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FIFTY LEADERS
OF BRITISH SPORT

FIFTY LEADERS^/
BRITISH SPORT

A SERIES OF PORTRAITS
BY ERNEST C. ELLIOTT (OF
ELLIOTT AND FRY) WITH
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND
A PREFACE BY F. G. AFLALO

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD
LONDON &' NEW YORK. MCMIV

c»v

Printed by Ballakttne, Hanson Sy Co.
At ths Ballantyne Press

PREFACE

The text which accompanies Mr. Elliott's remark-
able series of portraits is so meagre as scarcely to
require any foreword. Were such an introduction
desirable, I should be tempted to borrow from
John Bunyan's rhyming apology to the " Pilgrim's
Progress," but that, my subjects being still in the
flesh, I have not been called upon to follow their
careers to that extreme limit of interest in the
personal equation. What they do and even, by
inference, what they leave undone may be gathered
in some part ; but how they run and run until they
"unto the Gate of Glory" come, that will be for
other pens to relate. All that has been attempted,
in an exposure scarcely longer than that of Mr.
Elliott's lens, is to outline their many activities
and varied hobbies, their public services, their
private recreations. At any rate, with the above
time-limit, these brief biographies cannot be said
to add a fresh terror to death.

On two aspects of the book, however, it seems
desirable to address the Critical. In the first place,
there was the task of selection and the possibility
of not unreasonable carping at the title. Someone,
however, was, in the dim past, bold enough to
select the Nine Worthies ; and an anonymous
committee of three, aided by much outside advice,
must bear the brunt of having chosen the Fifty
here depicted. That it would have been easier to

PREFACE

choose three times the number goes without saying.
Eminent cricketers, eminent anglers, deadly shots,
masters of the sword, some, in fact, who rank
among the highest in almost every branch of sport
mentioned in the following pages, have, of dire
necessity, been omitted from the list. Indeed,
with the exception of perhaps half-a-dozen, whose
right to figure in these pages is scarcely open to
question by anyone, it would have been easy to
substitute other names without incurring any
greater or less risk of reasonable criticism. Why,
then, it may be asked, the title? Well, there is
much in the name of a book, but it is not every-
thing. The omission of the definite article pre-
cludes any suggestion of invidious comparison.
Sport, like Society, may have a thousand leaders,
just as it is the fashion of learned Societies to have
an appalling list of vice-presidents, but there is no
incorrectness in calling each one by that title. As,
however, there have been some friendly remarks on
the subject while the book has been going through
the press, it has seemed desirable, if possible, to
anticipate criticism, and it is perhaps only right
to add that when those who were good enough to
give special sittings for their portraits were first
asked to figure in the book, its title had not even
been thought of.

The second matter on which a word may
perhaps be looked for is the somewhat unique
composition of Mr. Ernest Elliott's portrait studies.
The telephoto lens and other devices of an age of
progressive, if somewhat mechanical, art have
latterly enabled animal photographers to give us
pleasing pictures of the most timorous creatures

PREFACE

amid their natural surroundings. The wide range
of merit between these studies of the beasts and
birds wearing their happiest expression and the
earlier photographs of either stuffed specimens or
woebegone captives in menageries needs no insis-
tence. Some time ago Mr. Elliott, senior partner
in the famous firm of Elliott & Fry, conceived the
scheme of adapting the new photography to his
own species. The sportsman, he rightly argued,
is seen at his best when engaged in riding his
favourite hobby. Without being at all times so
timid as to need the artificial aid of the telephoto
lens, even if the conditions of outdoor photography
were more favourable to the delicate manipulation
of sensitive apparatus than they are, it seemed that
he might be photographed in his happiest mood if
so much of the circumstance of the covert or river-
side could be added to the mechanical advantages
of the studio as to attune his mind and bring some
faint imitation of enthusiasm to his face. Mr.
Elliott, in fact, mentally compared the sportsman
in his go-to-meeting clothes as something akin to
the caged lion, if not indeed to the stuffed speci-
men. Some of the results of a year's careful ex-
periment in this direction are offered in this
volume ; and I venture to think that they will be
pronounced amazingly realistic, particularly when
it is remembered that most of them were taken in
the dim, religious light of Baker Street. They
may, in fact, be regarded as the first milestone on
a road along which portraiture will travel far. I
doubt indeed whether, if Mr. Elliott had not com-
bined in himself the qualities of artist and sports-
man, the result of his labours would have been so
ix

PREFACE

successful. Here we have none of the orthodox
"Now, please!" exposure that betrays itself in
some of even the best modern photographs. The
pictures in this book, on the other hand, show
men mentally throwing their carefully selected fly,
negotiating their worst bunker, bringing off their
favourite shot, and generally conducting them-
selves as if they were miles away from the
ordinary tortures of the studio.

Contemplating one of the angling studies in
the gallery, that of a distinguished legislator and
eminent litterateur casting over the wary fish an
artificial fly (of no matter what colour), we seem to
see him transported miles from the weary treadmill
at Westminster, and he might even be humming
to himself, in his happy freedom from care, the
concluding words of Izaak Walton's undying
song :—

"We'll banish all sorrow
And sing till to-morrow
And angle and angle again ! "

F. G. AFLALO.

June^ 1904.

LIST OF PORTRAITS

H.M. KING EDWARD VII. .
H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES .
THE EARL OF ANCASTER .
LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH .
MR. JOHN BALL, JUNIOR .
THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT .
MR. W. BUCKMASTER ....
MR. EGERTON CASTLE ....
MR. J. J. CAWTHRA ....
CAPTAIN R. H. COLLIS

MR. J. DAN^IELL

EARL DE GREY

COLONEL H. DE BEAUVOIR DE LISLE
THE EARL OF DENBIGH .
MR. CLINTON DENT ....
MESSRS. R. F. AND H. L. DOHERTY
THE EARL OF DURHAM .
CAPTAIN W. EDGWORTH-JOHNSTONE

MR. C. B. FRY

VISCOUNT GALWAY ....
GENERAL SIR MONTAGU GERARD .
THE MARQUESS OF GRANBY .

LORD HAWKE

SIR JOHN HEATHCOAT-AMORY, BART.
MR. CHARLES HUTCHINGS
MR. HORACE HUTCHINSON
THE HON. GERALD LASCELLES
THE EARL OF LONSDALE .
MR. A. C. MACLAREN ....
xi

Frontispiece

LIST OF PORTRAITS

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BART. . . facing page 96

MR. ROBERT MAXWELL . . . . „ 100

MR. JOHN GUILLE MILLAIS ,102

MR. G. MILLER ,,106

MR. C. R. MULLINGS 108

LORD NEWLANDS „ no

MR. J. OTHO PAGET >, i"

MAJOR R. M. POORE ...... ,,114

THE DUKE OF PORTLAND ,, "6

KUMAR SHRI RANJITSINHJI . . . . „ 118

THE RT. HON. LORD RIBBLESDALE . . „ 122

MR. R. H. RIMINGTON- WILSON 126

MR. R. A. SANDERS ,,128

THE HON. J. W. E. DOUGLAS-SCOTT-MONTAGU „ 130
MR. ARCHIBALD JOHN STUART-WORTLEY . „ 134

MR. EDGAR SYERS 136

MR COURTENAY TRACY ,,138

COLONEL H. WALROND ,140

LORD WALSINGHAM 142

MR. W. DUDLEY WARD 144

MR. P. F. WARNER .146

FIFTY LEADERS
OF BRITISH SPORT

HIS MAJESTY
KING EDWARD VII

Although His Majesty continues to take the
greatest interest in the racing stud at Sandring-
ham, and ! although he shoots high pheasants as
keenly and as accurately as ever, it is naturally as
Prince of Wales that he was first and inalienably
associated with all manner of sport. His racing
colours were registered as far back as 1875, and
ever since, though victory was not his for some
years, he has identified himself with the best and
manliest interests of the Turf. To this day he
freely admits great pride in his splendid stud, in
which the winners of other days sire the winners
of to-morrow, but for ten years or more he owned
chiefly the vanquished. The writer recollects being
present on one occasion at a Continental race
meeting at which two of the chief events were
won in succession by the heir to the throne, then
a lad in the nursery. Not so has our King won
his triumphs, but by close attention to breeding
and training and a personal supervision of the
manufacture of that finished article, a Derby winner,
out of the raw material. When Alep, the Arab,
was badly beaten by Avowal two years after its
owner had registered his colours, the Prince of
Wales had nearly twenty years to wait before he
was to win a Derby. In the meanwhile, however,
the racing stud had been established at Sandring-
ham under the care of Lord Marcus Beresford,
though the first important success was not re-
gistered until, in 1894, Florizel H., trained by
Marsh, won twice at Ascot. The first great popu-
lar victory was when Persimmon beat St. Frusquin
by a neck and thereby won the Derby of 1896, a
triumph which His Majesty repeated with Diamond
Jubilee four years later. Writers of recent Turf
15

HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VII.

history have all related the true and curious his-
tory of how Jones came to ride the King's horse,
owing to the animal having taken an unexplained
dislike to the chief jockey in the stable, so it need
only be referred to in passing. The undaunted
Blacklock blood in Persimmon also came to the
front in the Ascot Cup and Eclipse Stakes, and
then the good horse, which had done so much for
its royal master on the course, retired, laden with
honours, to the Sandringham breeding-farm.

During his racing days the King has achieved
a remarkable degree of success on the Turf, his
winnings amounting to over ;^i 00,000 in stakes.
The greatest year for the Sandringham horses
was 1900; for they won altogether over ^31,000.
That was Diamond Jubilee's year. He won six
events out of thirteen starts, including the Derby,
Two Thousand, the St, Leger, Newmarket Stakes,
and the Eclipse Stakes, and contributed over
^^29,000 out of the sum mentioned to the Royal
exchequer, and placed the King (then Prince of
Wales) at the top of the list of winning owners
that year. Persimmon won the Derby in the
fastest time on record, and Diamond Jubilee fol-
lowed suit by winning it in exactly the same time.

Persimmon headed the list of winning stallions
in 1902, beating his sire St. Simon, the amounts
won being ;^36,8io by Persimmon and ;^36,53i
by St. Simon,

The other sport for which His Majesty has
always entertained a passion is yacht racing, and
his successes in and around the Solent were curi-
ously coincident with his triumphs at Epsom. It
was in 1893 that he entered Britannia, rated 151,
in her first race, and for three or four years she
left her fastest rivals behind, beating such tried
craft as Valkyrie and Satanita. When it is stated
16

HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VII.

that in her first season Britannia won thirty-three
out of forty-three races, and in the next, twenty-
nine first prizes out of forty-two, more than once
beating the redoutable Vigilant, it will be under-
stood that the Prince's yacht was no ordinary craft.
She was not the first racing yacht owned by him,
having had a predecessor in Formosa, but she
certainly was the swiftest. In heavy weather in-
deed, in which the writer has more than once
watched her outside the Island, there was no hold-
ing her : she went like a torpedo boat. Although
she won the Queen's Cup in 1897, her first serious
check came a year earlier, when she was beaten
by the German Emperor's Meteor II. Still, she
was a grand yacht ; and those who remember her
at her best, as she carried the Prince's colours
first past the flagship, will reasonably regret that
the mandates of nature preclude our Sovereign
from establishing a stud farm for yachts at Cowes.
Britannia would have sired some fliers !

As might be expected. His Majesty when
Prince of Wales played a very prominent part in
the politics of yachting, and his acceptance of the
Commodoreship of the Royal Yacht Squadron in
1882, was of the greatest importance in readjusting
the hitherto strained relations between that body
and the equally autocratic Yacht Racing Associa-
tion, all difficulties being happily smoothed away
by the accession of the royal Commodore to that
honourable office, which he held until he came
to the throne. When a mournful pageant moved
majestically past the Squadron Castle one hazy
February morning in 1901, the Squadron had to
look out for another Commodore.

These two, then, are His Majesty's favourite
sports. He has shot, of course, in many lands ;
big game on the occasion of his Indian visit in
17 B

HIS MAJESTY KING EDWARD VII.

the seventies ; elk as the guest of the King of
Sweden and Norway ; deer in Scotland ; grouse,
partridges, pheasants — the last, shown high, being
his favourites. He is no fisherman, yet that he
has not wholly overlooked the claims of that
gentle craft is proved by the interest he took in
Lord Denbigh's experiment of stocking the lake
at Buckingham Palace with rainbow trout. This
does not, it is true, constitute him an angler, but
it shows a sympathy with that craft.

i8

HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE
PRINCE OF WALES

As he takes only a spectator's interest in horse-
racing, and has not, at any rate up to the present,
evinced that keenness for yacht racing to which
his practical acquaintance with seamanship and
navigation might have inclined him, the reasons
for which the Prince of Wales is less generally
known than his father as an enthusiastic sports-
man are obvious. The King, both before and
since his accession to the throne, has ever been in
evidence as an owner at Epsom, at Ascot, and at
Cowes, and never has other victory been so popular
as when his colours have gone first past the
winning post.

The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, has
his chief delight in shooting and in fishing, in
fishing a long way after shooting. The private
character of the shooting parties asked to meet
him accounts for there still being many ignorant
of the fact that he is an extraordinarily fine shot,
quite, in fact, in the front line. His Royal High-
ness is too fine a sportsman to admit distinctions
of rank when it is any question of skill with the
gun, but those who have seen him bring down
driven partridges have no doubt whatever in their
mind that he would rank among the first dozen
shots in this country, and that this is no mean
distinction even a glance through these pages will
show. At driven grouse he has also shown him-
self a wonderful shot, and during his recent visit
to Austria he shot capercailzie with the Arch-
duke Franz Ferdinand, but he has for the most
part shot partridges. A driven partridge, with a
little wind behind it, is no fool on the wing, but
it may without fear of contradiction be asserted
that there are not half-a-dozen men in this volume
19

H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES

against whom the Prince could not hold his own
on his day. Deer-stalking he has done around
Balmoral, being a good rifle shot and an untiring
walker on the hill ; and he had various rough
shooting during his sailor career in the Medi-
terranean countries, and some big game in India ;
but it is in the roots and stubbles that he proves
himself a really first-class shot.

He is also a keen fisherman, his fondness for
salmon fishing being shared by his mother and by
at any rate two of his sisters. Many a fine salmon
he has killed in the Dee and not a few in Canada,
but his liking for the rod is quite secondary to his
passion for the gun.

In other sports he has taken no prominent
part, though he played a good deal of polo
when stationed at Malta with the Mediterranean
squadron, and both real tennis and lawn tennis
have in turn attracted him. He is commonly
claimed as an ardent motorist, and so no doubt
he is ; but he regards motoring chiefly as a con-
venient and exhilarating means of getting about
and has no liking for motor racing.

That the Prince of Wales gives to sport only
such time as he can spare from incessant calls of
public business is well known. The most popular
perhaps of his many great services to the Empire
is the historic Colonial Tour which he and the
Princess accomplished in 1901, and which found a
fitting sequel in a splendid and memorable speech
at the Mansion House, one message of which —
". . . The old country must wake up if she
intends to maintain her old position of pre-
eminence in her colonial trade against foreign
competitors. . . ." — was flashed to the uttermost
ends of his father's dominions.

s»«#^

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3

THE EARL OF ANCASTER

Born in 1830, and educated at Harrow and
Trinity College, Cambridge, Gilbert Henry Heath-
cote-Drummond-Willoughby succeeded as Lord
Aveland in 1867, and as Lord Willoughby de
Eresby in 1888, his present title being a creation
of 1892. For four years previous to 1856 he
represented Boston in the House of Commons ;
thereafter he sat for Rutland until the death of
his father sent him to the Upper House. He is
hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, conjointly
with Lord Cholmondeley and Lord Carrington,
and he made an unsuccessful attempt on the occa-
sion of the King's accession to prove his sole
claim to that honourable office.

Lord Ancaster has always loved horses, and
has rendered long and useful services to the Four-
in-Hand Club, of which he was one of the earliest
members, subsequently filling the posts of Secre-
tary, Vice-President, and President. His famous
black-browns have long been familiar at the
Powder Magazine or Horse Guards Parade, and
whenever there was a long drive out to the Crystal
Palace his coach was almost invariably present.
Though never a Master of Hounds, he has hunted
a good deal with the Cottesmore and other packs,
and in fact horses in some form or other have
furnished most of his recreations.

He was, however, at his best an extremely
fine shot and, though he never hunted big game
abroad, he has had some of the best deer-stalking
in Scotland. The forest of Glenartney, celebrated
in "The Lady of the Lake," and one of the old
royal forests in which the Kings of Scotland used
to hunt when the Court was at Stirling, is his,
and the introduction of new blood from Grims-
thorpe has so improved the Glenartney stags that
the forest has latterly yielded beasts of twenty-
one stone.

THE EARL OF ANCASTER

As an angler Lord Ancaster has not discovered
any great enthusiasm, but his indifference to the
excitement of salmon-fishing has not stood in the
way of his taking an active part in the work of
the Tay Board, while in the Stobhall water he
owns one of the most sporting stretches on that
famous river. He is also a Vice-President, as well
as a Member of the Parliamentary Committee, of
the recently-formed Salmon and Trout Association,
and his long experience will without doubt be of
great benefit in the deliberations of that useful
body in the Fishmongers' Hall.

Lord Ancaster is, however, not only a keen
sportsman, but a model landlord, and his large
estates in districts so divergent as Lincolnshire
and the Highlands have given him a wide experi-
ence which lends great weight to his views on
agricultural depression, rural depopulation, the
small holdings fallacy and matters germane to that
improvement of the land to which he has devoted
much of his wealth and most of his life. Although
he dearly loves horses, his greater love of farming
has made him look with a kindly eye on the
motor car, and particularly the motor plough, as
a possible salvation of the farmer.

His son, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, con-
tinues in the House of Commons the work done
there by his father a generation ago.

LORD BALFOUR OF
BURLEIGH

Whatever, justly or otherwise, has been alleged
with regard to the apathy of recent members of His
Majesty's Government, it is certain that none have
ever thought of accusing Lord Balfour of consider-
ing his recreations first and his public duties after-
wards. So great, indeed, has been his energy in
various fields of political and other work that he
can be compared in this respect with only one other
public servant in this collection, and that a country-
man of his own. I recollect reading a speech made
on the occasion of his receiving the freedom of
Edinburgh, and the multiplicity of his positions of
trust reminded me at the time of the unsuccessful
litigant's remark on reading upon a tombstone the
legend : " Here lies a lawyer and an honest man."
" Poor fellows ! " he exclaimed, " is ground so scarce
about here that they had to bury the two of them in
one grave?" So, too, in Lord Balfour's case, it
seemed almost impossible that a man, who no
more than forty years ago was still at Eton,
should have had more than thirty years con-
tinuous experience of every variety of county and
parish work, and should now be presiding over
his seventh Royal Commission. It is, however,
as a sportsman that I must here consider him
who was lately Secretary for Scotland ; and even
in the rare leisure which he permits himself
Lord Balfour is almost as many-sided in his acti-
vity as at the council table, though it is easy to
understand that his devotion to his country's affairs
must always effectually handicap his enthusiasm in
sport. Had Parliaments and Cabinets not tied him
to London during the best years of his life, the
subject of this article must almost certainly have
stood among the best shots of his day, if, indeed,
23

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

he may be excluded from high rank as it is. Those
who have missed grouse on a Scotch moor will
appreciate one man knocking over his eighty-three
birds at one drive. Even in a Yorkshire butt such
a feat would be remarkable ; north of the border it
must stand almost a record, even in this age of trick
shooting. While, however, we cheerfully admit
that driven grouse are perhaps as severe a test of
eye, hand, and indeed nerve as most winged things,
it is also beyond dispute that, more particularly with
a born shot, practice goes a long way. Not all
Lord Balfour's zeal in his parliamentary work need
keep him in town when a discriminating legislature
arranges to be off duty on the twelfth of August.
Yet on two occasions during the last thirty years
even that sacred anniversary had to be dedicated
to the strenuous life of politics, with which excep-
tions, however, Lord Balfour has, since 1863,
missed being out on the twelfth only when it fell
on a Sunday. On those occasions he was out on
the thirteenth.

Nor, for all his love of the gun, does he neglect
the rod, but it is common knowledge, among those
whom it affects, that parliamentary fixtures inter-
fere with salmon and trout fishing far more than
with sport on the moors or in the coverts. Although,
then, he has not entirely missed the mystic joys of
angling, his opportunities in that direction have
of late years been comparatively few and far be-
tween.

As a golfer he does not take high rank. As a
matter of fact he is not seen on the links more than
once or twice during the year, so that, having
apparently no great love for his country's national
game, he cheerfully describes his own play as about
the worst on record. This gloomy verdict must
necessarily be discounted ; still, the fact remains
24

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

that his golf is not the finest exposition of the
game.

Scotland has, however, another national game,
one which will never permanently take up its home
south of the Tweed unless our English winters re-
turn to their simple severity of half a century ago.
Winters of the type familiar in illustrations in
" Pickwick" are the very breath of the curler, and it
is as the High Priest of curling that this all-round
sportsman has been asked to figure here. In this
game, at any rate, Lord Balfour has performed with
the skill that we should expect of one who, so long
ago as the year 1888, occupied the honoured posi-
tion of President of the Royal Caledonian Curling
Club, a body that may be regarded as holding in
the world of curling a position analogous to that
held in cricket by the M.C.C. Students of our games
invariably, and with good reason, contrast those,
like cricket or tennis, in which the individual player
is given opportunities of displaying his skill, with
the others, such as football, in which the victory
falls to combination among those who are ready to
merge their individual strength for the common
good of their side. Curling, even more perhaps
than football, is the game of combination and not
of the single player. Of it might have been said
the familiar words: "The individual withers, and
the State is more and more." Much, therefore, of
the good service which Lord Balfour has from time
to time rendered to his side would in the ordinary
course have escaped notice, and the only indirect clue
to his skill and keenness must be sought in the
victories of his rink. Thus, during the severe
winter of 1893, his rink made for the club a balance
of over ninety points in all matches played. That
year was, it will be remembered, a red-letter season
in the annals of curling, though non-curlers still
25

LORD BALFOUR OF BURLEIGH

recall its rigours with a shudder. Taking into
consideration the aforementioned limitations im-
posed by his political engagements, and making
some further allowance for the handicap of increas-
ingly mild winters, the wonder is that he should
have found opportunities of playing at all. En-
thusiasm, however, will surmount many obstacles,
and Lord Balfour has before now managed to dove-
tail a Cabinet meeting between one day's curling at
Carsebreck and another at his own home at Alloa.
Most of us have our pet ambitions, even in our
play-time. To one man, the clambering of untrod-
den peaks ; to a second, the bagging of the horns of
some wild sheep half-an-inch more round the curve
than those in Rowland Ward's book of record
measurements ; to a third, the scoring of his century
in a Test Match. The subject of the accom-
panying portrait probably finds the acme of human
enjoyment in the successful negotiating of a diffi-
cult shot with the curling-stone. And who shall
deny that such an appreciation from so wonderful
a grouse-shot is the highest possible compliment
to a game which commands, if few, certainly the
most devoted of adherents.

