupy Constantinople. Prince Bismarck thereupon intervened, and invited the nations concerned to discuss matters at Berlin. Lord Beaconsfield (he had received his peerage in 1876) and Prince Bismarck were the two most powerful men in Europe. Beaconsfield chose himself to represent Great Britain at the Congress, which opened at Berlin on 13th June, 1878. Lord Beaconsfield returned in triumph, bearing with him "Peace with Honour."

The advance of Russian influence in Afghanistan induced the British Government, in 1878, to dispatch an expedition to Cabul, which was occupied by British troops, and from which the Amir, Shere Ali, fled. Followed, the signature of the treaty of Gandamak by Yakoob Khan, son and successor of Shere Ali; the treacherous murder of Sir Louis Cavagnan, British Envoy, and the greater number of his staff; and the recapture of Cabul by British troops. The true history of the whole affair, much distorted at the time (and since) by political malice, is lucidly set forth in Lord Roberts's Forty-one Years in India, by the great soldier who took so distinguished a part in it.

Another frontier war broke out in 1879. In South Africa, Sir Theophilus Shepstone had annexed the Transvaal; Sir Bartle Frere, Lord High Commissioner, announcing to the Zulu king Cetewayo, that Cetewayo was entitled to a strip of territory claimed both by Cetewayo and the Transvaal Republic, ordered him to disband his army. The advance of British troops was checked by their total defeat by the Zulus on 22nd January, 1879, at Isandhlwana. Lord Chelmsford the commander-in-chief, prosecuted the campaign, defeated Cetewayo and took him prisoner. During the war the young Prince Louis Napoleon, son of the Empress Eugenie, lost his life.

In the meantime, the trade of the country had been profoundly depressed, with the natural result that there was much discontent. On 24th March, 1880, Parliament was dissolved; and the Liberal party were returned with a majority of some hundred and twenty. The Queen sent for Lord Hartington; sent for Lord Granville; and finally, for Mr. Gladstone.

The Russo-Turkish war of 1877 had brought Russia into opposition to Austria-Hungary, thus destroying the alliance of the three Emperors; and although Bismarck made peace between the two Powers at the Congress of Berlin, Russia became estranged from Germany. In order to restore her security, Germany concluded an alliance with Austria-Hungary and shortly afterwards with Italy, which had quarrelled with France concerning her occupation of Tunis. Thus was formed the Triple Alliance. Its counterpoise was the drawing together of France and Russia, in view of whose possibilities Prince Bismarck in 1887 increased the German Army. In 1900 Germany passed the Navy Law, which ordained that the German Fleet should be so strong that any attack upon it would be dangerous to the attacking party.

Nothing but the strength of the British Fleet, which had been largely increased by the action of Lord Charles Beresford in 1888, and again by the naval programme of 1893, and whose organisation had been brought to a high state of efficiency by Admiral Sir Frederick Richards (afterwards admiral of the Fleet), prevented the outbreak of war between England and France at the time of the Fashoda incident in 1897.

The affair caused both nations to reconsider the situation; with the result that they settled all outstanding difficulties; and the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France and Russia balanced the Triple Alliance. Germany, in 1912, added some 70,000 men to her army, while Austria and Italy increased their fleets. By the time the Allied nations of the Near East had declared war upon the Turkish Empire, in 1912, Russia had recovered from the disastrous results of her war with Japan, so that the Triple Entente once more balanced the Triple Alliance. But the war in the Near East, with the heavy losses it inflicted upon Turkey, had opened anew the whole Eastern question. The settlement concluded at the Berlin Conference thirty-four years previously was abolished in a moment.

It has been thought worth while to trace the main developments of European politics from 1873 to the present time; as it happened to Lord Charles Beresford to be a member of that Parliament which saw the triumph of the Beaconsfield policy in foreign affairs, and to be a member of subsequent Parliaments confronted with the emergence of new and sinister international conditions.

CHAPTER XV

AN IRISH ELECTION AND IRISH POLITICS

The political situation in Ireland at the time when I entered politics was characteristically exemplified in the Kerry election of 1872, in which I took part. It was fought entirely on the Home Rule issue, which had been revived by Isaac Butt when, in 1870, he formed his Home Government Association.

In the Kerry election of 1872, the Roman Catholic hierarchy was opposed to Home Rule. The anti-Home Rule candidate, Mr. Deas, was a Roman Catholic, a local landlord and extremely popular. His opponent, Mr. Blennerhasset, was a Protestant and a stranger to the locality. But because he was a Home Ruler, he was elected in spite of the priests and of the personal claims of Mr. Deas, winning by 839 votes. I may add that he won in spite also of my exertions, which were considerable. I started at two o'clock in the morning with Mr. Harry Herbert of Muckross, and led a band of 350 tenants to the poll. (The Ballot Act was not passed until 18th July of the same year, 1872.)

Having polled the tenants, I was strolling in the street, when I was stopped by one of my grand fellow-countrymen, a huge man of about six feet five.

"Are ye for Home Rule?" says he.

"To hell with your Home Rule!" said I. Whereupon he hit me on the point of the nose, knocking me over backwards, and effectually silencing my arguments for the space of an hour and a half.

The nature of the problem of the land in Ireland may be exemplified from my own experience as a landlord. I came into my property in 1866, and when I returned from the sea two years later, being in need of money, I wrote to my agent, telling him that I intended to inspect the estate. He replied asking me to come as soon as I could, and adding that I should be able to raise the rents all round. I told him to do nothing until my arrival. When I went over, I drove to one of my farms upon which it was proposed to raise the rent. The farm was about 48 acres in extent, situated in the middle of a bog. Here I was entertained by one of the finest old Irishmen I have ever seen, and his three sons. Said I to him:

"I want to talk to you about the rent. I hear that you are paying me only 2s. 6d. an acre, whereas I can get 18s. an acre in the market."

I shall never forget how the poor old man's face fell as he said:

"For the love of God, do not turn me out, Lord Charles, I will give you 12s. an acre sooner than you should turn me out."

And then he told me that he had occupied the farm during 48 years; and in that time he and his sons had raised the original value to 18s. an acre. Of course I told him to stay where he was at the old rent. But by the law of the land I could have turned him out and put in a new tenant who would have paid me 18s. an acre, the increased value being solely due to the exertions of the old man and his sons. Had I been an absentee landlord, it would have been an ordinary matter of business to have instructed my agent to turn the man out and to raise the rent; and that very course was taken in thousands of cases. There was no compensation for tenants' improvements before 1870; and a farmer who did his best for the land, and to whose exertions alone increased value was due, must pay the increased rent or go.

The monstrous land system in Ireland naturally caused the tenants to feel distrust and enmity towards the landlords; for, although not many landlords abused their powers, the knowledge that they could abuse them was alone sufficient to create suspicion and hostility. Again, the great companies which bought land on speculation, exacted rents at the outside market value. A company cannot be expected to make allowances. Nor did the companies know the tenants or care for them. But under the Irish custom they were the tenants who had themselves by their improvements raised the value of the land.

In fairness to the landlords, it should be understood that the tenants objected to the improvement of property by the landlord. "If you, the landlord," the tenant argued, "improve the land, you will be raising the rent on me. I would rather make my own improvements."