26

MR. JOHN BALL, JUNIOR

The diarising Pepys wrote down some rude, smart
notions about the inferiority of amateurs when
pitted against professionals. His remarks referred
specifically to fiddling, a pursuit that hardly falls
under the category of sport, else had the R.A.M.
furnished one or more of the immortals in Mr.
Elliott's artistic Walhalla. Now, there was some-
thing in what Mr. Pepys said on this, as on most
subjects, but his dogmatic statement is also open
to considerable criticism. This is not the place
in which to discuss the ethics of amateur as com-
pared with professional sport, but it may perhaps
safely be asserted that those games and sports in
which the professional has been allowed to asso-
ciate with the amateur on equal terms have main-
tained a standard of purity, of virile strength,
and of freedom from the worst elements that can
infect national pastimes, which we look for in vain
in other recreations where the professional stands
aloof. Between amateur and open championships
there is generally a wide gap, and the interest
taken in the two is by no means identical ; yet
where an amateur competes successfully against
those who make a business of sport, enthusiasm
is certain to run high, and, to their credit be it
said, the professionals take their rare beatings
with a good grace and give their praise without
grudging.

When by sheer splendid golf Mr. John Ball,
junior, of Hoylake fame, beat such redoubtable
golfers as Fernie and Archie Simpson, thereby
winning the Open Championship in 1890, he
achieved a task which only one other amateur
has as yet performed. Mr. H. H. Hilton has
done it twice. Mr. Ball's position in 1890 was,
however, in some respects unique, for that same
year he won the Amateur Championship. This
27

MR. JOHN BALL, JUNIOR

he had previously won in 1888; and he wrested
it from his brother amateurs on three subsequent
occasions — beating Mr. Hilton in 1892, Mr. Fer-
gusson in 1894, and, after a tie, the late Lieutenant
F. G. Tait in 1899. In 1895 he was beaten by-
Mr. Balfour-Melville. Like Mr. Horace Hutchin-
son, who held the Open Championship, as else-
where related in these pages, during the first two
years of its existence, he is an Englishman ; and
on the Hoylake links he was always regarded as
practically invincible, his long drives with the
cleek exciting the admiration of eminent judges
of the game.

Mr. Ball is master of one art, and has not,
so far as is generally known, shone at any other
game. Yet when sterner work fell to his hand, he
was not backward, but went out to South Africa
as a yeoman. The Royal Liverpool Golf Club
presented him with a horse, and he proved him-
self worthy of this honour by winning the prize
for the best kept horse in his troop. He is a
somewhat quiet and retiring man, and, whatever
opinion he may hold as to the game he plays,
he rarely argues and has never been known to
dogmatise. A player of such calibre can afford
to maintain a degree of reserve that might be
resented if it went with less merit, but, though
many are agreed as to Mr. Ball's invariable at-
titude of modesty, none have ever been found to
criticise it, except perhaps those editors who
have essayed in vain to woo him from his silence —
and editors, after all, hardly count.

28

THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT

Seeing that so eminent a judge of hunting as
Colonel Anstruther Thomson once gave it as his
opinion that Lord Worcester, as he then was,
should be considered the equal of Tom Firr and
Will Goodall, it may, without fear of contradiction,
be stated that the ninth Duke of Beaufort is, quite
without exception, the finest amateur huntsman in
England, and that there are, moreover, very few
professionals of whom he is not the recognised
superior. It is, doubtless, owing to the long and
useful service which he rendered to the Badminton
Hunt as Marquis of Worcester, to the fact of his
having succeeded so many-sided a sportsman and
litterateur as the eighth duke, and to his own
rooted objection to publicity that the world hears
less about him than about some who have more
slender demands on popularity in sporting circles.
He must have hunted the Badminton pack
through some of the most eventful years of its
existence since he came of age. Going back to
the days when, in 1868, Tom Clark retired from
the post of huntsman — my authority is Mr. T. F.
Dale's delightful history of the Badminton Hunt —
we find that Lord Worcester, then in the Blues,
hunted the pack. As a matter of fact, he was
so keen that he went backwards and forwards,
in fulfilment of his various duties, between Bad-
minton and Knightsbridge ; and, with the late
Charles Hamblin as kennel huntsman, in turn
succeeded by Will Dale, he has hunted the Bad-
minton ever since. He does not appear to care
about foreign travel, and perhaps others, if they
owned Badminton, would be of his mind. He
lives for the hunt, and his many successes with
hounds, more perhaps by judicious purchase than
actually by breeding — as witness his wins with the
famous Vaulter, which he bought from Mr. Austin
Mackenzie — have from time to time proved the
29

THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT

soundness of his judgment. Richer men might
have hesitated to pay the price he gave for Lord
Portsmouth's pack, or for the dogs out of Mr,
Austin Mackenzie's, but the results have amply
warranted the outlay. Moreover, it is only in
comparatively recent years that the Hunt has
accepted any subscription from its followers.

With the disabilities inseparable from a heavy-
weight and the kind of horses that he must of
necessity ride, the duke is a finished horseman,
and, when in the Blues, he must have been among
the earliest first-class polo players in this country,
at Lillie Bridge and at Hurlingham. At that
time, too, the Marquis of Worcester was a familiar
figure driving the Blues' coach.

Recognising that the sacred fox is everything at
Badminton, the Dukes of Beaufort have not made
as much of shooting as their beautiful coverts
deserved, and the present owner is not, in fact,
a devoted shot, while the indefatigable amateur
photographer, to whom even park walls are not
always an obstacle, has never, in all probability,
caught him with a fishing-rod in his hand. For
horse-racing and the turf he probably has a cordial
dislike. At any rate, his name is never reported
at race meetings, which means that he is never
present. And the absence of so devoted a lover
of horses from the paddock and grand stand is a
somewhat severe comment on a sport which has
shared with his own hobby a title of illustrious
associations.

30

MR. W. BUCKMASTER

In at any rate two respects Mr. Buckmaster, one
of the most brilliant polo players of the day,
differs from some other masters of the game : he is
a civilian, in fact a member of the Stock Exchange,
and he served his apprenticeship, one may say,
while still a schoolboy. Many of our leading
players are soldiers, and some of them never sat
a polo pony until well on in life. When still a
Repton boy, however, Mr. Buckmaster often saw,
and sometimes played, polo in Essex; and at Trinity
College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1891, at
the age of nineteen, he kept ponies, playing for
the University against Oxford, which was on both
occasions (1892-93) defeated. Football he also
played for the University, though not against
Oxford ; and he whipped in with the Drag. His
other hunting at that time was with the Fitz-
william, Oakley, and Lord Rothschild's ; and nowa-
days he hunts with the Pytchley.

His early days of distinction as a polo player
of front rank were when he played back, as he
did for the winning teams in the International
Open Tournament at Paris, 1895, in the Open
Championship Cup Match at Hurlingham, 1896,
and, the same summer, when playing for the
Stanstead team, which carried off the County
Cup.

Later on, during and since 1897, he played
No. 3, particularly for the Old Cantabs, founded
by himself on the disbanding of the Freebooters.
With Mr. G. Heseltine No. i, Mr. F. Freake
No. 2, and Mr. L. M'Creery back, this fine team
made a hard fight for the Open Cup Tourna-
ments at Hurlingham and Ranelagh in 1899, and
was victorious in the following summer.

Not always, however, are our best efforts
successful, and his most memorable match was
31

MR. W. BUCKMASTER

the final for the Open Cup at Hurlingham in 1897,
when his team was beaten by one containing two
of the Millers and W. Drybrough.

Horsemanship is Mr. Buckmaster's forte, and
he is a perfect judge of a pony, both buying and
training with almost unvarying success. His two
famous polo ponies, Rufus and Bendigo, were sold
last year to Mr. Whitney, but perhaps he has as
good in his stable.

During the season of 1903, when but little over
thirty, he was still the junior of the majority of
first-class players. He played with great keenness
for the Orleans Club when it defeated the Cavalry
Club, for Roehampton when it went to Ranelagh
and beat the home team, and for Hurlingham
when it won a great victory over Rugby, Mr.
Buckmaster's side hitting no fewer than four goals
in the course of ten minutes !

Early in the season he had met with a serious
accident, which prevented him from playing in the
Champion Cup, so that his first appearance was in
the Open Cup at Ranelagh.

His near-side forward stroke is always worth
seeing. In the play for the Ranelagh Cup he
more than once drove the ball down the ground,
hitting with equal certainty on the near- and off-
sides and making a goal. Under any conditions,
this would be a notable feat ; in a wet summer,
when the ground is cut up, it is wonderful. His
control of the ball exceeds that of any other living
player, and, playing last season at Leamington, he
certainly sent the ball through the posts from a
distance and at an angle that would have deterred
any one else from even attempting the shot.

32

MR. EGERTON CASTLE

The arme blanche, of which, in its long evolution
from the hacking blade of the old Freyfechter
down to the graceful weapon of the modern master
of fence, he is the recognised historian in more
countries than his own, made Mr. Egerton Castle
a writer of romance ; and, though the statement
may savour of contradiction, the writers of ro-
mance, the creators of D'Artagnan, of Admirable
Crichton, and of Bussy d'Amboise, made him a
swordsman. While yet a boy, his enthusiasm for
the phenomenal dexterity with point and edge
displayed by these heroes of fiction prompted him
to study the art and science of fencing : and this
soon brought with it a growing disbelief in the
accuracy of those alluring chroniclers. As a
remedy to an obvious want, he wrote his cele-
brated work on " Schools and Masters of Fence,
from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Cen-
tury," published in 1884, as well as several highly
popular stories, nearly all of which centred round
the flash of cold steel. Rarely, indeed, as the
sword cuts its way into Mr. Egerton Castle's
later novels, he apparently had some difficulty
in keeping its fearsome work out of his earlier
books ; and the high light that it threw on his
vivid pictures of romance and passion was without
a doubt responsible for much of their success, so
rare is it to find accurate detail in the weft and
warp of sporting fiction.

Mr. Egerton Castle, who, though only five-and-
forty years of age, has studied for the bar, served in
the army, fenced his way to a pinnacle of fame, and
held his position with the pen, after even (as at
any rate he is in the habit of saying) the rolling
years have left his hand less keen for the longer
weapon, must find some difficulty in enjoying that
retirement to which, all too early, he seems to
Zl c

MR. EGERTON CASTLE

aspire. Together with Captain Alfred Hutton,
and one or two other devotees of the sword, it is
common knowledge that his name figures in the
organisation of every important assault-at-arms, in
addition to which he delivers very fascinating and
informing lectures, illustrated with vigorous bouts
" at verie manie weapons," now on the stage of the
Lyceum Theatre, now in the august hall of the
Society of Arts, which presented him with its
medal for his last discourse on the subject of which
he is master. The first of these lectures, delivered
in the spring of 1891, made such a stir that it was
repeated a fortnight later by command of H.R.H.
The Prince of Wales ; and from that occasion it is
perhaps fair to date the modern revival of displays
of ancient swordsmanship.

The first public appearance, however, of Mr.
Egerton Castle was many years earlier, at Cam-
bridge, where he won the prize offered by Angelo's
for foil-play at the Universities, while the second
was when he won his honorary diploma of "Maestro
di Scherma, di Spada e Sciabola" at Rome, and
the third was at the Royal Military Tournament,
in 1882, where, as a Sandhurst Cadet, he won the
gold medal for swordsmanship. Subsequently he
twice represented his country in the International
Tournament at Brussels. He is an honorary
member of almost every Fencing Club of note
on the Continent, and the only foreign amateur
on whom the coveted fellowship of the ancient
Acaddmie d'Armes de Paris (dating from the
sixteenth century) has been conferred. But of
late years he has, as already said, with consider-
able difficulty, held himself emeritus, preferring
the judge's bench, where, as the Grand Turk
has it, he can let others dance for him. The
last great function which he organised to a
34

MR. EGERTON CASTLE

most successful issue was the Franco-Italian
match in 1902, at which H.M. The King was
present.

The secret of his eminence as a swordsman is,
no doubt, his unswerving devotion to style. As
Mr. Andrew Lang once wrote : " Whoever has
seen Mr. Ball drive from the tee, whoever has
seen Mr. Egerton Castle fence, has seen style."
Few will deny the absolute justice of Mr. Lang's
statement.

As some middle-aged men — Mr. Castle has
hardly any right as yet to the dignity of that
category, though, to hear him speak philosophically
of a purely hypothetical diminution in activity,
one might think him approaching the end of his
tether — swear by the royal and ancient game of
golf as a sovereign specific for increasing infirmity,
so the subject of this portrait relies on fencing to
keep men perennially strong and healthy ; and he
considers that the complete change, the concen-
trated exercise, the perfect distraction of those
joyous evening bouts at the London Fencing
Club, after the day's work is done, have not
their equal as a recreation for busy men about
town.

Of Mr. Egerton Castle's literary work, his
romantic plays and stories, there is here no room
to write. " Saviolo," the short drama, which, at
the suggestion of Sir Henry (then Mr.) Irving,
who subsequently purchased it, he wrote in col-
laboration with Mr. Walter Pollock, at that time
editor of the Saturday Review, is a case in point
of the influence which his fencing exercised over
his writing, for the whole action of the play centres
round the character of the superb Italian swords-
man, with whom Shakespeare is thought to have
been intimately acquainted.
35

MR. EGERTON CASTLE

The dress in the accompanying clever photo-
graph is, by the way, the " regulation " of the Epde
Club, consisting of snow-white jacket, black breeches
or trousers, heeled shoes (to fence on grass or
gravel), and ordinary kid gloves without gauntlets.
It is not by any means the most picturesque
costume in which Mr. Castle has given displays
of his brilliant fencing, but for its own particular
purpose it would be difficult to improve upon.

36

MR. J. J. CAWTHRA

Born in Toronto in the year 1879, Mr. Cawthra
has, after residing in the Old Country for ten years,
returned to Canada, which affords him opportuni-
ties of indulging in his favourite ice games that
the mild winter climate of England must often
have denied him.

Lacrosse is the game with which he is naturally
associated, and those who remember his play for
the Duke of Argyle's team at Lord's in the spring
of 1902 might wonder whether he had ever found
time to play any other.

Yet before he went up to Clare College in 1897
he had already learnt to play Rugby football and
ice hockey at the Upper Canada College, while
Malvern taught him in addition association foot-
ball and cross-country running, the latter to such
good purpose that he finished third in the Ledbury
run.

At Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree,
he devoted the spare time of his five years' resi-
dence to raising the standard of University lacrosse,
getting his colours the first year and his captaincy
in 1900. For two years, as one born to the game,
he played centre for South v. North, as well as for
England v. Toronto.

As a runner also Mr. Cawthra has had his
triumphs, the first of which was third place
in the freshmen's three miles, for which he got
his half - blue, subsequently receiving his full
blue for the international meeting of Oxford and
Cambridge v. Harvard and Yale, in New York,
1901.

He was in the Cambridge athletic team for
four years, and was second in the Canadian one
mile championship.

37

MR. J. J. CAWTHRA

His best times were as follow : —

One hundred yards, io| sec.
Quarter-mile, 53I sec.
Half-mile, 2 min. i sec. (Clare v. Oriel).
One mile, 4 min. 30 sec.

Three miles, 1 5 min. 20 sees. (Cambridge University v. London
Athletic Club, 1900).

In 1900 he instituted and captained an ice-
hockey club at Cambridge, winning the Prince's
Cup in 1902.

To play hockey on the ice, a game which, so far
as this country is concerned, belongs rather to a
bygone period of rigorous winters, but which may
still be played regularly in Mr. Cawthra's native
land, one must be a finished skater, and, as a
matter of fact, he was captain of the speed-skating
club up at Cambridge, and won the 'Varsity races
in the mile and quarter-mile.

The law seems a placid enough pursuit for one
of such athletic prowess, but such is his destiny,
and he is at this moment working it out in far
Toronto.

Arduous as may be his studies, he will have no
lack of resource for his spare hours. Still fond of
lacrosse, though perhaps less addicted as the years
roll by to the fiercer joys of athletic competition, he
has lately developed a passion for the automobile,
and already he has in his stable two cars. He also
shoots and fishes, and has had many opportunities
of enjoying both sports, whether in the strictly
preserved coverts and waters in this country, or
amid the freer scenes and grander resources of the
Dominion.

Yet lacrosse is the game at which many of us
have seen him excel. Whether Mr. Cawthra will
find so vigorous a pastime suited to the more
gentle requirements of middle age, there is yet
plenty of time to learn.
38

CAPTAIN R. H. COLLIS

To own a racehorse is not always to be able to
ride it. There must be magnificent excitement in
bare ownership, but whether any other sensation
attainable in the realm of sport can quite equal
that of riding your own horse first past the
winning-post is a matter of opinion. The imagi-
nation, challenged to find a parallel, hatches
visions of a man's first tiger or salmon, of his
first century in county cricket, or of some victory
before ten thousand eyes at Henley, yet all these
laurels seem to wither before the triumph of
winning a Grand National on your own horse.
We have few gentlemen riders to-day in the front
rank, and indeed the recent death of poor Reginald
Ward lately lessened their number by one who
could ill be spared. It is therefore the more
gratifying to find that Captain Collis has been
among the willing subjects of Mr. Elliott's lens.

Born in 1875, in the County Tipperary, he went
through the Militia into the Hussars just one-and-
twenty years later, transferring almost immediately
to the 6th Dragoon Guards, in which he was
gazetted lieutenant in 1897 and captain in 1900.

Meantime, in the years 1899- 1900, he was
serving at the front in South Africa, taking part
in operations in both Cape Colony and the Orange
Free State. He was present at the relief of Kim-
berley, at Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Driefontein,
Karree Siding, and Zand River, at the last of
which actions he was dangerously wounded. It
was, however, in connection with the operations
at Colesberg that he was mentioned in despatches
and won his D.S.O., Queen's medal with three
clasps. In 1901 he was made Adjutant to the
Imperial Yeomanry, and still fills that post.

His racing has for the most part been crowded
within the last three years, dating in fact from that
39

CAPTAIN R. H. COLLIS

appointment, though he has raced off and on
during the past eight. In the Grand National he
has yet to ride. So far ill luck has persistently
dogged him, for, although he entered several times,
he never yet got his horses to the post, while in
the present year he actually had a severe fall only
the day before the race.

Yet of other events he has won his share,
notably the National Hunt Steeplechase, on Mr.
F. Bibby's Comfit, at Warwick in 1903, and in
both 1903 and 1904 the Grand Military Handicap
Steeplechase, the first year on his own horse,
Prince Talleyrand. Of other horses that he has
owned, mention may be made of Parma Violet
and Tame Fox.

With the exception of such shooting as he has
enjoyed in these islands, all his sport has been in
the saddle, and to his racing may be added a fair
amount of regimental polo and a good deal of
hunting with the Old Berkshire, Bicester, North
Warwick, Pembrokeshire, Kilkenny and other
packs.

40

0

tiS^

MR. J. DANIELL

The history of cricket and football furnishes a
remarkable number of examples of men who have
excelled in both. Perhaps Mr. C. B. Fry, who
figures elsewhere in these pages, is the combina-
tion of cricketer and footballer most familiar to
the present generation, but the subject of this
portrait, Mr. J. Daniell, can also pretend to con-
siderable eminence in both games. This is no
place in which to examine the reasons for this
frequent dual allegiance to two games apparently
so different the one from the other ; but, perhaps,
like foxhunting and polo, the two national games
may be regarded as complementary in season for
men gifted with superabundance of energy.

Though devoted to both games as a boy, it is
with Cambridge, in 1897, that Mr. Daniell's serious
football commenced. During the three following
winters he played for the University, winning on
the first two occasions against Oxford and losing on
the third. In 1899 he played for England against
Wales; and in the following year he captained
England against Ireland and Scotland, winning —
as followers of the game will remember — the former
and drawing the latter match. His play has from
time to time been interrupted, and in both 1901
and 1903 he was unable to take part in any inter-
national engagements. In the intervening year,
however, he again captained his own country
against Ireland and Scotland, and this time won
both, curiously enough in either case by six points
to three. He is not only a very fine Rugby for-
ward, but a splendid captain. The neat way in
which he engineers a scrimmage, never getting
his men muddled up as some captains seem to,
has more than once meant victory for his side.

His first-class cricket has been restricted to
Cambridge and Somerset, in both of which, how-
41

MR. J. DANIELL

ever, he has had excellent averages. For the
University he played in 1899, 1900, and 1901,
and in the 1900 Cambridge batting averages he
was second to T. L. Taylor with 30.

For Somerset his 1899 average was 29, and in
1900 it was 24. It is on the Taunton Ground
that he is particularly useful, not alone as a bat,
but also as a field "in the country." On that
small ground many a great bat has vowed to hit
boundaries wholesale, only to find that he has
not hit quite hard enough and that Mr. Daniell
just manages to get in the way, while off a slow
bowler like Braund he gets, and takes, quite a
surprising number of chances.

He is fond of many kinds of sport, but has
distinguished himself only at these two games.

4

P >

-^ >

EARL DE GREY

So long has Earl de Grey's name been a house-
hold word in shooting boxes, so long have we,
who shoot atrociously yet admire pretty marks-
manship, seen him in our mind's eye with four
birds at once in the air, that those who meet him
for the first time, and hear the humorous way in
which he dismisses these phenomenal feats of
shooting, must experience a shock. He is not
fond of telling others how to do that which he
does so well himself; he is the reverse of dogmatic,
and he has never written instructions to shooters.
In fact, as he frankly says when questioned on
the subject, he feels that it is practically impossible
to put down in black and white the exact spot
at which to aim, the precise degree of swing re-
quired, and the one and only moment at which
the trigger should be pressed. Not only will
two excellent shots attain the same end by devious
routes, but he considers it impossible to say
precisely how it is done. In fact, the almost
perfect attunement of hand, eye, and brain in
a mechanical perfection cannot be figured out
on paper.

There is, however, one point that he has been
known to describe as too often overlooked or
undervalued, and that is the position of the
shooter. If we seek a parallel in the game of
billiards, we shall find the professional constantly
instructing the novice how to stand so that the
point of the cue strikes the ball in the right place.
The pointing of a gun, says Lord de Grey, should
be studied with as much care. Thus, birds coming
to the right require the shooter's left leg well for-
ward ; when they come to the left, it is, per contra,
his right leg that should be advanced. Birds
overhead demand that his two legs should be
nearly in line, the left slightly in advance of the
43

EARL DE GREY

other. It will be found that in these positions
the necessary swing is more easily given to the
gun, and that the chances of aiming behind the
bird are materially lessened.

Another fault that Lord de Grey has been
known to emphasise as particularly worthy of
careful correction is that of dropping the gun at
the moment of pressing the trigger. The remedy
is to hold the left hand well forward, and to use
the left arm entirely for moving the gun, the
right arm being used only in pulling the trigger.

To say anything in this place of the very
beautiful all-round shooting of a sportsman, whose
performances were already related by Lord Wal-
singham in the earlier editions of the "Badminton"
shooting volumes, would be only an imperti-
nence. That no other living game-shot can beat
him, that only perhaps Lord Walsingham himself
can hold his own against him ; these are truisms.
That he would take very high rank in any shooting
with gun or rifle is beyond question, though he
is a man of strong preferences. For instance, he
thinks very little of tiger-shooting from the security
of howdah or machan, such as he enjoyed on a
sporting trip in India when his father was Viceroy.

Keenness and quickness, combined with steadi-
ness and a precious knack of keeping excitement
well in hand at critical moments when coolness
is everything, constitute the secret of Lord de
Grey's shooting. Doubtless, he has enjoyed other
sports, yet it would seem a waste of space to write
of him in any other connection than with the
gun.

LIEUT.-COL. H. DE BEAUVOIR
DE LISLE

When the poet wrote of black care sitting behind
the horseman, he must have overlooked cases of
such superb horsemanship as that of which Colonel
de Lisle is master. A man who rides as if he and
his horse are one animal, who has captained the
most successful of Indian polo teams, who in a
single year (1891) in India rode thirty-one winning
mounts out of a total of forty-nine, has no room for
black care, either behind or before. Those who are
judges of who's who and what's what at Hurling-
ham say that it is principally to his powerful hitting
and fine riding that Colonel de Lisle's usefulness
as a polo player is due. At the same time he must
be considered on the polo ground in two aspects :
as the player and as the captain. Even his ad-
mirers— and they are many — would not perhaps
resent his exclusion from the very small number of
brilliant polo players, while, for himself, he would
unhesitatingly disclaim any such pretension. At
the same time, apart from the individual qualifica-
tions of strength and horsemanship, which count
for a good deal, his powers of organisation, his inti-
mate knowledge of the peculiarities of each player
in his team, make him invaluable as a leader ; and
as military polo is the backbone of the game, and
as military discipline in a team is often the secret
of success, the officer who can enforce a discipline
that no one feels has the best chance of riding with
the winning team. It may be that Colonel de Lisle
is not brilliant ; it may even be, as a friend of his
whispers, that to keep in first-class play — and he
figures, be it remembered, in the Hurlingham list of
first-class players — he needs three times the practice
required by other good players ; the fact remains
that his regimental team in India had an almost
45

COL. H. DE BEAUVOIR DE LISLE

unbroken list of successes that speak a good deal
for its captain.

His polo career has so far covered a period of
just twenty years. It was in 1883 that he joined
the Durham Light Infantry at Gibraltar, and it was
under the shadow of the Rock that he first learned
to hit a ball from pony back. It was, however, in
Egypt, in 1888, that he first played regular polo
whenever opportunity offered, at Cairo, Wady
Haifa and Assouan. The following year he went
to India, and there he at once organised a Regi-
mental Polo Club, with which, two years later, he
won the Quetta Polo Tournament. The history of
the team down to 1898, when the regiment left
India, was one of almost unbroken sunshine
chequered with but two passing showers, a failure
at the Infantry Polo Tournament in 1893 and one
other. Sixteen victories went during that period to
the credit of Colonel de Lisle and his men, includ-
ing four in the Infantry Tournament, three each in
the Inter-Regimental and Jubbulpore fixtures, the
Mhow Tournament twice, single wins at Poona,
Bombay, and Johdpore, and finally the champion-
ship. A full explanation of so remarkable a series
of wins would, no doubt, involve some account of
other players in the victorious team, but it would
be unreasonable to deny Colonel de Lisle his share
of the success.

Since his return to England he has organised
the Students' polo team, and has played for The
Magpies. It is in the saddle that he excels, and if
he had had greater chances of hunting and pig-
sticking he would no doubt have held his own at
these as well as on the polo ground. At shooting
or fishing, or at games that have to be played on
foot, he would in all probability vote himself a
duffer. Such a horseman has, in fact, his limita-
tions when there is no horse.
46

THE EARL OF DENBIGH

If one episode interested loyal anglers more than
another during last year, it was the introduction of
rainbow trout into the lake at Buckingham Palace,
and the name associated with that effort is Lord
Denbigh's. Lord Denbigh will say that the whole
idea, nay, his own interest in trout hatching from
its first inception, was due to his cousin, Mr. John
Feilding, and this, no doubt, is right. Still, associ-
ations die hard, and nine out of ten who take any
interest in such matters at all would, if asked, name
Lord Denbigh as the originator and architect of
the scheme.

Scarcely less interesting was the address with
which, some months later, he proved the success of
the experiment by catching some of the trout, three
on one evening late in July. The largest weighed
just i6J ounces, and they were caught respectively
on a small black hackle, a coachman, and a spent
gnat, and all gave great sport. The spectacle of
well-conditioned, silvery trout rising freely on all
sides at gnats and moths on a summer's evening
in the heart of London must have been a gratify-
ing one.

He is a keen, all-round sportsman, and Lady
Denbigh has often been by his side, whether hunt-
ing with the Atherstone or stalking big game in
Cashmere. In the hunting field they are sometimes
accompanied by several of their children, familiar
to followers of the hunt as the " Newnham Com-
mando."

It was in 1885 that he went with his battery to
India, having married in the preceding year, and,
as things were quiet, he got three months' leave to
go with his wife into Cashmere. That was by no
means his first sporting trip abroad, however, for,
after he had served in the Egyptian Campaign of
1882 in a field battery, he went to Canada with his
47

THE EARL OF DENBIGH

father shortly after his appointment to the Royal
Horse Artillery, and there, amid the wild rice
swamps and shallows that border Lake St. Clair,
he had his first experience of local duck-shooting
and some capital days with canvas-backs over
decoys.

It was in Cashmere, however, that, after follow-
ing the roughest tracks, mostly devastated by ava-
lanches, and reaching the nullahs of the Kajnagh,
across the Jhelum, he got markhor and bear. The
two finest markhor that he sighted and stalked were
lost under somewhat trying circumstances. He had
toiled and clambered in rain from five in the morn-
ing until two or three in the afternoon, and at last,
after an interminable following of the ridge between
the nullahs, he saw the markhor of his dreams ; in
fact, two of them lying side by side far below him.
Another two hours went in getting near, and then,
after all the hard work, he missed what he has de-
scribed as an easy shot, and he attributes his failure
to being dead-beat at the moment and making too
little allowance for firing down on the subject.
Nowadays he is able to discuss the episode with
calmness, but it is said that he took some time
getting over it.

After his promotion and subsequent return
home to take up the duties of A.D.C. on the staff
of Lord Londonderry, then Lord-Lieutenant of
Ireland, Lord Denbigh gave up arms and embraced
politics, working hard for three years as candidate
for the Rugby division of Warwickshire, but, as his
father died shortly before the General Election of
1892, his chance of standing was gone.

He is an enthusiast at that which he puts his
hand to, and he has been out in camp with the
men every year since his appointment to the com-
mand of the Hon. Artillery Company. Last autumn
48

THE EARL OF DENBIGH

he took over nearly two hundred of them on a visit
to the branch founded in Boston in 1638, after which
Lady Denbigh and he visited a mining property in
Mexico, His work in connection with the London
County Council was thorough, perhaps, rather than
well known, but he was particularly prominent
when he resigned his seat for the City and went to
Battersea, losing to Mr. John Burns by twelve
hundred votes.

He was given an appointment in the Govern-
ment as a Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria in
1896, and in that capacity accompanied Her Majesty
to Ireland four years later. He has retained the
appointment under the King, and in the House of
Lords he represents the Irish Office, answers Irish
questions, and has charge of minor Irish Govern-
ment bills.

Fishing, shooting, and hunting are all favourite
pastimes with him, but he also pays close attention
to his estate and tenantry, frequently throwing open
the beautiful grounds at Newnham to the neigh-
bouring public and never finding his trust abused.
He is also interested in gardening and is frequently
seen at the autumn bulb sales in London, sending
down large quantities to Newnham, and even suc-
ceeding in interesting the villagers in their culture.
This he contrives by selling some thirty thousand
bulbs, daffodils, narcissi, gladioli and tulips, snow-
drops and hyacinths, at cost price and in small lots,
and the local enthusiasm in bulb culture now runs
high and even supports hyacinth shows. In sugar
beet he has also made some experiments, not on a
lavish scale, but sufficient to convince him that it
might be a profitable crop if a market were made
for the roots.

As a man of boundless energy and extraordin-
arily varied interests Lord Denbigh would be hard
49 D

THE EARL OF DENBIGH

to beat, and it must be a matter of great pleasure to
him that his sons inherit his love of sport and also
some of his proficiency. They are excellent shots
and keen fishermen, and for the last six or eight
years they have accompanied him regularly on some
sporting trip to Scotland, Ireland, South Uist,
Norway, or Germany.

Last spring his second son passed brilliantly out
of the Britannia, second, in fact, out of sixty-five,
carrying off the grand aggregate for highest in all
subjects put together. He then joined the Bac-
chante on the Mediterranean station, and, character-
istically, his father stowed away in his sea-chest a
serviceable sea-rod and a stock of tackle sufficient
to empty that still sea of all its remaining fishes.

50

MR. CLINTON DENT

Those who have travelled in the East are familiar
with the sharp dividing line between the moun-
taineers and the men of the plains. The former
are a hardy, fighting race, poor and proud, and
a little addicted to plundering their sleeker and
more peace-loving brethren of the valleys. Yet
each keeps to his own range, and those born
and bred at sea-level would no more dream of
venturing into the hills than the ostrich would
attempt the flight of the eagle. But civilised man
is a restless animal. The arboreal habits of his
ancestry survive in the schoolboy's love of climb-
ing after birds' nests, and even after he has left
school he finds, if so constituted, delight in climb-
ing mountains for the climb's sake. To ascend a
high peak for the sake of the view or even for
the bodily exercise is intelligible enough to the
average understanding, but to climb it, with in-
finite effort and risks indescribable, merely for the
pleasure of standing somewhat higher than the
last pioneer, and then to return to lower earth,
is an ambition that must belong to a higher in-
telligence than that possessed by most of us who
are not members of the Alpine Club, of which,
in 1886, Mr. Clinton Dent was the youngest
president ever elected.

His present enthusiasm for mountain-climbing,
which passes all else save his enthusiasm for his
professional work, was characteristically burnt into
him by an attack of snow-blindness on the lower
rocks of the Matterhorn, a little above the present
hut. This was in September 1864, the year before
the famous accident, and there was a thick pall
of fresh snow over the Alps, which so affected his
eyes that he feels the effect to this day. And he
likes it so much, that no more ardent mountaineer
ever swung an axe. He takes his mountaineering
51

MR. CLINTON DENT

seriously. To him it is, like navigation, a difficult
game both to learn and to play. The use of the
axe has to be acquired like the use of an oar, a
bat, or a racquet, and he considers that the highest
form, and perhaps also the most neglected form,
of the sport is snowcraft.

The Alps kept him busy in his holidays until
1880. During the ten years previous he did a
deal of climbing in what are now hackneyed dis-
tricts of Switzerland, but which in those days
were not overrun, overbuilt, and overboomed.
From 1873 to 1878 he spent his holidays in the
Chamonix district, and it was then that, to his
regret, the chief interest of the mountaineering
world centred in the possibility of ascending such
subsidiary but formidable-looking peaks as the
Aiguilles in the Mont Blanc group. This he
would probably describe as the acrobatic element
of mountaineering, but it certainly attracts to this
day a very large number of those who call them-
selves serious mountaineers.

More famous are his expeditions in the
Caucasus, between 1886 and 1895, the best known
episode in which was the fatal accident to his
companions, Messrs. Donkin and Fox, and their
two guides, Streich and Fischer. This was in
1888, and in the following year he organised a
search party to ascertain the exact fate which had
overtaken them. From what was found there
seems to be no doubt that they were all killed
on Koshtantau, then known in the atlases as
Dych-tau, and Mr. Dent himself has often given
it as his firm belief that their bodies will be
recovered in six or seven years time at the end
of the Tiutiun Glacier. Now and again the
mountain spirits take this dreadful revenge, and
indeed, from the perusal of two collections of stories
52

MR. CLINTON DENT

of mountain adventure recently published by an
intrepid lady, the danger of Mr. Dent's favourite
exercise seems to constitute no small part of its
attractiveness. He escaped the accident of 1888
by a fortunate attack of Batoum fever, which com-
pelled him to secede from the party, and he has
always since been of opinion that the accident
would never have happened if he had been with
them. Still, though he has up to the present come
through many hairbreadth climbs without loss of
life or limb, he also has had his joys, as moun-
taineers reckon joys. One of these may be cited
as a fair sample. Three or four years ago he,
with two scientific friends, was spending his holi-
day on Mont Blanc, cheerfully making observations
on the effect of high altitudes on the human blood.
A blizzard beset them in the Vallot Hut, where
they spent great part of a week in an atmosphere
composed for the most part of carbonic acid.

On another occasion, while making the first
ascent ever accomplished of the Rothhorn from
the Zermatt side, he saw an immense slab of rock
sliding down at great speed on the party, and
indeed it only narrowly missed sweeping Fer-
dinand Imseng, a famous guide, into eternity.
The remarkable knowledge acquired by a moun-
taineer like Mr. Dent is that he can fearlessly
negotiate climbs amid moraine and crevasse which
would appal the Swiss folk indigenous to the
valleys. In all probability, the average Swiss
conception of Paradise would approximate to the
comfortable flatness of Norfolk, but for your tried
mountaineer there is no elysium like to that of the
Alps or Caucasus.

If he were questioned as to his love of sport
generally, Mr. Dent would probably wave his hand
along the volumes of the "Badminton Library"
53

MR. CLINTON DENT

— he contributed the major portion of that on
"Mountaineering" — excluding only dancing, horse-
racing, and the shooting of big game. The last-
named has no attraction for him, since he missed
every chamois he ever shot at.

Until surgery took up all the time not spent
in mountain-climbing, he used to play a deal of
cricket, and his special pride was a peculiar twister,
with which, it is reported, he to this day gets
several wickets in the annual village match. And
still, when he has done his work of mercy, as a
healer of men, at sea-level, Mr. Dent packs his
knapsack, and is away to the realm of the mountain
gnomes whenever he can be spared.

54

MESSRS. R. F. AND
H. L. DOHERTY

As demonstrated in the late seventies by the
Renshaws and, somewhat later, by the Baddeleys,
partnerships between brothers have more than once
made for championship in lawn tennis doubles,
and the lawn tennis world has during the past
few seasons once more been made to accept the
same fact by the brothers portrayed on the next
page. Though much of their interesting career
in the game which they have made their own is
necessarily one story, it will be more in keeping
with the plan of this volume if their individual
performances be briefly considered in order,

Mr. Reginald Frank Doherty, the elder of the
two — there is not, as will easily be seen from the
photograph, any of the ridiculous resemblance
which, more than once, led umpires to mistake
one of the Renshaws for the other — was educated
at St. Peter's College, Westminster, and Trinity
College, Cambridge. His first game was football,
in which, though a useful player at school, he
never particularly distinguished himself. He also
plays both golf and real tennis. It is, however, in
lawn tennis that he has won his laurels, and, with
one or two small failures to relieve the monotony
of a success that would otherwise have been tedious
even to his admirers, his career has been one long
triumph.

Already at the age of twelve he played in a
tournament at Llandudno with an elder brother,
one year his senior, the two winning on that occa-
sion the Juvenile Doubles ; but it was not perhaps
before the year 1892 that he came into prominence
as a player in open tournaments. In the following
year he attracted considerable attention by winning
the handicap singles at both Brighton and East-
55

MESSRS. R. F. AND H. L. DOHERTY

bourne, as well as by making a determined, though
unsuccessful, fight in the level event against the
then invincible W. Baddeley. In 1894, when up
at Cambridge, he played against Oxford, and won
all his single matches without losing a set, and
those who confidently expected that his play and
example would do much to improve lawn tennis
at the University were not disappointed. It was
in that year that he won the Fitzwilliam Purse at
Dublin ; but his best performance at the time was
in the Long Vacation when he, in the Exmouth
Tournament Singles, successively defeated Messrs.
E. R. Allen, W. Renshaw, H. S. Barlow, and
C. G. Allen, losing only three sets throughout.
In 1895 he was made President of the C.U.L.T.C.,
and in the same year he won important matches at
Homburg, Baden-Baden, distinguishing himself
later at Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. His crown-
ing success was when, in 1897, he won the Double
Event, thereby becoming All England Singles and
Doubles Champion ; and in 1899 he won the Irish
Championship, which he held for three years, or
one year less than the period during which he held
the Championship of England. In 1901, handi-
capped by indifferent health, he lost the Singles
Championship after winning the first set, but he
retained the Doubles Championship with his
brother, the two defeating the celebrated American
champions, Davis and Ward. In 1902 he lost the
Doubles by a few points, being chosen with his
brother to represent England against America.
The two, who received an enthusiastic reception,
succeeded in winning the American Doubles
Championship, but unfortunately the matches won
by R. F. Doherty from Whitman and Earned
(Champion) were not in the International Match,
so that the cup was not brought back.
56

MESSRS. R. F. AND H. L. DOHERTY

Mr. Hugh Lawrence Doherty, the younger
brother, was at the same school and college as
his brother, and, like him, he plays also real tennis
and golf, the latter with some distinction, par-
ticularly at Cannes, where he won the prize given
by H.I.H. the Grand Duke Michael, and several
besides. Many of his successes have necessarily
received notice in the course of the foregoing re-
marks on his brother's play, but he has had some
victories on his own account, and he is further
distinguished from his brother by a very strong
talent for drawing and painting, which, however,
he has never cultivated as it deserves. His lawn
tennis career dates from the year 1892, when, at
Scarborough, he was the winner in the All Eng-
land Championship for boys under sixteen years
of age. During the next year or two his prin-
cipal successes were made in partnership with his
brother, and need not therefore be repeated. He
also filled the position of President of the
C.U.L.T.C. After, with his brother, defeating
the Baddeleys in the Doubles Championship in
1897, he held the championship for five years
in succession. Ill-health also interfered with his
play, and, as one of the many victims of influenza,
he was for some time an absentee at first-class
meetings. In 1900 he won the championship at
the He de Puteaux and Dinard, and in 1902 he
went to America, but did not compete in the
singles. Since his last victory in June 1903,
which gave him the All England Championship
for the second time, he also holds the Doubles
Championship for the sixth, an almost unique
record.

To any one who has any notion of the con-
stant and unremitting practice needed to achieve
and retain first place in so exigent a game as lawn
57

MESSRS. R. F. AND H. L. DOHERTY

tennis, it will hardly come as a surprise that these
brothers have no time for other forms of sport.
Some folks aspire to a moderate proficiency in
many arts ; the brothers Doherty are modestly
content to be first in one.

58

THE EARL OF DURHAM

No discussion on the ethics of racing, or on the
effectual steps which the Jockey Club has of late
years taken to place the sport on a healthy and
decent basis, ever proceeds far without Lord Dur-
ham's name cropping up ; and indeed, since his
famous, one might say historic, speech at the Gim-
crack dinner in 1887, it may be said that certainly
no man in all that illustrious list of stewards has
been more wholesomely associated in the public
mind with turf reform. Scarcely less certain to
attract notice was his determined opposition in the
House of Lords to Lord Davey's Betting Bill in
1903, an attitude which must have been largely in-
strumental in securing the defeat by nine votes
of the second reading of a measure which he doubt-
less, and with good reason, regarded as unneces-
sarily harsh, palpably impracticable, and undeniably
insincere. The racecourse has many detractors,
and some of its practices are surely not above
criticism. Yet, so long as men of Lord Durham's
clear judgment and strength of purpose watch over
its conduct, there is no danger at all of its relapsing
into the scandalous condition in which he must
have found it in the seventies. It was, in fact, in
1874 that Lord Durham was first connected with
the turf, though he did not own a racehorse for
another seven years, and was not elected to the
Jockey Club until the year after that, 1882.
During the interval that has since elapsed he
has, as may be seen by a glance at the Racing
Calendar, taken a leading part in all important
reform ; and whenever any jockey, British or
otherwise, is warned off on account of a proved
misdemeanour, we may be sure that Lord Durham
was either the prime mover, or, at any rate, an
uncompromising advocate of his downfall.

On the course itself his has never been a familiar
59

THE EARL OF DURHAM

figure, though I believe he did once ride and win at
Stockbridge. It is, however, in the hunting field
that he has ridden most. From the age of five,
when, with his twin brother, he was " blooded " by
the late Lord Wemyss, who in those days hunted
the border country of Northumberland, he has been
a regular attendant in the field. His first acci-
dent was when, aged eight, he broke his leg by
his pony falling back on him ; and during his
boyhood he hunted in North Durham and North
Northumberland.

He was educated at Cheam and Eton, playing
cricket at the latter and getting his twenty-two.
He was also in those days fond of football. From
Eton he proceeded straight to the Coldstream
Guards in 1874, remaining with the regiment until
his father died in 1879. When on duty, he hunted
occasionally with both the Rothschild staghounds
and Windsor drag, but his foxhunting was neces-
sarily limited during that period.

Lord Durham is no fisherman, though he has
tried his luck as occasion offered. Of shooting,
however, he is fond, though of late years his sport
has been confined to the pheasant coverts at
Lambton and to such deer forests as he has rented
in Scotland, In former years, however, he has
had big game and other shooting abroad, having
killed tigers in India, both in the winter of 1881-82
and last year when over for the Durbar. He has
also yachted off the coast of Albania, and there
enjoyed excellent woodcock and pig shooting. In-
deed, his only protracted trip devoid of shooting
was when, in 1886, he travelled through America
as far as Vancouver and San Francisco, though, of
course, his shorter excursions to Italy, Greece, and
Egypt were similarly barren of sport.

60

CAPTAIN WALTER
EDGWORTH - JOHNSTONE

As an exponent of the noble art of self-defence, as
a master of the sabre and foils, and as the very-
genius of a military assault - at - arms. Captain
Edgworth-Johnstone stands almost alone; while
his book on "Boxing" has been widely read.

His military and athletic records have alike
been brilliant, even for an Irishman. In the
Expedition to the West Coast of Africa, 1887, he
served with such distinction as to be mentioned
in despatches and to receive the medal and clasp,
honours which again fell to him in another ex-
pedition in that region some years later.

His successes in games, and more particularly
in boxing and fencing, date both before and since
his fighting period. Already more than twenty
years ago he for three years in succession repre-
sented Dublin University in both cricket and foot-
ball, subsequently playing, also in both games,
for Sandhurst. He was Heavy - Weight Army
Champion in 1894, and in the two following years
held the Amateur Heavy- Weight of All England
Championship. The sabre won him the Royal
Military Tournament Challenge Cup (1896 and
1900), and the Amateur Championship (1898 and
1900), in addition to other honours in 1899.

His great success as a boxer is in all proba-
bility due to his having early adopted the most
modern American methods of both training and
fighting. "Fancy" work never attracted him.
He went in for hitting power. He worked up
the " knock-out " blow with the right hand, using
it whenever he got an opening. Little wonder
that the other man went down so often ! Rapid,
accurate and severe hitting was administered on
important occasions with such despatch that he
61

CAPT. W. EDGWORTH-JOHNSTONE

won most of his big bouts in the first round.
Only once did an opponent reach the third round ;
not once did he get through it. This undivided
attention to the putting of one's adversary hors
de combat as quickly as possible is surely better
than the worship of that fetish, Style, to which
instructors devote so much of their own time and
that of the pupils, whom they in consequence turn
out clever sparrers and little else.

In his sabre-fencing Captain Edgworth-John-
stone is an ardent disciple of the Masiello (Floren-
tine) School, and in him we see a worthy pupil
of a brilliant instructor, Mr. H. B. Foerster,
perhaps the finest sabreur this country has ever
produced.

He still plays a good deal of cricket ; and in a
match in 1902, playing for the Free Foresters
against Lord Dunleith's Eleven, at Ballywater, he
proved by far the most useful all-round player in
either team. In the first innings of his side he
scored 209 out of a total of 255, and in the second
he was within three of his 50. When his side was
in the field he bowled ten wickets and held five
catches, a feat which, in any cricket match, is
probably in the nature of a record.

Besides being passionately fond of all kinds
of game-shooting, Mr. Edgworth-Johnstone is a
very keen dry-fly fisherman, though as yet most
of his fish have been caught in Ireland, and he has
still to stalk a chalk-stream trout. He cycles and
he golfs ; and, incidentally, he holds the post of
Assistant-Inspector of Gymnasia at Aldershot, a
post to which he brings a ripe experience as super-
intendent and assistant-inspector of more than one
military gymnasium during his service in Ireland.

62

MR. C. B. FRY

The entire agitation for a wider wicket, which not
long ago convulsed the cricket world, threatening
to bring the powers at Lord's into momentary clash
with general opinion, may possibly be traced to the
brilliant scoring of Mr. Fry and a distinguished
partner of his triumphs who figures on another
page. It is on record that in one season, 1901,
Fry made six consecutive centuries, and indeed
"another century for Fry" has become an almost
trite comment on the evening paper " stop press "
news any time these five summers.

As cricketer, footballer, and athlete combined
he has not his equal, and those who lament
the physical decadence of the age might perhaps
be challenged to find his rival, outside the realm
of myth, in any other period.

Born in Surrey in 1872, he went to Repton,
and there played cricket under the Rev. A. Forman,
figuring in the Repton Eleven for four seasons,
first under the captaincy of Mr. Lionel Palairet,
and for the last two years himself captain.

At Wadham, outside his cricket distinctions,
he was senior scholar, and performed the then
record long jump of 23 ft. 6i in. ; and a little
later, as captain of both cricket and football for
the University and President of the O.U.A.C,
he wore a triple crown that has been borne by no
one else.

Fry made one of his usual centuries in the
'Varsity match at Lord's. Those who are familiar
with his name in the Sussex Eleven may not re-
member that, by the qualification of his birth, at
Croydon, this wonderful cricketer played one match
in 1 89 1 for Surrey. From 1897 on, however, he
has played for Sussex, having previously, in the
winter of 1895-96, played in Lord Hawke's team in
South Africa, on which tour he headed the batting
(>2

MR. C. B. FRY

averages. In 1899 he played in all the "Test"
matches against the Australians.

A careful study of the cricketing annuals of the
last five years would probably, in the hands of a
competent calculator, reveal a unique number of
records. His six consecutive centuries in a season
have already been noticed. In 1898, playing at
Brighton against Middlesex, he made two cen-
turies (he has since repeated this performance
twice), being not out in the second innings. Now
and again, it is true, his admirers have been dis-
appointed by a failure to score, but more often
it happens that his scoring is so high as almost
to call for apology to the bowlers, whom he does
more to tire out than most living cricketers.

His cricket, unlike Maclaren's, is the result
of untiring practice. Those who have seen him
batting in his Hampshire garden, with most of
the fielding done by a small dog of fine zeal but
doubtful ancestry, are not likely to forget it.

As to his football, he is an International, and
has played back both for the Corinthians and for
the Southampton team, which was not far from
winning the Association Cup three years ago.

He was once asked to row for his College, but
he found that he had no time for it. He is one of
the keenest of fly-fishermen, very fond of shooting,
and partial to a day with hounds. He is passion-
ately fond of horses, yet not blind to the enjoy-
ment of the motor-car recently presented to him
by his county.

He is still so young that it is impossible to say
what he may or may not do, but those who know
how much time he spends in summer on the cricket
field marvel at the voluminous writings signed with
his name. And now, after his name has for some
years been familiar in both the daily press and a
64

%

MR. C. B. FRY

monthly magazine, he has brought out what pro-
mises to be the most popular English magazine of
sport and outdoor life.

Fry's is the healthy mind in the healthy body ;
the beautiful balance of action and thought which
means as much in the game of life as in the
game of cricket. Not very far removed from
boyhood in years, he is absolutely a boy at heart —
keen, enthusiastic, as willing to learn as to teach.
Unbounded outdoor energy is not often accom-
panied by a passion for learning. When in Rome
he rushed about from one sacred ruin to another,
anxious to renew as quickly as possible his friend-
ship with his old school classics. One winter in
town he spent in great part at the Royal Geo-
graphical Society, taking up surveying and the
use of the theodolite and sextant, and frequently
visiting Battersea Bridge to take new observa-
tions. When, again, he wished to learn riding,
he stuck to all manner of mounts at the Royal
Artillery riding-school in St. John's Wood until
he is now a fair horseman, and can look back
with equanimity to a certain occasion during a
cricketing visit to South Africa on which he put
himself on the wrong horse and very nearly rode
into eternity. His cricketing zeal is perhaps too
well known to need further evidence, but I never
knew another man who would practise either
cricket, or, for the matter of that, football, more
zealously with anybody, in any place, in any
weather, or in any temperature.

To write of Fry at all is a temptation to become
both enthusiastic and anecdotal, and for neither
have I space. Yet it is perhaps worth recalling
the fact that within three days of a bad smash
when playing for the Corinthians, so bad indeed
that his friends feared for his eyesight, he was to
65 E

MR. C. B. FRY

be seen, with a most picturesque black eye, learning
as much as he could from Alfred Shaw, and he
always admits that he owes the genial Nottingham
bowler a great deal. Nor am I minded to forget
the circumstances in which he played that brilliant
second century last year against Surrey, the power
and determination with which, like another Jessop,
he smote the bowling in all directions. He had
been suddenly roused to active indignation by a
conviction that Relf had been given out wrongly.

66

VISCOUNT GALWAY

If few men have had greater opportunities than
Lord Galway of enjoying all manner of sport, fewer
still perhaps have made better use of such chances
as came their way.

Born rather less than sixty years ago, he in-
herited from his father, the sixth Viscount, an
ardent love of hunting and an enthusiasm in
various other sports as well. For years, until,
indeed, his father died in 1876, the two went
each autumn to the deer forest at Langwell, and
the evidence of the splendid sport they had there
remains in the fine collection of heads at Serlby.
He has, however, excelled in a degree by no means
common among men whose chief hobby is fox-
hunting, with both larger and smaller game. Few
of his contemporaries would care to back them-
selves against him at a driven partridge coming
down wind ; and, on the other hand, his own par-
ticular sanctum at Serlby is decorated with trophies
of tiger, bear, and bison from Cooch Behar. Here,
too, a mighty boar surmounted by crossed spears
recalls to him merry gallops in the company of that
fine sportsman, the Maharajah Pertab Singh.

Lord Galway also throws a good fly, as many
salmon have known to their cost when they lay on
the banks of more than one river in Scotland,
Finland, Norway, and Sweden. He can play a
good game on the golf links when in the mood,
and most autumns see him on a short holiday at
North Berwick.

It is, however, as a hunting man that he is best
known to his generation, and his consummate skill
and tact in handling his pack is said by those who
know to recall the best days of Squire Osbaldestone
and Mr. Assheton Smith. He hunts his own
hounds four days a week, and, in addition to his
wonderful kennel knowledge, he rides as hard as
67

VISCOUNT GALWAY

he did thirty years ago and travels across country
with the best.

In addition to his attention to field sports,
however, Lord Galway is a busy man with many
other calls on his time. As A.D.C. to H.M. the
King, and as a member of the Yeomanry Advisory
Board at the War Office, he has his duties to
perform, besides which, too, he is the Vice-Chair-
man of the Notts County Council and colonel of
that crack yeomanry regiment, the Sherwood
Rangers.

The fourteen years during which Viscount
Galway sat in the House of Commons for North
Notts, before his constituency was divided into
four, were a period of hard work, and although
after 1876, when the late Viscount died, he hunted
his own hounds regularly, he was never absent from
any important division, and was always nicknamed
the "Stormy Petrel." In 1887 an English peerage
was given him, and in 1897 he was made A.D.C.
to the late Queen, an honour which has been
continued to him by the King.

68

GENERAL SIR MONTAGU
GERARD

When too rapid promotion, the inevitable result
of brevets for early war services, condemns a
soldier to enforced inactivity in his profession long
before he has the desire to be idle, he is to be
envied memories of over two hundred tigers and as
many bears and panthers. Such a sportsman as Sir
Montagu Gerard can always console himself, now
that active service is no longer permitted him, with

" The shadow of glory,
Dim image of war,"

as some one has called sport.

That the profession of arms and the pursuit of
sport go well together these pages give many
evidences, but none perhaps more convincing than
that afforded by the career of General Gerard.
His recently-published journals present such agree-
able alternation of field sports and active service, of
garrison reminiscence and social functions in many
societies, as should disarm the criticism of those
who take exception to any endeavour to combine
sport and soldiering. His record is proof enough
that he never devoted his time to the rifle or boar
spear to the prejudice of the sterner duties that
belonged to his position in the East. He hunts
the Thug and Pathan as merrily as pig or tiger,
and of these dangerous brutes he spears the one
and shoots the other as unconcernedly as men at
home play salmon and shoot snipe. The delibe-
rations of a tent club or the prosecution of a
hazardous punitive expedition on the frontiers are
both his serious business in their proper season,
and we find him now marching on Kabul, now
hunting in the anointed company of Hungarian
nobles, now skating on the frozen ponds of the
Himalaya, now camping in the beautiful cork-woods
near Tangier.

69

SIR MONTAGU GERARD

Entering the Royal Artillery forty years ago,
he subsequently served first in the Bengal Staff
Corps and then in the Central India Horse, with the
latter of which he was connected for five-and-twenty
years. Among the many landmarks on the straight
road of a brilliant career, on which he rarely halted
and never turned back, were the medal and des-
patches in the Abyssinian War, three mentions in
despatches, a medal and the Kandahar star in the
Afghan War, and a C.B. and other honours in the
Egyptian campaign. He also spent nearly twelve
months in disguise, exploring 3000 miles of prac-
tically untrodden tracks between the Persian Gulf
and Caspian. During that trying period he was
the recipient of the dubious hospitality of some of
the most lawless of the turbulent Kurdish clans,
squatting in oriental fashion with their chieftains,
and with them feeding with the fingers from
the common platter. A few years later he was
appointed Chief of the Staff to the present Czar
throughout his Indian tour, at the conclusion of
which His Imperial Highness specially invited
him as a guest in his further Eastern peregrina-
tions. Later still he served as military attachd
at St. Petersburg, and both in Russia and the
Carpathians he has bagged specimens of most
European big game. He was also British Com-
missioner in the Pamir boundary delimitation, a
work which a single season sufficed to bring to
a successful issue, and he was more recently
deputed to report on the remount question in both
Hungary and Russia. These allusions to his varied
and valuable professional services are offered not
from any lack of sporting material in his biography,
but in case they may help to correct the erroneous
impression of those who see incompatibility in pro-
ficiency in sport and distinguished public services.
70

A

THE MARQUESS OF
GRANBY

The salmon and the trout, the grouse, the driven
partridge and the rocketing pheasant are all to
Lord Granby's liking, and when none of these
are available there is little that pleases him better
than sitting in the Pavilion at Lord's and criticis-
ing the game.

Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, saw him
through the stage which an eminent divine once
described as "vealy." He has, since those days,
interested himself in Conservative politics, sitting
from 1888 to 1895 for a hunting division of Leices-
tershire, of which county he is now Lord Lieu-
tenant, and acting as principal private secretary to
the late Lord Salisbury from 1884 to 1888. In
1896 he was summoned to the House of Lords in
his father's Barony of Manners of Haddon.

Perhaps trout-fishing, on which he has written
a delightful and instructive volume, is Lord
Granby's favourite sport, and even to-day, though
he has known its delights these thirty years, he
feels as keen when the spring comes round as any
younger angler. The Hertfordshire Mimram and
the Derbyshire Lathkill have given him his best
trout, and have between them taught him all he
knows — and that is a large order — of both wet and
dry fly. On one evening he had two trout weigh-
ing respectively 3I and 2^ lbs. out of Lord Dacre's
water on the former river, while on the latter he
has more than once made baskets of ten or fifteen
brace. The Kennet, the Gloucestershire Colne and
the Chess have also contributed to his sport with
trout, and on the last-named river indeed he had
during last year, with a friend, fifty-one trout weigh-
ing just over 74 lbs. in two days of fishing, while
they put back as many more — a fine record for two
7»

THE MARQUESS OF GRANBY

rods. On the whole, I expect that Lord Granby
places a really good day with the dry fly above any
other form of sport. Certainly he is, though never
narrow in his sport, an artist with the rod as with
the pen. Not even Mr. Halford, the High Priest
of the chalk stream, is a greater stickler for the
proprieties, a warmer advocate of the upright-
winged invitation to the wariest members of
a family which, in such circumstances, unbend
only to the proper formalities of a well-timed intro-
duction.

Nevertheless, he has had fine sport with salmon
as well. For some twenty years he spent nearly
every autumn at Birnam. In those days the Tay
was at its best, and wonderful bags of salmon and
grilse were made, under ordinarily favourable con-
ditions, on the Murthly, Burnmouth, Isla, Stobhall,
and Stanley beats. He had no water of his own,
but he had friends who liked their water fished by
a good sportsman, and in this way he has probably
fished every yard of the Tay from Dunkeld to
Perth. When Mr. Barclay Field had the Stobhall
and other beats, he must often have seen thirty or
forty fine salmon killed in a day to five or six
rods. His own best performance on the Stobhall
water was when he killed eight fish on one day,
averaging over 20 lbs., the largest weighing 31
lbs. On the Murthly water, too, by the kindness
of Mr. — now Sir Henry — and Mrs. Graham, and
on Benchill, when fished by Sir W. Elliott, he
fished with varying luck over a number of seasons.
Nor has the Tweed failed him, for one October,
fishing with Mr. Greville Douglas at Wark, the
two rods killed a score of fish ; and another day
he himself landed half-a-dozen fish in three-
quarters of an hour, fishing the stretch of the
Mertoun water above the red bridge at St, Bos-
72

THE MARQUESS OF GRANBY

well's. Two consecutive salmon of his on the
" Snipe " cast at Wark weighed 30J and 29^ lbs.

Of sport with the gun, too, Lord Granby has
had his share, and the informing article on grouse
and grouse shooting which, some years ago,
he contributed to Badminton Magazine attracted
much attention at the time. Capercailzie, black-
cock, snipe, duck and woodcock have all fallen to
his gun at Birnam, both when held by Sir John
Millais and by Mr. and Mrs. Graham. Since
those early days, he has shot on many moors,
taking part in grouse drives where seven hundred
brace fell to four guns, and more frequently, where
from two hundred and fifty to five hundred brace
fell to five or six.

He does not, however, find his greatest pleasure
in taking part in record drives. The way in
which the birds are put over the guns means much
more to him than the actual number killed : and
as regards partridge driving, perhaps his favourite
form of shooting, he has had more enjoyment out
of those early January days, with a modest bag of
perhaps forty brace to four or five guns, than in
assisting at drives with their three hundred and
fifty brace to seven. A really tall pheasant, on the
same grounds, gives him more enjoyment in the
bringing down than a hot corner in which, though
the bag is large, the shooting is comparatively
easy.

Most of Lord Granby's shooting has been done
at home, though in the middle of the seventies he
went on a sporting tour in Egypt, then far less
overrun by tourists than it is to-day, and secured
a fair collection of specimen birds. He is a natu-
ralist as well as a sportsman, and the wild birds
interest him fully as much as those reared for
his sport.

73

THE MARQUESS OF GRANBY

In addition to the book on trout-fishing and
the article on grouse-driving to which allusion has
been made, Lord Granby has written much on
sporting subjects in various magazines and papers,
and he has all his life taken a keen interest in every
aspect of the natural history of these islands.

74

LORD HAWKE

Of the ethics of professional captaincy in cricket
this is assuredly not the place to write, but the
arguments in favour of amateur captains receive
the strongest support from the contemplation of all
that Lord Hawke's knowledge of men and ready
tact have done during the past twenty seasons for
the Yorkshire County team. He had, previous to
1883, played under Tom Emmett, and it was in
the early eighties that the cricket world in general,
and the gods who rule in the St. John's Wood Road
in particular, began to see the unsatisfactory side of
professional captains and the opportunities given to
them for sacrificing to purely personal motives the
interests of their side. The Yorkshire eleven has
had its triumphs and its failures since those days,
but its present captain has in all probability keenly
enjoyed his position through them all, and with
the professionals he is au mieux. It is in great
measure due to his efforts that the Yorkshire Com-
mittee takes such care of its professionals as even
to make them thrifty, the benefit moneys being in
great part invested so as to bring in four per cent.
When a professional gets ^^3000 from a benefit, it
is surely better that two-thirds should be invested for
the recipient than that the whole should promptly
be squandered to entertain friends. Still, it is diffi-
cult to persuade him to talk on the subject, while
as to writing — well, more than one sporting editor
has been at his wit's end to induce him to write on
controversial cricket, but, so far, he has successfully
resisted the temptation, if indeed writing can ever
offer great temptations to a man whose chief delight
is in action. If only this reluctance of his could
be overcome, he could delight thousands of readers
and do not a little good in the cause of his favourite
game, for few men with so much right to an
opinion think more emphatically on the many
75

LORD HAWKE

vexed questions which from time to time come
before the dread tribunal at Lord's. He has, as a
matter of fact, contributed a couple of widely-read
articles to recent numbers of the Badminton Maga-
zine, while his denial of the alleged unpopularity of
modern cricket in the Tatler excited comment
throughout the cricket-playing empire. A man
who permits himself to write so little necessarily
commands attention at every rare relapse into
print, and cricketers have therefore read with great
interest his Introduction to a recently published
history of Yorkshire cricket, in which he relates
his almost life-long enthusiasm for the prowess of
his county in the great game.

Lord Hawke's famous scores are enrolled in
the cricket annuals for the past quarter of a cen-
tury. Perhaps his favourite performance was his
126 at Taunton, in Yorkshire v. Somerset. During
his long innings he gave no chance, and to him-
self this feat was the more gratifying because it
followed immediately after " spectacles " at the
Oval. The clouds rolled by; the sunshine fol-
lowed with a vengeance. As recently, however,
as 1902 Lord Hawke played a couple of innings
of which any living cricketer might be proud.
His score against Surrey at the Oval was, on
that occasion, curiously enough the same as he
made previously at Taunton — 126 — so that he
got home on the Surrey bowling at last. On the
other occasion, also in 1902, he was playing for
the M.C.C. against Oxford University, and here
he went in first, carried his bat, and contributed
107 runs to his side. Under correction, and with
none of those wonderful compilations of cricket
curiosities handy, from which to refresh my memory,
I imagine that for a player to carry his bat right
through an innings and also make his century,
76

LORD HAWKE

is unusual. In an age in which the spirit of
caution has been apparent in first-class matches,
such a performance must be increasingly rare, and
perhaps we must go back for a parallel to such
performers as L. Hall and R. W. Rice.

Cricket, like lawn tennis and some other games,
is often a matter of useful partnership quite as
much as of individual brilliancy, and in selecting
these two or three examples of Lord Hawke's play
it would not do to overlook the amazing \/^^ for
the last wicket which he and David Hunter put on
for Yorks against Kent on the Leeds ground.

Cricket is nowadays Lord Hawke's only game,
though at Eton he was captain of football, be-
sides carrying off many of the athletic and run-
ning trophies. His only other pastime, in fact,
is hunting, and he puts in his four days a week
in winter, chiefly with the Bramham Moor.

With the rod he has done little in this country,
most of his fishing having been done in India, and
at the best of times, and in the most favourable
circumstances, he is anything rather than a keen
angler. It is doubtful indeed whether most forms
of fishing would satisfy his passion for violent
exercise. Golf he has not yet taken up, his two
hobbies being cricket in summer and hunting in
winter.

He is fond of shooting when combined with real
hard work, but he regards himself as anything but
a first-class shot. The sport of the kind on which
he looks back, no doubt, with the greatest pleasure
is the big-game shooting in which he took part out
in Nepaul. There is at Wighill a remarkably fine
bearskin, the original owner of which fell to his
rifle ; and during that trip he and his friends
made two bags of thirteen and nine tigers re-
spectively. Most of his foreign travel — three trips
77

LORD HAWKE

to India, two to America and South Africa, and
one each to Australia and the West Indies — have
been for cricket ; and he always maintains that
there is no more enjoyable way of visiting our
possessions over-seas than as a member of a cricket
team out from home.

He is as keen a cricketer as this year's Eton
captain ; he is still on the right side of five-and-
forty. And he yet belongs to the Bachelors
Club. Truly, the gods smile on some I

78

SIR JOHN HEATHCOAT-
AMORY, Bart.

It would be hard, looking at him and his sur-
roundings to-day, to say whether sport has done
more for Sir John Heathcoat-Amory or Sir John
Heathcoat-Amory for sport. He is now seventy-
five years of age, and he can remember hunting
with Sir Walter Carew's fox-hounds in the days of
John Beal, a huntsman who worked his hounds
without assistance and killed his foxes too, in spite
of the big woods and difficult country. Some of
his wonderful sporting energy he has latterly de-
puted to near relations, but when it is mentioned
that fox-hounds, harriers, and stag-hounds hunt
within a mile or two of his home at Knightshayes
Court, and that the fox-hounds are hunted by his
brother-in-law, the harriers by his son-in-law, and
the stag-hounds by his son, some idea may be
formed of the extent to which the neighbourhood is
indebted to the family for its sport. Fox-hounds
he never hunted himself, considering the country
round about more suited to the chase of other
quarry, but his harriers he purchased five-and-forty
years ago.

His stag-hunting on his own account belongs to
a much later period. About the year 1896 the deer
about Stoodleigh increased to so alarming an extent
that the farmers in the neighbourhood declined to
preserve them any longer unless they were systema-
tically hunted. Sir John, therefore, in conjunction
with his eldest son, got together a pack to hunt the
country south of the Devon and Somerset railway
boundary and also to render occasional assistance
to the older pack. Since then two new packs have
been formed to hunt the stag, the one at Barnstaple
and the other for the Quantock country. Numbers
of deer are now killed every season, though Sir
79

SIR JOHN HEATHCOAT-AMORY

John remembers the Exmoor country when only a
few could be killed every year for fear of exterminat-
ing the herd. Even otter-hunting has at times
attracted this indefatigable sportsman, and, although
he is, as a keen angler, alive to the damage done by
otters to trout and salmon, he has always been
careful that they should be killed on his waters in
legitimate fashion only.

As a fisherman, he must well remember the
golden days of the Exe and Culm, when there
was grand sport without any need for conservancy
boards. As far back as 1859 he instituted some ex-
periments in salmon-hatching at Bolham. Young
salmon in plenty were turned out in the Exe ; where
they went is a problem yet unsolved. In Scotland
he killed many a good fish in the Moriston, Ness,
Beaulay, Spey, Spean, and Tay; and for thirteen
years he held the fishing of the Eira River, in
Norway.

At one time he played real tennis with much
enthusiasm and some skill, and he gave valuable
assistance to his relative, Mr. Smith Travers, in
designing, at Hobart, the first tennis-court built
out of Europe.

Sports and games have not taken up all his
busy life. As a volunteer, like his father before
him, he had a distinguished career, having main-
tained two rifle ranges on the estate, besides raising
and commanding one of the earliest corps formed.

It is common knowledge that he sat for
Tiverton from 1868 to 1885, but what may be
forgotten is that, much earlier in life, he did all
the electioneering for his grandfather, John Heath-
coat, who sat for the borough of Tiverton with
Lord Palmerston, in opposition to the Walrond
influence. Electioneering work in the days of open
voting and hustings eloquence was no sinecure.
80

:i«W

m

MR. CHARLES HUTCHINGS

Few outdoor games differ more clearly from
billiards than golf, so much so that a man
who has been on the links all day is rarely on
the spot in the billiard-room the same evening.
This makes it the more interesting that so emi-
nent a golfer as Mr. Hutchings should, formerly at
any rate, before he almost completely renounced
the indoor game, have attained to a proficiency
in it which may be indicated by a break of 148,
spot-barred. His earlier enthusiasms included
both cricket and football, but a bad accident
in the latter game soon compelled him to
relinquish both, since which time salmon-fish-
ing has been the only serious rival of the game
with which we have long since associated his
name.

As holder of the amateur championship, he
stood down in the 1903 contest, debarred by ill-
ness from both games and sport, but throughout
his splendid golfing career he bore living witness
to the fallacy of the arguments by which amateurs
are sometimes disparaged by comparison with pro-
fessional competitors for championship honours.
Mr. Hutchings, however, will bear comparison by
the severest standards.

Since he first played at Hoylake in 1881,
and became scratch in 1886, then, or thereabouts,
winning his first scratch medal, his list of suc-
cesses has been so long that a bare summary
must here suffice, though diligent reference to the
files of golfing journals would no doubt enable any
one to double it. The Kennard, Hall Blyth, and
St. Andrews medals at Hoylake ; the town of Pau
gold medal and other honours on the same line ;
the Spring, Bombay, and Jubilee medals at St.
Andrews ; the Duke of Devonshire's Cup at
Buxton — this brings us down to 1894 — and the

MR. CHARLES HUTCHINGS

amateur championship at Hoylake, 1902, by which
time he had completed his fifty-third year.

It was in the same year that he played for
the International Team, England v. Scotland,
winning his match by six holes from Mr. Leslie
Balfour-Melville. During many years of team
matches for the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Mr.
Hutchings has been so fortunate as never to lose
a match, though two or three were halved.

In the early nineties, in partnership with Mr.
J. Ball, jun., who figures elsewhere in these pages,
he played many notable foursomes against the late
Lieutenant F. G. Tait and others, for the most
part with success. His favourite links are St.
Andrews, and his most deadly work is done with
iron shots of various kinds.

Golf is a jealous mistress, and brooks rivalry
only with a very bad grace ; but Mr. Hutchings
has had the courage, for a little more than fifteen
years now, to give some of his devotion
to salmon-fishing, chiefly in Scotland but also
in other countries, his most successful excursion
after salmon being to Russian Lapland in
1899. On his best day he killed thirty-nine
fish, weighing 383 lbs., and his friend made an
even better bag. Two years later, in 1891, Mr.
Hutchings killed, on the Evanger River, in
Norway, a splendid fish of 48^ lbs., on a i6-ft.
rod and fly, after a terrible struggle lasting three-
quarters of an hour, and taking both fish and
fisherman a mile below the pool in which the fray
began. Such memories of the links and riverside
are surely an old-age pension against the day when
the clubs and rods must lie untouched in the rack.
But Mr. Hutchings has no need to draw on them
for many a year yet.

82

MR. HORACE HUTCHINSON

A MAN who at the age of sixteen won the open golf
medal on the lonely links of Westward Ho, who
then carried off the Amateur Championship and held
it the first two years of its existence, and who still
retains sufficient of his old skill to prove a very
formidable runner up to the best, is a striking
contradiction of the common fallacy that golf is
the game only of those past middle age. Mr. Hut-
chinson, in short, is little more than forty years
of age, yet a long and distinguished golfing career
lies behind him, and in all probability some years
of first-class play, if not perhaps of championship
honours, lie before.

Yet he is not by any means a man of one
hobby. To read his delightful articles on salmon
fishing, one would imagine that no other sport or
recreation shared his homage with the rod — only
as recently as 1903 he took a splendid twenty-six
pounder from the Wye — and indeed I suspect that
salmon fishing ranks in his opinion highest among
all sports. Then, again, he is an accomplished and
patient deerstalker, and now and then he writes
with such affection of the hill that it would look
as if he were never happy unless crawling over
fearsome Highland boulders with his eye riveted >

on some misty glen in front. Nor is this the only
form of shooting in which he finds his pleasure,
for he is a keen shot at driven game, and, with
the birds put over his gun in the most difficult
manner, he can for the moment, so his friends say,
forget that there ever was such a game as golf.
This preference for driven birds is curious if we
regard it in the light of heredity, for his father.
General W. N. Hutchinson, of the Grenadier
Guards, was author of the standard work on Dog-
breaking, and it might have been expected perhaps
that his son should give his allegiance to the
older method.

83

MR. HORACE HUTCHINSON

In spite, however, of his own preferences, one
comes back to Mr. Hutchinson as a golfer. His
earliest exploit has already been named, and it may
be added that he played for Oxford in the inter-
university match. In connection with the Open
Championship he had one of the hardest pieces of
luck that could well have befallen him. The very
first year that the competition was made to extend
over more than one day, he was first at the end
of the first day ; that is to say, with a similar
performance a year earlier, he would have been
Open Champion.

At other games he has not done much, though
he won the billiard cue at Oxford, and he also
played a good deal of cricket in former days.
Indeed, he is still a member of the M.C.C.,
I. Zingari, and Free Foresters, but his cricket to-
day consists in sitting in the pavilion and fighting
the old battles over again.

Mr. Hutchinson's literary activity has won him
a still larger circle of admirers and friends than his
golf. That game and cricket have furnished him
with most of his themes, but dreams and other
fiction have also been represented in his prolific
contributions to modern serial and periodical
literature, while of books he must have written
or edited at least a dozen during the past ten or
fifteen years. An amateur golf champion who took
classical honours at Oxford should be a fairly
good embodiment of the healthy mind in the
healthy body. None who know Mr. Hutchinson
would question his right to the title.

84

THE HON. GERALD
LASCELLES

The poet tells how a certain king won the love of
a fairy, which in the end profited him little, by
watching a falcon seven days and nights without
once closing his eyes. Not with such frivolous
intent, but for some more practical reason, it is not
difficult to those who know something of his hawk-
ing ardour to picture Mr. Lascelles performing
such a task with a light heart and unblinking eye.
Falconry, that most picturesque of the sporting
survivals of the Middle Ages, would seem to have
its last temple in these Islands, and assuredly Mr.
Lascelles is its High Priest. In its palmy days
the sport engaged both temporal monarchs and
the princes of the Church, but it is fallen from its
high estate. Yet the devoted few still take even
its pomp and circumstance very seriously, and the
subject of this portrait is the moving spirit of their
official body corporate, the Old Hawking Club.
To form an idea of the enthusiasm with which he
personally looks after the hawks, and has indeed
looked after them for the thirty years during which,
as successor to the late Clough Newcome, he has
managed the club's fortunes, it is necessary to see
him on his morning round of the mews at Lynd-
hurst. Mr. Lascelles is no beginner, for he must
have had his first lessons in the art of hawking
when only twelve or thirteen years of age, his pre-
ceptor being that famous sportsman. Sir Charles
Slingsby, who, with his huntsman, was drowned
in the Ure. Since serving his apprenticeship, Mr.
Lascelles has never been without a trained hawk
of some sort, and he must have flown at every
quarry provided by these Islands. He has, as
already stated, been in charge of the Old Hawk-
ing Club and its birds for a considerable period,
85

HON. GERALD LASCELLES

and during his tenure there have been several
professional falconers and not a few young men
successfully trained as such.

There was, however, a sport to which he was
entered long before he flew a hawk. Both his
grandfather and great-grandfather were Masters
of the Bramham Moor hounds, a hunt of which,
to the day of his death, his father was also a keen
supporter. He probably saw his first run when
not more than six years old, and soon after he
was blooded by old Charles Treadwell, who was
huntsman to the Bramham for a quarter of a cen-
tury. To this first sport he has been faithful all
his life ; and even when duty kept him for a few
years resident in London, his was a familiar figure
with the Whaddon Chase, as well as with Baron
Rothschild's staghounds in the vale of Aylesbury,
the Bramham, and some other packs.

In 1880 Lord Beaconsfield made him Deputy
Surveyor of the New Forest, and most of his
hunting and fishing of late years have been con-
ducted in that beautiful district of Hampshire.
Though the Forest has lacked the Heme of Wind-
sor or the spectral huntsman of the Schwartzwald,
its gaunt old elms have seen wild riders many, and
Mr. Lascelles could tell of some good runs. His
long and varied experiences of the hunting field
stood him in good stead when he came to the new
country, and from the first he formed an opinion,
which he has since had no reason to modify, that
the chase of the wild deer was the form of hunting
best suited to that woodland country. He found
on his arrival but a scratch establishment of deer-
hounds, but his efforts and authority have suc-
ceeded in placing it on a proper basis, and in
enabling it to show wonderful sport over a period
of twenty years. His closest association with the
86

HON. GERALD LASCELLES

fortunes of the pack was perhaps during the seasons
of 1886 and 1887, when, owing to the Master being
for the greater part of the time incapacitated, he
hunted them. Since those days the services of a
professional huntsman have been employed, but
again in 1889 and 1900, in the master's absence,
Mr. Lascelles performed the duties of master and
occasionally carried the horn himself.

All true Yorkshiremen love dogs as well as
horses, and Mr. Lascelles is no exception to the
rule, for he has been particularly successful with
his setters and other gun-dogs. That these should
have attracted him is not surprising, for he was
always very keen with the gun, and is particularly
fond of partridge-driving, of which he well remem-
bers the introduction into the sporting world. His
love of retrievers, which dates from a very tender
age, was only confirmed by the varied rough shoot-
ing of the Forest, where good dogs are essential,
and he used both setters and spaniels for retrieving,
one or other of the latter having invariably been
found good enough to accompany its owner to the
very best shoots, and having there held its own
with other men's retrievers. Some years ago he
used to keep pointers, but he gave them up for
setters, finding these better suited alike to the
Forest shooting and to the work done with hawks.
It was in 1901 that he first ran his setters in public.
Charles Frost, now well known as a breaker, was
born and bred in Mr. Lascelles' establishment, his
father being employed there, and to him were en-
trusted some young setters. So successful was
Frost with these that they "got into the money"
at almost every meeting held in 1901 and 1902,
while Dora of Lyndhurst won the all-aged stake
at the Setter Club meeting, and the brace stake
with her brother Dart at Glanllyn, and was placed
87

HON. GERALD LASCELLES

third to him in the all-aged stake at the same
meeting, which Dart won outright. The brace
were, in fact, first, second, or third in every brace
stake run in public in 1902.

As a fisherman Mr. Lascelles has also played
his part, having killed his four Tweed salmon, one
of them weighing 31 lbs., in a day, though latterly,
with a few visits to Norway thrown in, most of his
fishing has been in the Test or Avon, almost at his
own door.

In fact, he would not despise a day's ratting, and
for so versatile a sportsman the close seasons have
no menace. When he may no longer hunt, there
are the trout ; and when these, too, are sacred, there
are stubbles and coverts. The hawks are full of
interest all the year round. He is a most ardent
otter hunter, and may generally be seen out with
Mr. Courtenay Tracy's hounds. He would think
the particular sport which for the moment en-
grossed him better than all other sports. That
way lies contentment.

THE EARL OF LONSDALE

Few families in England, certainly none on that
borderland which separates it from the North
Country, can boast sporting traditions quite equal
to those of the Lowthers, and it would be trite to
attempt any description of the splendid style in
which Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale,
has upheld the family reputation. Whether in the
hunting field or in the grouse butts, in pursuit of
the big game of India or the Rocky Mountains, or
at the meets of the Four-in-Hand Club, with the
boxing gloves or otter-pole, on the cricket pitch or
on the fastest racing yacht of her day, he has always
been the right man in the right place. Someone
has said that Lord Lonsdale invariably does things
about twice as well as other men with double his
income, and that, in these days of general depres-
sion, is a great tribute to his judgment.

He was born in 1857 and he went to Eton,
where he did a good deal of rowing and played
some cricket. Horses, however, were perhaps his
earliest joy, and he was blooded in the hunting
field when seven years old, while at ten years of
age he had already driven a team and ridden gallops
and trials. His historic wager with Lord Shrews-
bury, who failed to come up to the scratch and paid
forfeit, in fulfilment of which he drove single, pair,
and four-in-hand and rode postillion over twenty
miles in 55 minutes 35! seconds, has been so
frequently related with more or less picturesque-
ness that this mention may here suffice. He has
long been one of the leading members of the Four-
in-Hand Club, and he has hunted with all the
best packs, having in turn mastered the Pytchley,
the Blankney, and the Quorn. The one drawback to
his taking over hounds is that, when he resigns, it
is a sore trial, as a rule, to his successor to do the
thing in the same style. He used at one time to
89

EARL OF LONSDALE

do a great deal of steeplechasing, having in his
time won the Rutland Welter Drag Hunt Cup
at Newmarket, the longest race that has taken
place in England ; but he has long since given up
this form of sport, as he never rides less than 12.7,
and has always been amongst the heavy weights in
the hunting field, riding nearly seventeen stone.
What would, above even his horsemanship, his
knowledge of hounds, and even his magnificent
scale of hunting a country, always endear the
memory of Lord Lonsdale to the shires is his
thoughtful solicitude for the farming interest. He
always realises that a master has duties to the
farmers as well as to the members of the hunt. He
it was who instituted free advertisement for forage
in the Melton papers, giving the men by v/hose
hospitality alone hunting is possible some chance
of deriving benefit from the sport. This thought
for the farmer distinguishes Lord Lonsdale from
some masters and from more who follow them.

If there is another sport that he puts on a level
with fox-hunting, it is big game shooting, for he is
a man who finds equal enjoyment in the comfort of
a perfectly-appointed hunting field or in the rough
and tumble hardship of a log hut on the confines of
civilisation. He has shot in the United States,
Canada, Alaska, India, the Malay Peninsula,
Burmah, China, Ceylon, and Switzerland. His
two expeditions to India, in 1889 and 1903, resulted
in fine bags of tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo,
bison, bear, leopard, and various deer. America
gave him four species of bears, in addition to the
famous kadiack bear of Alaska ; also moose, wapiti,
cariboo, three sorts of mountain sheep, goats and
musk-ox, one of the last-named having been pre-
sented by him to the British Museum, the first, I
believe, added to the national collection.
90

EARL OF LONSDALE

His shooting at home has been in the main
confined to deerstalking and grouse, the grouse-
drives at Lowther, in which both the German
Emperor and Crown Prince have so often taken
part, being celebrated for the admirable manner in
which the birds are shown in spite of the difficulties
of undulating ground. Another sport at Lowther
is otter-hunting, and Lord Lonsdale, when at home,
hunts regularly every summer. He also takes the
greatest interest in the sheep-dog trials which evoke
so much enthusiasm in the men of the fells, and
gives every encouragement to this form of sport,
both in the Park at Lowther and elsewhere on the
countryside. Coursing with lurchers is another
favourite sport, when not hunting, at both Barley
Thorpe and Lowther, and one of which he has
made long and careful study.

Further, he is equally in his element on the
water, for, besides having done a deal of rowing, he
directed the sailing of the German Emperor's
Meteor II. with a success that is chronicled in the
annals of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Of that
Club, as also of the Royal Portsmouth, Royal
Southampton, Thames, Dorset, Royal Victoria, and
Royal Corinthian, he is a prominent member, and
his enthusiasm for yachting and for the promotion
of the best interests of the sport, would, to any one
listening to him discussing the subject, suggest
that he had no other recreation.

There is one more branch of sport in which
Lord Lonsdale excels in so extraordinary a degree
that the only way of avoiding any temptation to
enlarge upon it beyond the allotted limit of space
was to leave it to the last ; and this is the one form
of athletic competition in which a man must rely
on his own natural resources of hand and eye.
Neither gun nor horse nor rod nor bat help the
91

EARL OF LONSDALE

boxer. The gloves, indeed, handicap him rather
than otherwise. Those who would care to stand
up to Lord Lonsdale at the present day do not
include the present humble chronicler of his prowess.
In the days when he gave the sporting public such
masters as Peter Jackson and Dickson, the latter of
whom was trained at Barley Thorpe, he could, it is
said, hold his own with all the best professionals.

In short, he seems to have gone in for every
sport and for most games. Whether he plays
golf and croquet I know not ; if not, then it is
because every spare moment of a busy life is
required for more vigorous exercise.

92

MR. A. C. MACLAREN

When a man makes a mannerism of grumbling,
with the assistance of a very dry humour, it is on
the cards that he will be popular with his intimates
and the reverse with the rest of his acquaintance ;
and it is perhaps this unvarying attitude of Mr.
Maclaren's that has contributed to the general
tendency to overlook the fact that he is probably,
on the field at any rate, the finest strategical cricket
captain now living. With no unfairness to other
brilliant captains whose portraits are to be found
in this book, it may be questioned whether any of
them make, at a pinch, quite such scientific use of
the material at their disposal for getting the other
side out. There are, in fact, two Maclarens on the
ground. The one plays his cricket as a kind of
athletic chess, grasping the condition of wicket and
weather almost ere he has left the pavilion, and
moving his men, down to the smallest pawn, with
consummate resource. The other, the cricketer
pure and simple, is one of the most magnificent
bats that the present generation has the opportunity
of watching — a beautiful player ; quick on his feet
as a cat ; ready with his wrist-play as a fencer ; a
fine all-round judge of the game, and a dangerous
man on either a winning or losing side. It is said
that, once in form, he never practises. This, while
at once differentiating between him and such pains-
taking workers as Fry and Ranjitsinhji, is by no
means equivalent to comparing him with the poet
who is born and not made, for a long and arduous
cricket education, seconded by quite unusual natural
advantages, lies behind his present successes. Nor
does he abstain from practice through any slack-
ness. But, on the contrary, he believes that too
much practice spoils his play.

Unlike most of our great cricketers, Mr. Maclaren
has no marked proficiency in any other game. If
93

MR. A. C. MACLAREN

he has another passion, it is coursing ; and his keen-
ness in looking after his greyhounds at Basingstoke
is probably equal to any enthusiasm that he has
ever felt for cricket. It may be indeed that the
recreation hidden from the inquisitorial public eye
has the warmer corner in his heart.

Of his cricketing achievements, which date back
to the early forming of his style at Elstree, we need
only recall such remarkable performances as his two
innings of over 50 against Eton in 1887 and his
innings of 76 three years later, on which occasion
he captained the Harrow team. He played his first
match for Lancashire (against Sussex) in 1890, and
the Brighton ground was so kind to him that he
made a little over his century, rather an unusual
achievement for one who had not before played in
county cricket. What is probably the record in-
dividual score in first-class county cricket was his
424 against Somerset five years later. Of his meet-
ings with Australian teams, as both batsman and cap-
tain, his memories are not indeed all of unqualified
successes, but his 88 not out at Lord's in 1899,
and more than one very fine performance on the occa-
sion of Stoddart's second visit to the Colonies —
the present writer well remembers a glorious after-
noon on the Melbourne ground — will always do
much to soften old regrets. Of his cricket more
has been said than of that of some among his con-
temporaries who are associated with him in these
pages, but in truth, with the exception of his cours-
ing, of which the public knows nothing and even
his friends see little, he is not conspicuous in any
other field. This, according to the point of view,
makes him either more or less interesting than his
fellows.

94

/

e

W^

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL,

Bart.

In this brief descriptive tour of a gallery of sports-
men the biographer is in some measure restricted
in his choice of standpoint, and such limitation is
indeed of assistance in dealing with Sir Herbert
Maxwell, for he has played, and is playing, so many
parts that there might otherwise be a difficulty in
assigning the r61e in which historians of the pre-
sent times will eventually place this indefatigable
sportsman, statesman, litterateur, and journalist.
When a man has, apparently without effort, repre-
sented one county in the House of Commons for a
quarter of a century without interruption, and when
during that period of political activity he has pro-
duced delightful books of sport, topography, criti-
cism, and what not by the shelf, and magazine and
newspaper articles by the thousand, his admiring,
but somewhat breathless chronicler may fairly claim
to be a little exercised.

That he should indeed find time for any form
of recreation whatever must rouse wonder in any
one with an even superficial acquaintance with all
his political work, with the amount and length of
labour that he has devoted to Royal Commissions
and Parliamentary Committees, of which, with his
genius for organising and classifying, he is an ideal
chairman. In a widely different connection they
find him — since so good a sportsman naturally has
an abhorrence of wasteful slaughter — interesting
himself closely and in a practical manner in the
work of the various societies and movements for
the protection of birds and other wild fauna. They
read his articles almost weekly in the papers and
almost monthly in the reviews ; they see announce-
ments of his books continually staring at them from
the publishers' spring and autumn lists ; and they
95

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL

marvel how one who seems inevitably a bookworm
should ever walk the coverts with his gun on his
shoulder or crouch beside the pool in which a trout
or salmon is lazily rising to the fly.

Probably, indeed, the laird of Monreith has
given less and less of his time to sport of recent
years. There were few keener shots than he when
young, and the owner of such magnificent partridge
ground as is to be found in the sixteen or seventeen
thousand acres of the Monreith estate, perhaps the
finest partridge ground in North Britain, might in
other circumstances have spent more time in the
stubbles and less in the library. But, as he would
sorrowfully admit, most of Monreith had, like so
many other Scottish estates, to be let, and for the
last ten or fifteen years its owner has done little
shooting other than deerstalking in the Highlands.

The mention of Monreith recalls an interest-
ing sporting fixture enacted there at a period
considerably anterior to the birth of the present
baronet, who is only in his fifty-ninth year. This
was the famous two days' shooting match between
England and Scotland in 1836, in which Scotland's
representative, Lord Kennedy, shot at Monreith.

As a somewhat later Monreith record it may be
mentioned that the bag of partridges for the seasons
of 1894-95 and 1895-96 topped four thousand head
both years.

Though a fine shot in his day, and still a most
assiduous deerstalker, salmon fishing, Sir Herbert
Maxwell's first love, bids fair to be his last, and his
views, which many regard as heterodox, on the sub-
ject of colour in salmon flies are too well known to
anglers to need more than passing reference. What
must also be remarked is his exclusive devotion to
the method of fly-fishing, for, while he finds no
amusement in catching fish with spinning baits, he
96

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL

has a lively prejudice against both prawn and worm.
A long and successful angling career has, as might
be expected, not lacked its remarkable experiences,
and most of these, down to 1897, are related in his
admirable volume on "Salmon and Sea Trout."
His most exciting time was probably spent on the
banks of the North Tyne in the autumn of 1872,
when, in four days and a half, he killed no fewer
than forty-six salmon and grilse with an aggregate
weight of 561 lbs. As likely to interest anglers
with a taste for statistics, he has kindly furnished a
more detailed analysis of these wonderful five days
than that given in the volume referred to, and it is
as follows : —

October 5,

1872 .

14

fish,

weighing

180 lbs.

''

7
8
14

" '

8
6
12

"

»

75 „
71 „
141 „

„

15

',', (till I

P.M

•) 6

„

„

88 „

Total .46 561 lbs.

With the games, in which once he took such
delight, his public and literary work has interfered
still more effectually than with his sport. He
played golf long before it became fashionable in the
south country. Curling, too, he played from boy-
hood, but the short spells of frost that have marked
recent winters have almost invariably found him
in his seat at Westminster or at his desk in the
library, and it is long since he found himself free
to follow such a game day by day.

Though few of his many-sided literary labours
are associated with sport, this sketch would be in-
complete without some allusion to them. His
sporting writings, indeed, with the exception of the
aforementioned work on salmon fishing, have been
for the most part contributed to encyclopaedias and
97 G

SIR HERBERT MAXWELL

magazines, but some charming sketches of angling
and other sport will be found in his " Memories of
the Months," two volumes which have earned the
flattery of imitation. Perhaps his most important
literary achievement has so far been the " Life of
the Duke of Wellington," a fascinating piece of
hero worship ; and he has also published an extra-
ordinary collection of books on Scottish topo-
graphy, on the history of some notable Scottish
families, and on the books of his choice, while a
popular history of the late Queen and two or three
works of fiction have made him friends and ad-
mirers out of a wider public.

Such an amazing combination of author and
sportsman is but one more witness to the absurdity
of that jealous rancour with which a great country-
man of his own would have debarred sporting men
from daring to trespass on the fields of literature.

98

MR. ROBERT MAXWELL

From the time of his leaving Eton Mr. Maxwell
has played serious golf, and as he is only twenty-
eight years of age now, a glance at his achievements
will show that he has not lost much time. Standing
over six feet, and broad in proportion, he is always
a conspicuous figure at Championship meetings,
nor does his play disappoint the gallery attracted
by his physique.

The first real competition in which he took part
was that for the Tantallon Spring Medal in 1897,
where he won the handicap medal from scratch.
The same year he entered for the Amateur Cham-
pionship at Muirfield, to be beaten by Mr. Robb
in the fifth round. The rest of that year and part
of the next he was away in Australia, but in 1899
he was again playing in the Championship meeting,
and this time it was Mr. J. Ball, whose portrait
appears elsewhere, who beat him at the nineteenth
hole. He was indefatigable in his struggle for the
Amateur Championship. In 1900, after he had
carried off the St. George's Vase, Mr. H, H. Hilton
beat him at Sandwich. In 1901 he did not play ;
but in 1902 he was again beaten, this time by Mr.
S. H. Fry, at Hoylake, but not till the semi-final
round had been reached and he had, in earlier
rounds, defeated Messrs, Ball, Pease, and Fer-
gusson. In the Open Championship meeting, also
held at Hoylake a few weeks later, Mr. Maxwell
finished fourth, only four behind the Champion
and one behind Braid and H. Vardon. At last
came victory, for he won the Amateur Champion-
ship at Muirfield in 1903.

He is Captain of the Tantallon Golf Club, and
is also a member of the Honourable Company of
Edinburgh Golfers, the Royal and Ancient at
St. Andrews, and the Huntercombe, but he plays
chiefly at North Berwick and Muirfield.
99

MR. ROBERT MAXWELL

The only other sport in which he takes any part
is shooting, and it is worth noting that he shoots
off the left shoulder. For some years he shot with
a gun with left-hand cast off; but of late, finding his
right eye the master eye, he has experimented with
a gun cast across. He is fond of a rough day's
shooting, but his favourite bird is the grouse. He
has been heard to describe himself as a bad shot,
with an adverb before the " bad." If this be true,
and not mere modesty, it is remarkable that one
who golfs with such precision should be found
wanting in the grouse butts.

MR. JOHN GUILLE MILLAIS

A MAN who has walked three times round the
coasts of Scotland and collected birds from the
Orkneys unto Iceland will always be chiefly as-
sociated with the triumphs of shore-shooting, and
of these Mr. Millais has had his share. Beyond
this homely sport, however, he has shot as much
big game as falls to the rifles of most men.
From his catapult days at Marlborough College,
when he shot with that silent and deadly weapon
upwards of four hundred specimens of small
birds, to his last jaunt after Newfoundland cari-
bou in the footsteps of his friend, F. C. Selous,
he has bagged trophies since he was nine years
of age, and now he is eight and thirty. From
Algeria to Cape Colony, from Norway to the
Rockies, from Canada to Iceland, north, south,
east, west, he has enriched his wonderful collec-
tion, in which the Great Grey Seal of the cold
seas, the elk and wild reindeer of Scandinavia,
the bear, wapiti, red and roe deer and caribou
are housed with birds in every stage of plumage.

There is something peculiarly characteristic in
the manner in which Mr. Millais both executed
and spent the fruits of his first artistic com-
mission, the drawing of twenty-eight studies
for the late Henry Seebohm's monograph on the
Charadriidcs. He was nineteen years old at the
time, and he made his drawings in a leaky Govern-
ment tent when out with the Somerset Militia
in the Blagdon Hills, near Taunton. Having
successfully acquitted himself of this difficult task,
he spent his honorarium and militia pay on a trip
to the Rocky Mountains, on which occasion he
shot wapiti, mule -deer, white -tailed deer, and
antelopes, and lost an enormous grizzly bear.

Few of his many expeditions have failed of
their object, though in 1897 the French autho-

MR. JOHN GUILLE MILLAIS

rities were so solicitous of his safety as to frustrate
an attempt to shoot addax in the Northern Sahara,
from Ain Sefra. Nor was he altogether success-
ful in 1902 in the northern parts of Canada, though
he eventually bagged two bull moose in Quebec.

Mr. Millais served for a few years in the regular
army. From 1887 to 1891 he was in the ist
Battalion of the Seaforths, but so keen a wanderer
could not be expected to take kindly to the mono-
tonous routine of barrack life, and, much to the
annoyance of his distinguished father, he left as
senior subaltern after only a few years* service.

As one of those rarely blest individuals who
can both write and illustrate books, this versatile
sportsman has, during the past ten or twelve years,
contrived an ideal combination of making the pro-
ceeds of each book pay the expenses of the next
trip. Thus, his excellent volume on " Game Birds
and Shooting Sketches " paid for that extended
trip in 1893 to the Free State, Transvaal and
Eastern Mashonaland, which resulted in his
famous volume "A Breath from the Veldt." His
equally popular work on " British Deer and their
Horns " embodied the results of ten years of deer-
stalking from 1887 to 1897.

It is only, indeed, by exceedingly careful and
conscientious study of a subject in all its aspects
that Millais is able to produce the work he does.
As another case in point, having before him, then
at an indefinite date, the publication of a work on
" British Surface-feeding Ducks," he was not satis-
fied, as many would have been, with studying that
remarkable group of water-fowl during their sojourn
in these islands, but he must needs proceed, in
1892, to Iceland in order that he might investi-
gate their breeding haunts and nesting habits on
the spot. During that expedition, he must have

MR. JOHN GUILLE MILLAIS

covered some nine hundred miles of what was
practically unexplored country on ponies. Another
literary result of his unique knowledge of duck-
shooting is found in that beautifully illustrated
work, "The Wild-fowler in Scotland." Yet, of all
his books, there is no doubt that most of his
enthusiasm went into the Life of his father, which
he undertook at the request of the family.

Account has so far been taken of J. G. Millais
as traveller, gunner and author. His artistic work
is sufficiently well known to both the general public
and such editors and publishers as continually have
reason to regret that so much of his labour is
monopolised by his own volumes.

If he were not so well known as a shooting
man, he would be remarkable as an angler.
Familiar with most of Scotland's salmon waters,
it is the Tay which has given him his best sport,
and he could boast, if he wanted to, that he has,
with the exception of two casts, fished every yard
of that romantic river from Loch Tay to the tidal
waters below Perth. Between 1883 and 1892 his
father rented Murthly and its fishing, and here he
had some red-letter days. Three of these, for
instance, in September 1889, gave him eight, seven,
and seven fish respectively, the fish on the first
two averaging twenty-one pounds. His greatest
triumph with the rod, however, was the killing
of a splendid forty-six-pounder after a determined
struggle that lasted two hours and a half. This
battle royal was waged on the afternoon of October
loth, 1890, and earlier that same day he had already
killed two other trifling fish of twenty-three pounds
and twenty-five pounds. Another fine fish, of
thirty-five pounds, was killed by him on Stobhall,
in August 1892, and he has grassed several of
thirty pounds. It was a thirty-four-pounder, how-
103

MR. JOHN GUILLE MILLAIS

ever, which gave him the most thrilling experience
of his angling days, for he foul-hooked it in the
front fin at 1.30 on an October afternoon in 1890,
and finally, after having been pulled into swift water
up to his neck, and then having had to follow at
breakneck pace down three miles of an uneven
bank, it was landed in pitch darkness at 8.30 that
evening.

"Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war!"

104

MR. G. MILLER

Polo in this country has so short a season that
some regard it rather as off-season training for
hunting-men. It is not therefore surprising to find
that so great a polo player as Mr. Miller some-
times spends his winters in India, or that, during
his stay in that country, he hunts and sticks pig.
The strenuous life has more fascination perhaps
for the winter visitor to India than for those com-
pelled to reside there throughout the year, but at
any rate I have heard it said that on one occasion
Mr, Miller hunted the hounds before breakfast and
killed a jackal ; then went pig-sticking after break-
fast and, with two other spears, killed three good
boar ; thence rode straight to the polo ground and
played a match, and all within three miles of the
bungalow in which he was staying. He still
counts the most sporting day of his life that on
which he was out with four other spears, and the
party killed nine large boar before two in the
afternoon.

He is, indeed, an all round sportsman, being
keenly fond of shooting — particularly stalking —
and fishing. He has killed good salmon in the
North Esk and brave stags on the Morar and
Meoble forests, while, during ten days of tiger
shooting in Nepaul, he was so lucky as to bag a
very fine tiger.

It is, however, of his polo that his contem-
poraries think most, and it might surprise some
of them to know that he had never bought a polo
pony previous to the year 1891, when he took
Spring Hill, Rugby, and, in the face of many
difficulties, started the Rugby Polo Club. Support
was at first not to be counted on, though he was
lucky in getting that of Major Beatty, who now
trains horses at Newmarket, and also of Major
Beech. Railway enterprise at once thwarted his
105

MR. G. MILLER

old efforts and stimulated him to new, for the Great
Central cut through his first polo ground at Rugby,
and compelled the laying out of two new ones in
every way superior to the old. In 1896 Mr. Miller
went to Ranelagh to assist his brother, taking his
place as polo manager during his absence in South
Africa; and at the end of 1901, when one brother
had returned from Africa and another from India,
the three obtained the Grove House lease and
started the new Roehampton Club.

As a player Mr, Miller has a brilliant record.
Since 1897 he has won five champion cups ; he
also won the Ranelagh open cup in 1897 and 1901 ;
the Irish open cup in 1897, 1898, and 1901, the only
three occasions on which he competed ; the social
clubs tournament in 1897 and 1903 ; the county
cup in 1895; the public schools cup in 1901 and
1902 ; and the Rugby tournament in 1893, 1896,
1900 and 1902. Some gaps in his career of activity
are accounted for by a broken collar-bone in 1900
and a severe fall two years later, both of which put
a stop to his play for some time. He also captained
the English team in the last two American matches,
in 1902, winning on both occasions, by 6 goals
to I and 7 to i respectively.

Since his devotion to polo it is not surprising
that Mr. Miller has found time for no other game.
At Cheam, Marlborough, and Trinity College,
Cambridge, he played cricket, representing his
public school on one occasion against Rugby in
the match at Lord's. At Cambridge he played
cricket and ran with the Trinity foot-beagles,
after which he spent three years in an office in the
City, getting neither health nor money out of so
uncongenial an occupation.

106

a

MR. C. R. MULLINGS

Of all the many water sports associated with com-
petitions and championships none is perhaps more
characteristic of the Thames than punting, and
apparently punting is so fascinating a pursuit that
Mr. MuUings would, if asked, have no hesitation
in saying that it furnishes all his amusement. At
no other sport does this champion punter excel.
He has never played either cricket or football in
first-class fixtures. He has tried his hand at
most other sports, not merely, as one would ex-
pect, rowing and sculling, but also riding, shoot-
ing, and boxing.

A busy life, however, even at the age of five-
and-twenty, leaves him little leisure all the summer
for any recreation other than that he represents
in this collection. What he does in winter it
would be difficult to say : perhaps plays golf and
smokes and takes an occasional round with the
gloves.

Living, like another famous ex-champion
punter, on the Taplow reach of the Thames, he
was naturally attracted by punting at an early age,
and for instructor he was so fortunate as to secure
the services of Abel Beasley of Oxford, perhaps
the finest punter who ever poled his way over
Thames gravel.

He started racing at the age of seventeen,
being beaten for the Championship in 1899 by
N. M. Cohen, since which he has been victorious
without exception.

The annual race for the Championship is held
under the auspices of the Thames Punting Club
at Shepperton, and on that reach Mr. Mullings
puts in a fortnight's hard practice each year im-
mediately before the event.

The punts have altered more than the men.
There is something recognisable in the physique
107

MR. C. R. MULLINGS

of a champion puntsman, but the craft have been
narrowed beyond recognition, fourteen or fifteen
inches being a common width in the latest models,
though, as in sculling, the boat must be built
with due regard to the weight of the man who is
to occupy it.

Mr. Mullings has established a record by win-
ning the Championship four years in succession.
Mr. W. H. Grenfell, a near neighbour of the
present champion, may, however, be said to have
run him close, for he is said to have resigned
after holding it for three successive years. Mr.
Mullings prefers to retain his honours until some
other shall wrest them. With one of Shakespeare's
characters he says :

" Let there be some more test made of my metal."

io8

LORD NEWLANDS

Presumably Lord Newlands is the senior whip
actually driving to-day. That he is one of the best
of living whips is recognised without question.
Born in the year 1825, William Wallace Hozier,
Lord Newlands of Newlands and Barrowfield in the
county of the City of Glasgow and of Mauldslie
Castle in the county of Lanark, married in 1849.
His wife, a daughter of the late Mr. O'Hara of
Raheen, County Galway, died in 1891, leaving an
only son, the Hon. James Hozier, M.P. for South
Lanarkshire since 1886, and three daughters, two
of whom are Lady Baird and Lady Lamington.
Lord Newlands served for a considerable period
in the Royal Scots Greys, and, taking a deep
interest in the Volunteer movement, he was, on
leaving the army, appointed the first Colonel Com-
mandant of the 4th Administrative Battalion
Lanarkshire Volunteers, also serving for many
years as Captain and Adjutant in the Lanarkshire
Yeomanry. Convener of the county of Lanark from
1875 to 1892, and Chairman of the first Lanarkshire
County Council, he retired in 1892 and was on
that occasion presented with his portrait by the
county, the artist being Sir George Bird, President
of the Royal Scottish Academy. Lord Newlands
is still Convener of the Commissioners of Supply,
as well as Vice-Lieutenant and a Justice of the
Peace of Lanarkshire. He was created a Baronet
in 1890, and in 1898 Queen Victoria raised him
to the Peerage.

Turning from this summary of a long and
useful career in his own county to some considera-
tion of his sporting tastes, we find that his interests
have been as various in play as in work. Coach-
ing and four-in-hand driving survive the earlier
objects of his devotion, and he is a member of the
London Four-in-Hand Club, and President not only
109

LORD NEWLANDS

of the London Coaching Club, but also of the
Lanarkshire Four-in-Hand Club, founded by himself
in 1887 and the only four-in-hand driving club out-
side London. His excellent workmanlike teams
of dark browns are a conspicuous feature of all
the principal meetings.

Among the other sports which earlier engrossed
his leisure must be reckoned cycling, in which he
was among the pioneers, rifle-shooting and yacht-
ing. He was an expert rifle-shot with both the
Snider and small-bore long-range match rifle, and
many a prize he carried off at Wimbledon in the
sixties and seventies of the last century. His son
was also a prize-winner at the butts, and, with
Lord Cloncurry and the late Mr. Randal Plunkett,
M.P., they won prizes, not only at Wimbledon, but
also at the Inverness and other rifle meetings.

As a yachting man Lord Newlands was also
an enthusiast. Not for him was the transient
excitement of racing, but he cruised in all
weathers, and his intimate knowledge of the chan-
nels and currents of the west coast of Scotland
enabled him to navigate his own craft in those
waters in days before yachting was made easy by
the admirable charts now available. A favourite
run of his was in those days across to the Irish
coast or down to England. So keen indeed
was his enthusiasm that he once designed, and
with his own hands built, a small yacht of about
five tons, which he used to sail alternately with his
larger yacht. When a man in his eightieth year
can still handle a team of coach-horses, he defies
the dictum of Plautus that

Non omnis aetas ludo convenit.

Sportsmen like Lord Newlands are of the
immortals.

MR. J. OTHO PAGET

Mr. Paget may fairly be regarded as the excep-
tion to the rule that sailors are poor horsemen.
True, he had done with the sea and its elusive joys
before he was twenty; still, an old "Conway" boy
who, after spending two years in the Merchant
Service, has hunted regularly every season since
1 880-8 1 is certainly entitled to rank among the few
seamen who have distinguished themselves in the
saddle. He is at heart an Esau, and for him the
term "hunting for the pot" has no reproach, for
he considers that the needs of the larder should
be the chief inducement to hunt wild animals,
though whether he applies this to his fox-hunting I
have not inquired. At any rate he set himself to
work to make foot-beagling a popular sport in a
very conservative part of England, and, in face of
innumerable difficulties, he has so well succeeded
that the farmers in his neighbourhood are not
merely keen about the sport, but also take the
greatest interest in the pack, with the result that he
finds no difficulty about walks for the puppies. His
pack was, as he would admit, not much to look at
in its early days, but by dint of judicious buying
and breeding, he has done wonders for it, so that
at the 1903 Peterboro Show the Thorpe Satchville
beagles took two first prizes as well as the champion
cup for the best three couples. Experience has
changed his ideals, and whereas his first ambition
was for a 14-inch pack, he has gradually reduced
the size, and now admits nothing over 12^ inches.
As a sample of the sport which he is able to show,
it may be mentioned that, hunting two days a
week through last season, he killed fourteen brace
of hares.

Hunting men edit Beckford as readily and
inevitably as naturalists edit White or anglers
Walton, and Mr. Paget is responsible for his

MR. J. OTHO PAGET

edition of the great hunting classic, as well as
for a volume on his favourite sport in Lord
Granby's " Haddon Hall Library " and a book on
horses in another series particularly designed for
young sportsmen. It is, however, in the field of
journalism that he has done most of his work with
the pen. The hunting correspondent dates back to,
at any rate, Mr. Apperley, and in this capacity Mr.
Paget was early entered to a long and honourable
term of service. Starting in 1882-83 on the staff
of " Bell's Life," he transferred his energies during
the following season to " The County Gentleman,"
and, after a respite in 1885-86, during which he
hunted much and wrote little, Mr. Walsh offered
him the vacant post of hunting correspondent to
"The Field," a position he has filled ever since.

Whether in the saddle or on foot, Mr. Paget is
keen, and in his optimism lies the secret of his suc-
cesses. He will tell his friends that, although not in
the enjoyment of sufficient means to allow of his
indulging his somewhat expensive tastes in old
furniture and other beautiful things, he lives every
moment of his life, hunting his four days a week
with the foxhounds in winter and walking other
two with beagles, doing the literary work that he
sets his hand to, and always ready for an evening
rubber of bridge. He farms nearly four hundred
acres and breeds a few thoroughbred horses ; and,
though he has few opportunities of enjoying these
sports, both fishing and shooting attract him.

Add to the foregoing notes that Mr. Paget is six
years on the sunny side of fifty, and that he has all
his life been a total abstainer, and it will be admitted
that there are less enviable men in the world.

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MAJOR R. M. POORE

It is commonly said that no game can be learnt
from books, but those who know him best say-
that Major Poore, one of the many soldiers who
have played for Hampshire, studied the " Badmin-
ton " cricket volume when in India as he would
have studied a cavalry text-book. More than one
characteristic attitude of his in the cricket field is
too obviously modelled on the photographs of an
eminent veteran to escape the critical eye, though
he has one extraordinary style of raising the bat
peculiarly his own.

His school was Cheam, and thence he passed
by the usual routes into the army. During his
service in India he played a good deal of cricket
against Parsee and other teams, and in 1895 he
went out to South Africa for the first time with
the 7th Hussars, playing during that time for
Natal against Lord Hawke's team and twice scoring
centuries. After his return to this country in 1898
he first played first-class cricket, and his success
took the cricket world by surprise. Yet there was
nothing amazing in the performances of a man
who took his cricket so seriously, particularly as
he stands 6 feet 4 inches, and has a reach given
to few. Still, three centuries in succession, and
two of them in one match, furnished the compilers
of cricket statistics with new material. Further
exercise for their ingenuity was furnished by the
way in which he headed the batting averages in
1898 with the extraordinary average of 91.4, play-
ing twenty-one innings and scoring over 1500, his
best being 304.

That was indeed his Annus Mirabilis, for that
same season he not only won the shield for best
man-at-arms in the Military Tournament, a dis-
tinction repeated the following year, but also hit
the winning goal in the final tie of the Inter-
Regimental Tournament at Hurlingham.

113 H

MAJOR R. M. POORE

All this has, as might be expected, made him
immensely popular with his regiment, and indeed
his military record alone is something to be proud
of. In 1896 he served in Matabeleland under Sir
F. Carrington, and in the following year in
Mashonaland under Sir R. Martin, and was men-
tioned in despatches, besides getting the medal
and clasp. During the South African Campaign
he served from 1899 to the end of the war on
Headquarter Staff (three times mentioned in
despatches, D.S.O. medal six clasps, king's
medal two clasps). Consequently, his cricketing
days were over for the moment, for he did not
return home until the season of 1902 was well
advanced, and he re-embarked for South Africa
during the first week of 1903.

Of his polo much might be written. His great
height and length of leg always make him a con-
spicuous figure on a polo pony, but his seat on
horseback is, in fact, almost perfect, and that alone
is no bad introduction to athletics.

He is one of the four directors of that interest-
ing social settlement at Winterslow, of which his
father, Major R. Poore, was the originator, and is
still the chairman. It would be interesting, were
this the right place, to give some account of this
daring and successful attempt to throw labouring
men on their own resources, and let them taste
the sweets of thrift and judicious investment, but
the temptation must be resisted.

114

^^mWn^*^*"" -

THE DUKE OF PORTLAND

John William Arthur Charles James Caven-
dish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, was born
in 1857, was educated at Eton, and served in the
Militia and subsequently in the Coldstream Guards,
from which he retired in 1879 on succeeding to the
title.

Though he has probably tried every sport and
every game, with the possible exception of croquet,
it is chiefly with horses that his time has been
occupied. Officially, he has been thrice appointed
Master of the Horse, while his zealous fulfilment
of the duties of Steward of the Royal Commission
on Horse Breeding has frequently brought him
into the ring at Islington a good hour before
fashionable London is out of bed, there perform-
ing the onerous duties of organising parades and
generally seeing that the shows go off without a
hitch.

To the public, however, he is more widely known
as one of the most popular, as well as one of the
most successful, owners of racehorses, and the list
of his famous winners is almost appalling. His
colours were first seen on the course in 1881, when
the late Fred Archer rode for him, Mowerina win-
ning him his first important race, and it may be
noted that on the same day he himself rode, and
won, a match against the late Sir John Astley.

His most remarkable good fortune, however, was
winning the Derby two years in succession, with
Ayrshire in 1888 and with Donovan in 1889. He
also won the Oaks two years running, with Mrs.
Butterwick in 1893 and with Amiable in 1894,
besides winning it with Memoir in 1890 and with
La Roche in 1901.

He has enjoyed two big game expeditions in
India; he is an enthusiastic deerstalker, killing
some splendid stags most seasons at Langwell ;
"5

DUKE OF PORTLAND

and he also fishes some of the best salmon water
in Inverness-shire.

Nor, like other horse-lovers in this volume, is he
hostile to the motor. On the contrary, he makes
every use of it as a convenience, and watches with
great interest the speed trials on his private track
at Welbeck.

ii6

KUMAR SHRI RANJITSINHJI

Prince Ranjitsinhji tells an amusing story
against himself as a shooting man — and as a
splendid shot he is known only to the few, where,
as " Prince of Cricket," as one of his biographers
has well named him, he is the property of the
many — which may perhaps bear repeating. In
his native land, it must be remembered, or, at any
rate, in those portions of it which are under native
government, there are, or were, no close times
for game of any description. Thus it happened
that when, as a lad of fourteen, just over from
India, he was invited to shoot partridges one
fine September in the vicinity of Bournemouth,
he could not understand why the rest of the
party were such duffers as to spare the "big
birds," an omission which he, being even then
a remarkably quick shot, took pains to rectify.
The sequel at dinner that evening, when the master
of the house read out the bag of partridges, hares,
and rabbits, and, after an interval of impatient
expectation, a youthful voice added with pride,
" And nine pheasants ! " may be better imagined
than described.

Born in September, 1872, K. S. Ranjitsinhji
went in due course, as is known to every lover of
cricket, to Cambridge, and there distinguished
himself in the national game. It is difficult indeed
to say at what game or sport he would not dis-
tinguish himself if he cared, seeing that for extra-
ordinary quickness of eye and suppleness of limb
he has not his equal. If, for instance, he had
given himself to the study — he is essentially the
patient and dogged student of whatever he takes
up — of lawn tennis, he would undoubtedly have
ranked among the foremost players of the day,
and, as it is, he has beaten one or two of those
who stand in the front line.
117

KUMAR SHRI RANJITSINHJI

What is not generally appreciated about " Ranji "
— it is difficult to relinquish the pet name of the
Pavilion — is his untiring application and constant
practice. It might indeed be said of some of our
other cricket prodigies, but of none more safely
than of him, that they are made, not born. A man
of his natural advantages and old fighting stock is
not likely to be beaten by any game or sport
known to man, and Swift's remark, that most of
our amusements are an imitation of fighting,
might perhaps give the key to his all-round pro-
ficiency. While he is usually associated with
outdoor games, his intimates know him as a fine
player of both bridge and chess, while a break of
176 stands to his credit at the billiard table ; and if
he plays a better winning game than losing, he is
still a very pretty billiard player. Here again,
however, as on the cricket field, careful coaching
by the best professionals and assiduous practice
whenever opportunity offers have much to say to
his success.

As a shot, particularly as a driven shot, he is
wonderful, and those who have frequently been out
with him say that he shoots the fastest rabbits
before he gets his gun up, while he will get his
brace of birds out of a covey before other men are
ready to shoot at all. What is equally valuable to
his friends is his perfect genius for organising a
shoot. In this connection it is interesting to re-
member that he served as A.D.C. to the Maharajah
of Patiala, and those who had an opportunity of
seeing his services as a transport officer declared
that he would be an invaluable soldier in that
capacity in any campaign. In the country round
about Cutch and Gujarat, where linger the last
lions on the continent of Asia, he has shot all
manner of big game, and he has had his share
118

KUMAR SHRI RANJITSINHJI

of pig-sticking, though it is not perhaps one of
his favourite sports.

Nor is this all-round sportsman proof against
the gentler attractions of the rod. While at Cam-
bridge he made friends with an expert roach-fisher-
man, well known in the town, and he acquired
great skill and corresponding enthusiasm in that
somewhat humble branch of angling. Then it
was that his great friend and Sussex colleague,
C. B. Fry, chaffed him into trying fly-fishing, and,
with the encouragement of an extraordinarily suc-
cessful dibut on a Yorkshire stream, he took to it
with his usual determination, and now throws a
good fly.

In taking leave of this, the most remarkable
sporting Indian of our day, it is almost refreshing
to note two pastimes at which he fails. Although
he has resigned the captaincy of the Sussex team
in favour of his friend Fry, he will doubtless con-
tinue to show us the same faultless cricket all
through the season. Yet he, even he, has
his athletic limitations. He never rowed, and
he cannot swim. Nor does he hunt in Eng-
land, though a fair horseman. Perhaps in our
winters it makes his feet cold. His cricket
is, of course, superb ; but where is the use of
recapitulating his centuries and other triumphs
on every great cricket ground of the day? It is
of greater interest, taking his pre-eminence for
granted, to recognise the truth, that the position
which he holds has been reached not so much by
exceptional advantages of hand and eye and general
cat-like agility — though these go for a good deal —
as by extraordinary application. At one time of
his career, at any rate, even if of late his attention
has been somewhat diverted by other matters, he
may be said to have lived cricket, dreamt cricket,
119

KUMAR SHRI RANJITSINHJI

smoked cricket. The game was never out of his
thoughts, sleeping or waking, for an hour. It is
surely more pleasing to watch his beautiful strokes,
not as the work of an athletic miracle, but as the
fruit of an unswerving loyalty to the greatest of
games. To the born poet there is no more credit
for his tuneful numbers than to the skylark for its
song.

LORD RIBBLESDALE

Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribblesdale, of Gis-
burne Park, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was
born in 1854. He was educated at Harrow, and
thence went straight into the army, the date of his
first commission being 12th November, 1873. He
joined the 4th battalion of the Rifle Brigade, then
stationed at Umballa in the Punjab. He retired
from the service in 1886. When quartered with
his regiment at Gibraltar in 1885-86, Lord Ribbles-
dale hunted regularly with the Calpe hounds,
making the best of that rough country of stone,
sand and ravine.

Soon after his arrival at the Rock, Lord
Ribblesdale was put in charge of Zobehr Pacha,
then in detention at Gibraltar as a political prisoner,
he and his family and following occupying the
Governor's cottage. The experience must have
been interesting, for, thanks to the services of a
capable interpreter, and to the confidence which a
friendly intercourse with his warder inspired in the
Pacha, Lord Ribblesdale soon learnt a good deal,
not alone of Zobehr's early and adventurous history,
but also of his views on the then perplexed politics
of the Soudan region.

A Liberal in politics. Lord Ribblesdale was
Lord-in-Waiting to Her late Majesty Queen
Victoria from 1880 to 1885, and he held the
appointment of Master of the Buckhounds from
1892 to 1895.

The latter appointment was offered to him by
Mr. Gladstone under circumstances at once novel
and precarious, for he seems to have accepted it on
the understanding that he was to prepare himself,
officially, and those committed to his care for their
latter end. One Minister even wrote congratu-
lating him on his moriturus appointment, so
generally does the position seem to have been

LORD RIBBLESDALE

accepted. Threatened men, however, live long, and
the fall of the Liberal Administration in Ascot
week, 1895, found things just as they had been
in 1892. Thus the subject of these notes looked
after the Royal Enclosure after three highly success-
ful seasons, and then found himself in a position
to hand over to his equally popular successor a
seasoned stud, a tireless pack, stout deer, and a
smart and competent establishment.

Had it indeed not been for his mastership of the
Queen's hounds, it might have been no easy matter
to fill the allotted space with anything about Lord
Ribblesdale. A personal acquaintance justified me
in asking him for some particulars of his sporting
accomplishments, some clue to his aspirations.
The reply was not encouraging. He seriously and
stoutly questioned his claim to be included in a
sporting gallery, and threw liberal douches of cold
water on the possibilities of a regular biographical
notice. He declared that material was altogether
lacking. He had never, so he said, owned race-
horses, kept hounds, or made record bags. Doubt-
less it is at once the fashion and the privilege for
those who have seen abundance and variety of sport
in many lands to make light of their experiences,
yet, although Lord Ribblesdale's Rousseau-like
confession of an assumed mediocrity did not in the
least deceive me, there seemed nothing more to be
done.

Fortunately, however — and all who love a good,
racy book of sport have occasion to rejoice with me
— his mastership of the Buckhounds produced a
very entertaining work, under the title of " The
Queen's Hounds and Stag-hunting Recollections."
This book, which appeared in the Jubilee Year, and
which was by permission dedicated to our late
gracious Queen, deals with many matters other

Wl''M'§0^r00^it0;X

LORD RIBBLESDALE

than stag-hunting, and horses, hounds, deer, and
human beings are all touched upon with the same
felicity. Moreover, as has been well remarked,
history is biography; and from many points of
view the book is its author's autobiography.

The Listers, who have held and lived on the
same lands in Craven from the time of Edward IV.
(though the pedigree traces back to the 6th of
Edward II.) were one of the gentle Yorkshire
families who gave their active support to the
Parliament. A Lister of Gisburne commanded a
troop of dragoons at Marston Moor, and it is on
record that Oliver Cromwell stayed the night at
Gisburne on his way north after the field of Preston,
while the Barbara Lister of that day married John
Lambert of Calton, son of the famous Parlia-
mentary General. Gisburne Park, by the way, was
formerly remarkable for its herd of wild white
cattle ; but in-breeding was the ruin of the stock,
and, after a period of nothing but bull-calves, the
remnant of the herd were killed off in 1859.

The present owner of Gisburne is, as we have
seen, a horseman before all else. He is also, how-
ever, a skilful and enthusiastic trout-fisherman, and
in earlier life was much attached to deer-stalking.
Never more than an average rifle-shot, he never-
theless acquired some reputation as a walker, and
learnt much of the ways of deer and winds.

Though those who are privileged to give a son
in their country's wars are not bereft of consolation,
it must have been a terrible blow when, in the
recent fighting in Somaliland, Lord Ribblesdale's
gallant son. Captain Lister of the loth Hussars,
was first reported missing and then discovered
killed. Already in South Africa his brief military
career had been extraordinarily brilliant; thrice
mentioned in despatches, D.S.O., and Queen's
123

LORD RIBBLESDALE

medal with six clasps. Had he not been cut off in
the pride of his manhood by a savage foe, none can
doubt that he would have worthily upheld the
traditions of soldier and sportsman due to a great
house. But it was written otherwise. Kismet f

124

MR. R. H. RIMINGTON-
WILSON

In an age of specialising it would be surprising
if so marvellous a shot at driven grouse as Mr.
R. H. Rimington-Wilson should fail to excite
the admiration, if not the envy, of his brother
sportsmen. He was born in 1852, and spent his
early years at Eton and Cambridge and in the
Inniskilling Dragoons. He left the regiment in
1879, and went the same year on a rather un-
fortunate shooting expedition in China and Japan,
in the course of which he was lost in the snow
and left there two days and two nights. Many
men would have perforce spared the grouse after
such an experience, but Mr. Rimington-Wilson's
constitution pulled him through, and all that he
suffered was the amputation of his toes by a skilled
native. In Albania he has also done a good deal
of shooting, but the day's sport which he always
says will live longest in his memory is that on
which he killed to his own gun seventeen and a
half couple of snipe and seven duck before ten
in the morning, unwittingly poaching on seven
or eight acres close to Glasgow Barracks and long
since built over.

Although, however, Mr. Rimington-Wilson is
an accomplished billiard player, taking high rank
among amateurs, and although he is also a fine
all-round game shot and particularly good at clay
birds, it is with the grouse, and with the record
grouse bags on his admirably managed Broom-
head Moors, near Sheffield, that his name is com-
monly associated. A thousand brace of grouse a
day seems a prodigious bag for nine or ten guns,
yet this figure has been reached on the best day
in most years at Broomhead. Six drives a day,
and places drawn for without favouritism, the guns
125

MR. R. H. RIMINGTON- WILSON

moving up two places at each drive, is the rule;
and the results certainly warrant the praise in-
variably lavished on the head keeper, who is said
to have forgotten more than many head keepers
have remembered about the production and driv-
ing of grouse. There is no shooting over dogs,
the owner of Broomhead having a firm belief
in the efficacy of driving as tending to mix the
blood, though killing off the old birds also benefits
the moor.

The record, which still holds, for one day's
grouse shooting was that of 2648 birds made at
Broomhead by nine guns on 30th August 1893.
This has never been beaten, and indeed un-
favourable weather, more particularly with the
wrong wind, has sometimes disappointed when
it seemed at first as if Mr. Rimington-Wilson
might break his own record. Altogether, he has
taken part in fourteen days at Broomhead, Wem-
mergill, and Moy, when the bag averaged over
2000 grouse a day.

The Broomhead Moors have belonged to his
family for many generations, and the greatest at-
tention is given to the production of the birds,
as also to the conduct of the drives, though the
subject of these notes is always anxious to impress
upon his friends that these enormous bags are
not 'the result of a deliberate attempt at record
breaking or making.

126

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MR. R. A. SANDERS

If one sport is more peculiarly associated with the
West Country than the rest, it is the hunting of
the stag ; and of the several packs that pursue that
royal game, none is more popular or more famous
than the Devon and Somerset, which Mr. Sanders
has mastered for nearly ten years. As he hunts
the hounds himself for two days in the week, and
as this sport continues with regularity during nine
months of the year, it will readily be understood
that he has little leisure for other sports, though
he gets an occasional day's trout-fishing, and has
played some polo without, however, taking front
rank in the list of players. He also hunts with
the Blackmore Vale, so that he must spend a good
portion of the year in the saddle. Though not
himself a west countryman, having been born
thirty-seven years ago in the Isle of Wight, he
has made his home at Exford, the site of the
Devon and Somerset kennels, while his wife, who
lived at Glenthorne, a picturesque home on the
border of Devon and Somerset, has always been a
keen rider to hounds, and they both hunted for
two seasons from Kibworth Hall in Leicestershire.
Mrs. Sanders is referred to in John Fortescue's
"Stag-hunting on Exmoor," as one of the young
ladies who followed the hunt on ponies.

As has been said, so busy a Master of Hounds
as Mr. Sanders has no time for other sports, but
he is a keen politician. In 1900 he stood in the
Conservative interest for Bristol, and his defeat on
that occasion has not discouraged him, for he is,
at the time of writing, candidate, as a follower of
Mr. Chamberlain, for the Bridgewater division of
Somerset in place of Mr. Stanley, who has retired
after holding the seat unopposed since 1892. Mr.
Sanders also commands the South Molton Squad-
ron of the Royal North Devon I.Y., and it is
127

MR. R. A. SANDERS

interesting to note that at the last training there
numbered among its officers no fewer than ten
masters of hounds, past or present — no mean
tribute to the sporting character of west country
squires. Mr. Sanders was at Harrow and Balliol,
where he took first-class honours, and was called
to the bar in 1891.

Since he took the hounds, his chief difficulty-
has been to keep the herd of deer within manage-
able limits. He started with two days' hunting a
week ; increased this first to three, then to four.
Three new packs of staghounds have been formed
in the old Devon and Somerset country to cope
with the difficulty, and of this something has
already been said in the note on Sir John Heath-
coat -Amory, who hunts the Tiverton district,
while Mr. Sanders hunts the Quantock country,
and a third pack hunts round Barnstaple. No
fewer than three hundred and fifty deer were, by
the combined efforts of these packs, accounted
for during 1903, yet the country is still well
stocked. Among famous long runs during the
Mastership of Mr. Sanders mention may be made
of those from Youlstone Wood to Badgworthy,
Hawkridge to Glenthorne, Bremridge Wood to
Porlock Weir, and Haddon to Emmet's Grange.
These were with stags. With hinds the best runs
have been from Slowley to Withypool, Hawkridge
to Dunster, and Chapman's Barrows also to Dun-
ster. During his nine years of Mastership Mr.
Sanders has had the services as huntsmen first of
Anthony Huxstable, who retired in 1901, and then
of Sidney Tucker, who still carries the horn.

128

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\

THE HON. J. W. E. DOUGLAS-
SCOTT-MONTAGU

Sport, politics, journalism all appeal to the protean
energy of the Member for the New Forest, but it
is with the progress of motoring and motors that
he has been more intimately identified than per-
haps any other among our legislators. We are
commonly told by its many admirers that the
motor has come to stay, but this savours of para-
dox when we consider its restless twofold progress,
locomotive and evolutionary ; and Mr. Scott-
Montagu, like his motors, is never still.

One of the pioneers of motoring in this country,
one of those who have brought it in line with Con-
tinental neighbours, who would otherwise have
hopelessly outdistanced it on the road, he may in
the first instance have been attracted by its sport-
ing possibilities. That phase, however, has been
left behind with many other milestones, and he is
now absorbed in the future development of motor
traction as an asset in the solution of the housing
problem and as an influence on the more healthy
development of the nation. His war is not against
the horse ; indeed, the riding and racing horse he
never expects or wishes to see displaced by mecha-
nical traction. Yet he contends, not without sup-
port from the developments daily proceeding before
our eyes, that the beast of burden, harnessed to
its own undoing in van and dray, will slowly but
surely be superseded by petrol and electricity. In
army manoeuvres he looks to the motor car to play
a great and useful part, and on his own shooting —
which is, after all, the imitation of warfare — he has
long since introduced the motor in a novel and now
indispensable character. The guns at Beaulieu are
taken out by motor, and one of the cars also con-
veys the keepers and dogs from one beat to the

X29 I

HON. DOUGLAS-SCOTT-MONTAGU

other, thus widening the sphere of shooting very
considerably.

The purely sporting aspect of motoring has
engaged its share of his attention, even if it is
the utilitarian side which to-day attracts him most.
He took part in one of the very first road races,
that from Paris to Ostend in 1899, driving a
twelve horse-power Daimler, the first British car
ever raced on the Continent, and winning a
bronze medal as third prize. He was until quite
recently Vice- Chairman of the Automobile Club,
and only after the victory of his reform party
did he retire, like Cincinnatus to the plough,
remaining, however, an influential member of the
Executive Committee. He drove in one of the
first big events organised under its auspices, the
Thousand Miles Trial, and during the Irish Fort-
night, at the time of the Gordon-Bennett Race in
1903, he raced his twenty-two horse-power Daimler,
taking second place in the speed trials, and
winning the cup presented by the Royal Ulster
Yacht Club for the hill-climbing contest at Castle-
wellan. Apart from his intrinsic interest in motor
cars, he has always been fascinated by the most
difficult problems of mechanical traction ; and
practical work in locomotive shops at Crewe, not
to mention constant experience on the footplate of
some of our fastest locomotive engines, has quali-
fied him to indulge in such exercises. He is
always particularly enthusiastic on the subject of
the excellent roads in France, having toured over
a great part of that country. By a singular sub-
version of fact, more than one writer on Parlia-
mentary matters has been known to refer to the
" Scott - Montagu Bill," alluding to the recent
Government Bill for the regulation of motor traffic.
Seeing that Mr. Scott - Montagu worked most
130

!i:^^#r#^;r*^,;*-,_.. ^.

HON. DOUGLAS-SCOTT-MONTAGU

strenuously, in face of tremendous opposition from
his fellow legislators, to get some modification of
the severity with which this measure was originally
drafted, a term, originally invented as a joke at his
expense, is now a well-earned compliment, particu-
larly as the Act promises to work smoothly and
with excellent results.

He has shot big game in India and North
America, but of late years his passion for active
public life has kept him at home. It is twelve
years since he was given the management of the
Beaulieu shooting, and the wonderful improvements
which he has effected in that time are widely known.
As some evidence of the results of his labours, it
may be mentioned that whereas anterior to 1889
the best day's partridge bag was 142 birds, he has
since killed 692 in a day, and over 2000 in a
season. His practice of leaving a good stock of
wild hen pheasants each year is amply justified by
the unusual preponderance of wild birds shot.
In 1896, for example, only about 1600 birds
were reared on the whole estate, but the total
pheasant bag reached 6000. He has not bought
a pheasant egg for the estate for twelve years,
so that his principle of leaving wild hens answers
in every way. His ingenious creation of duck and
teal pits in various parts of the estate has also
made the wild-fowl shooting first-class, and even
in a recent busy year, with very few days given to
this shooting, the bag included 250 teal and 350
duck, while as many as 13 snipe have been killed
in one drive.

Mr. Scott-Montagu is also a keen fisherman,
and has killed sea-trout of 10 lbs. in the Beaulieu
river, at Hartford Hole and other pools, by fishing
the last hour of daylight, when all other methods
have failed to score against Salmo trutta. This
131

HON. DOUGLAS-SCOTT-MONTAGU

introduction of a method well known in both
Scotland and Norway, fishing till the line is no
longer visible in the water, resulted in a complete
refutation of the older belief that the Beaulieu river
sea-trout could only be caught in rain and a gale
of wind. He is, in fact, an adept with both gun
and rod, and a flighting duck has not much chance
of getting past him, unless the light is uncommonly
bad. The gunning-punt, in both its scientific and
sporting aspects, is another hobby of his, and few
amateurs are his equal in sculling a punt up to
duck. His insatiable love of experimenting has
made the Beaulieu estate not alone the breeding-
ground of wild turkeys, but a general sanctuary of
rare wild fowl.

He also has his share of literary labours, for
he edits two periodicals, one weekly, the other
monthly, dealing with his favourite hobby, and is
a prolific writer in the dailies and monthlies on all
manner of subjects, from politics to locomotion.
His passion for motoring is a joke among his
friends. " I believe you think that motor cars will
cure all human ills," was the bantering remark
addressed to him on one occasion by a well-
known statesman. Scott-Montagu modestly, but
readily, claimed that they would at any rate help
to cure a great many ; and his retort may perhaps
have had more reason in it than we are yet in a
position to appreciate.

132

MR. ARCHIBALD JOHN
STUART- WORTLEY

Mr. Stuart-Wortley, born in 1849, ^^d edu-
cated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, where
he took his B.A. degree, is well known as artist,
author, and all-round sportsman. His shooting
has placed him in quite the front rank, and he has
held his own on occasion with such famous shots
as Lord de Grey, Lord Walsingham, Mr. Riming-
ton Wilson, and others in whose company he here
finds himself. Pigeon-shooting was at one time
his forte, and in his celebrated match with Dr.
Carver, in the eighties, for ^^500 a side, one hun-
dred birds apiece, he and his opponent killed eighty-
three each, and he then killed an eighty-fourth,
only it fell on an outhouse which, in the match
in question, was out of bounds. He has been
equally proficient with the rifle, and made some
fine scoring at the running deer in the old days
when the National Rifle Association held its meet-
ings at Wimbledon.

Hunting never attracted him, but he has
always been an enthusiastic angler and, with Lord
Granby, Mr. Croft, and other masters of the dry
fly, he belonged to the celebrated Mimram Club,
in Hertfordshire, on the water of which he spent
many hours after trout as long as that club
existed.

In early life he was very fond of cricket, played
for his college, and was for a time a member of the
M.C.C., but the serious study of art left him little
leisure for so exigent a game.

It is, particularly of late years, as an artist of
distinction that Mr. Stuart-Wortley has been before
the sport -loving public, though his monographs
on the partridge and pheasant and grouse also
entitle him to high rank among sporting authors.

MR. A. J. STUART-WORTLEY

For all his success with the brush he thanks
Sir John Millais, and he had the distinction of
being that master's only pupil. He also studied
at the Slade School and in Paris, Rome, and
Diisseldorf, and the cosmopolitan breadth of his
art training is apparent in his work. His best-
known sporting pictures are of grouse and part-
ridge driving, one of " The Big Pack " having
been painted at Broomhead, and now the property
of Mr. Rimington-Wilson, another of partridge
driving being the property of Lord Ashburton,
while the late Mr. John Penn bought " The Lost
Royal." In addition to his sporting pictures, how-
ever, Mr. Stuart- Wortley has painted a number of
portraits, among his most distinguished sitters
having been the King (for the Junior Carlton
Club), Dr. W. G. Grace (for the Pavilion at
Lord's), Mr. Shirley, late President of the Kennel
Club, and, of ladies, H.RH. the Duchess of Fife,
Lady Newtoun Butler, Lady Kilmorey, and many
others.

In the course of a very active life it has fallen
to Mr. Stuart- Wortley 's lot to found more than
one useful institution, and of those which owe
their inception to him among others, mention may
be made of that popular retreat, the Beafsteak
Club, and the Portrait Painters' Society, of which
he is President, while he was also the originator
of two great successes in the way of exhibitions,
that of Sports and Arts at the Grosvenor Galleries
in the late eighties, and that of Fair Women at
the Grafton Galleries some years later.

134

MR. EDGAR SYERS

That there should still be English skaters able
to hold their own among the first exponents of
that graceful pastime, says not a little for their
perseverance in the face of long odds. The rigours
of our English winters are not what they were.
Instead of "enjoying" spells of frost-bound
weather every year, as they still do in Russia or
in Scandinavia, we are now accustomed to look
back to the last hard winters of the eighties as
survivals of earlier meteorological epoch. Those
who do not take their pleasure on ice-skates have
little reason to regret the change that has come
over our island climate ; and those who do, can,
thanks to the facilities of modern travel, pursue
their favourite exercise in lands which still lie
under the yearly grip of frost.

Mr. and Mrs. Syers are easily the first pair-
skaters in this country, and indeed, in addition to
having won the world's championship in London
in the year 1902, they carried off all honours at
Copenhagen during the previous year, and were
second at both Stockholm and Berlin. They are
chiefly known in the English skating world as
advocates of the International style, which aims
at grace and freedom, whereas the English ideal
is in the direction of large curves in a rigid attitude.
The freer European style was first introduced into
this country by Mr. Syers, who holds the position
of honorary secretary to the figure-skating branch
of the National Skating Association ; and he it
was also who induced the authorities to hold their
first world's championship, and to invite such
masters of the new style (which is in reality a
return to the older methods, as any one may see for
himself by studying the older works on skating)
as Hiigel, Fuchs, and Grenandcr.

It is chiefly perhaps as pair-skaters that Mr.
135

MR. EDGAR SYERS

and Mrs. Syers are known to the sporting world.
They also shoot, fish, bicycle, and swim ; and much
of their summer, the off season of their craft, is
spent in a Canadian canoe along little travelled
English rivers and canals.

Mr. Syers, who was recently handicapped by
ill-health, was third in the world's championship
meeting held at Davos in 1899, and in the follow-
ing year he was winner in the junior class of the
European championship at Berlin, At " Niagara "
in 1 90 1 he figured second in the N.S.A. competi-
tion, and he holds the N.SA. badges for both
figure and speed skating, on ice and rollers.

It is difficult to write of Mr. Syers without re-
calling the marvellous skating of his wife. She
has skated for seven years, but only during the
past three has she applied herself in earnest to
the international style. Before her conversion, she
had, however, passed the three N.S.A. tests in the
English style, and she made one of the team which
won the N.S.A. challenge shield for combined skat-
ing. Her rejection of the English style in favour of
that in which all the international competitions are
held was the result of a visit to Davos, where she
had opportunities of seeing and admiring the other
methods. Besides having practised with her hus-
band, she owes many hints to three such cham-
pions as Messrs. Hiigel, Fuchs, and Salchow.
With her husband she visited Berlin, Copenhagen,
Stockholm, and Davos, and, after winning the
ladies' international competition at Copenhagen
in 1 90 1, she was second to the redoubted Salchow
at "Niagara" in 1902, on which occasion H.M.
the King was present. Again, in 1903, she was
second to Salchow at Davos and also the first
winner of the Swedish Cup, presented to the
N.S.A. by the Stockholm Skating Club.
136

I

MR. COURTENAY TRACY

Some one — it must have been the sporting Mr.
Russell — once said that in his early days he had
tramped over three thousand miles of Devon with-
out finding an otter, and he concluded that he might
as well have looked for a moose. Many who have
been out on unsuccessful days with the Dartmoor
or Culmstock will sympathise with this sombre
experience, but Mr. Courtenay Tracy would not be
among the number, for he must by now have
notched a whole jungle of otter poles from end to
end.

The otter was not his first quarry, for, as a lad
of only nine years, in the days when his father had a
deal of shooting round Ockley, in Surrey, he began
hunting hare with a scratch pack of beagles. In
fact, the party combined hunting and shooting in an
ingenious manner, first shooting such rabbits as the
pack put up, and then, as soon as a hare appeared
in fairly open country, putting the guns in the
nearest dry ditch and following the chase on foot.

Later on, when his father moved into Kent, to
Edenbridge, Mr. Tracy whipped in to, and later
hunted the pack, and also, until the middle sixties,
hunted at times the Southern Hounds kennelled in
the neighbourhood. At Trinity College, Cam-
bridge, he started and hunted the Trinity Foot
Beagles.

His otter-hunting enthusiasm practically dates
from his meeting Mr. William Collier, perhaps the
finest huntsman of otterhounds in the history of
the sport, and that in turn was due to Mr. Tracy's
joining the Western Circuit after taking his degree.
The first day out with Mr. Collier on the Exe may
be said to have laid the foundations of the successes
that have rewarded him during the past forty years,
in the course of which he has hunted otter in the
west and north of England, in Wales, in Ireland
137

MR. COURTENAY TRACY

and Scotland, and, on one memorable occasion, in
France.

About the year 1884 Mr. Clift, of the West
Cumberland, brought his otterhounds to hunt in
Wiltshire, and showed excellent sport. This led
to the establishment of the local pack, of which
Mr, Tracy was elected Master in 1887, and with
which he has carried the horn ever since. The
country extends from Yeovil, in Somerset, to Farn-
ham, in Surrey, taking in the New Forest. This,
with an occasional visit to friendly Masters in
Devon and elsewhere, when the water meadows are
laid up for hay, gives even an enthusiast like Mr.
Tracy all the sport he can want.

All manner of other hunting Mr. Tracy has
done in the intervals of his favourite sport : the
foumart in the Lake Country, the wild deer on
Exmoor and in the Forest, the carted deer in
various countries, the fox also, and even the badger
by moonlight with the Axminster pack.

Hawking, too, with the Old Hawking Club has
also given him many an enjoyable day, and with
the gun or rifle he has stalked on the fjelds of
Norway and on the plains of North Africa.

As a fisherman he has been most successful with
trout, his proudest day being when he killed five
consecutive fish, averaging 5 lbs. a piece, on the dry
May-fly. Salmon have been less kind to him, in
spite of his constant war against their natural
enemy.

Though not a young man, he still, in season,
shoots his five or six days a week. Even then,
when the last coverts have been shot, he cannot
rest the few weeks that must elapse before the
opening of the otter-hunting, but is out every
fine day, and some others, seeing on foot the end
of many a good hunt.

138

1

COLONEL WALROND

Colonel Walrond, although he was born in Paris
in 1841, and did not see England until 1852, is of
old Devon stock, and few have done more than
he during the last thirty or forty years to keep alive
the national interest in archery. Colonel Walrond
shot with a gun before he drew the bow, but he
also used the latter while still a schoolboy near
Oxford. He and his father used to shoot sitting
rabbits with arrows on lawns which covered about
thirty acres and were well enclosed, so that there
were plenty of opportunities. Some have gone
yet further than this in their hopes of reviving
the bow as a weapon of the chase, and Mr.
Thompson, in America, and Mr. Straker, in India,
have both shot game in this way. On the whole,
however, the modern hammerless ejector is more
profitable, though a more general use of the bow
would perhaps preclude the necessity of enforcing
the game laws.

It was when coaching at Teignmouth, before
he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, that Colonel
Walrond first took seriously to archery, joining the
then flourishing Teignmouth Archery Club (1857),
which has long ceased to exist ; and in 1858 he shot
for the first time in public at the Grand National at
Exeter. During the next two or three years he won
numerous prizes. For some little time he lost
interest in the sport, but when, in 1864, the Grand
Western Meeting was held at Exeter, he recovered
his keenness and was eighth, bettering this two
years later by coming out first, and consequently,
at the Grand Western Meeting at Weymouth,
holding the Championship of the West. Two
years after that, in 1868, the Grand Western
Meeting fell through, and he accepted the post of
Honorary Secretary and revived the meeting, which
has been a great success ever since.
139

COLONEL WALROND

Such an enthusiast could not well shirk ofificial
responsibility, and Colonel Walrond has, in fact,
borne more than his share of duties. He was for
fifteen years (1861-1876) Honorary Secretary to
the Teignmouth Archery Club ; he has held the
same post to the Grand Western ever since 1868 ;
he was appointed on the Committee of the Grand
National in 1869; he was Vice-President in 1894;
Chairman of Committee since 1896 ; and Honorary
Secretary of the Royal Toxophilite Society since
1893.

His principal wins include the Championship
of the West for the years 1866, 1870, 1871, 1874,
1875, 1879, 1887, 1888. In the Grand National
Meeting he shot third in 1871 and 1900, fourth
in 1879, and fifth in 1874, 1887, and 1892.

He carried off the first prizes at the Crystal
Palace in 1891, at the Grand Northern in 1896,
and at the Grand Western on six occasions be-
tween 1866 and 1899.

His best public scores have been (Double York
Round) 851 in 1871 ; 815 in 1878; 829 in 1887, all
at the Grand Western Meeting.

Besides his archery, Colonel Walrond was
always fond of rowing in his earlier Teignmouth
and Oxford days. He also commanded the Teign-
mouth Rifle Volunteers 1863 to 1873, and did a deal
of rifle shooting. Indeed, his eye and hand have
served him admirably with the modern rifle as with
the ancient bow, for he was the best shot at the
Hythe School of Musketry in March 1868, and
Musketry Instructor 1868-81 with the First Class
Certificate, Hythe, P.S. (P.O.) Tactics (First Class).

He joined the ist Devon Militia in the early
sixties; was Lieutenant in 1863; Captain, 1871 ;
Major, 1882 ; Lieutenant-Colonel and Honorary
Colonel, 1893, finally resigning in 1898.
140

LORD WALSINGHAM

We do not commonly associate a passion for
butterfly-hunting with a love of big-game shooting
and a skill with gun and rifle that few can equal
and fewer still excel. Lord Walsingham, the
chronicler of the " Badminton " volumes, the peer
of only such shots as Lord de Grey, the maker of
the record bag of 1070 grouse in one day to his
own gun, is more widely known, but not more
enthusiastic, than the author of upwards of a
hundred contributions to learned Transactions, the
Fellow of every learned Society of note in this
country, the honorary member of the leading
scientific bodies of the United States, France,
Germany, Holland and Russia. His administra-
tive work has been performed as trustee of both the
British Museum, and the Museum of the College
of Surgeons, but his services to the nation will live
after him, for he has by deed of gift transferred to it
the splendid collections now lodged at Merton Hall.

Lord Walsingham went to Eton and thence to
Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he is M.A.,
LL.D., and High Steward. Although political life
at no time absorbed him, he sat for five years as
Conservative member for West Norfolk.

Though his specific claim to a place in this
gallery rests on his splendid skill with the gun
rather than on his entomological lore, it is impos-
sible seriously to consider Lord Walsingham apart
from the unique collections, to the making of which
he has given most of his life. There are in all pro-
bability as many micro-lepidoptera at Merton as there
are lepidoptera altogether in the British Museum.
The Walsingham collections are not important only
from the great extent of their material, but rather
from their high scientific value, comprising not alone
his own types, but also several other collections that
he has from time to time acquired and added.
141

LORD WALSINGHAM

It has already been remarked that he contrives
in a surprising manner to combine sporting and
entomological recreations on his foreign trips, and
the most important of these was that which he
made 1 871-1872 in California and Oregon.
Travelling vid New York, Chicago and San Fran-
cisco, he shot humming-birds and sea-lions on the
way. After hunting and collecting on various
grounds, he made his winter quarters at Fort
Watson, where exposure told on him, and during
March 1872 he was seriously ill, the trip having
then occupied nearly a year. Resuming his march
in the middle of April, he followed the Columbia
River down to Portland, and thence to the end of
the railway track. Some very interesting micro-
lepidoptera were collected in the Siskiyou Moun-
tains on the border of California and Oregon, and
the journey was continued by way of Crescent City
to Eureka, where camp was broken up, and Lord
Walsingham returned home via San Francisco.
This trip involved the only really important
collection of micro-lepidoptera ever made in Cali-
fornia and Oregon. The larger zoological results
of the trip consisted of a variety of deer, bears,
beavers and Rocky Mountain sheep, with fossil
skulls of extinct mammalia, found in the Miocene
clays on John Day's River, in Oregon.

Lord Walsingham has also collected in the
south of France, as well as in Germany, Italy,
Switzerland, Albania, Corsica, the Pyrenees and
southern Spain, Morocco and Algeria. He must
personally have collected for his own cases between
fifteen and twenty thousand specimens. It matters
little to their race. The moths and butterflies
increase in a ratio that would defy all the energy
of a thousand Walsinghams, and their life is at
best but a little span.

142

MR. W. DUDLEY WARD

Of all the sportsmen who have preceded Mr.
Ward in these pages, none have taken our thoughts
to that festive pageant at Henley wherein, under
the paternal eye of Leander and some other
ruling bodies, sundry aquatic gladiators of more
than one nationality strain their muscles, and too
often their hearts, in manly contest for coveted
trophies of the river. More than one of the
subjects depicted by Mr. Elliott have figured with
credit in the Oxford and Cambridge cricket match ;
it is left for Mr. Ward worthily to represent the
Boat Race in which his university has of late years
recovered so much of its threatened prestige. In
a year indeed which seems to have given all
the glory to the Light Blues, only the cricket
match remaining undecided at the time of writing,
it is perhaps fitting that the boats should be repre-
sented by a Cambridge oarsman.

Mr. W. Dudley Ward, born in 1877, went to
Eton in 1891 and soon took to the water. Indeed,
his sporting career has been one long rowing
record, and if this lacks the variety which belongs
to some more catholic activities, there is, on the
other hand, such a list of victories as might in-
spire envy in others as young. Having, as early
as 1893, won in the Novice Eights, in 1894 in
Lower Fours, and in 1895 in Trial Eights and
House Fours, he occupied in 1896 the proud
position of Captain of the Boats.

In 1896 he went up to Cambridge (Trinity),
where he remained until 1900. In 1897, 1899,
and 1900 he rowed in the Cambridge boat, the
first year being one of defeat, the other two of
brilliant victory. In 1898 he scratched all engage-
ments through illness.

At Henley he was in constant evidence during
five or six summers. He always contrasts his
143

MR. W. DUDLEY WARD

Henley experiences of 1900 and 1902, and indeed
they illustrated for him the blaze of sunshine
after rain, for in the former year he got in the
final of three such important events as the Grand
Challenge, Stewards' Cup, and Silver Goblets,
only to be beaten in the finals on the last day,
whereas in 1902 the position was happily reversed,
and the last day saw him victorious in all three
events. To give a complete list of all his wins
and losses at Henley would be only a monotonous
delving into old records.

He has narrowly won and as narrowly lost
some hardly contested races, of which perhaps
the most remarkable was that in which his House
Four at Eton (1895) won by a quarter of a length
after being behind most of the way. Almost as
exciting was when he rowed for the winning
Leander in the 1901 Grand Challenge, their
opponents being Pennsylvania University. For
three-quarters of the course the boats pulled dead
level ; then Leander sprinted home by just a
length. Of his defeats by an equally small margin
perhaps the most memorable was when he rowed
for 3rd Trinity in the Grand Challenge, 1903.
The misfortune of one of his crew falling ill on
the opening day of the regatta and having to be
replaced at the eleventh hour by an untrained man
made it imperative to reconstruct the whole crew,
so that in the circumstances a defeat in the final
by Leander by only six feet was practically equiva-
lent to victory had the original crew been intact.

He coached the winning Cambridge crews in
1902 and 1903, and has in fact only coached one
unsuccessful crew.

144

MR. P. F. WARNER

When a man has travelled 130,000 miles on
cricketing tours alone, when he has played in
the West Indies, the United States and in Canada,
in Australia and New Zealand, in South Africa,
in such widely sundered cities as Invercargill,
San Francisco and Oporto, when he has captained
important teams in four continents, surely such
a title as " the Odysseus of Cricket " may be
applied to him without fear of criticism. In the
case of Mr. Warner the title is particularly happy,
since it was he himself who invented it for Lord
Hawke, to whom it might indeed apply with equal
appropriateness.

Mr. Warner is a West Indian by birth, but he
came to this country at a very early age, and was
known in his day as Captain of the Rugby XI.
of 1892 and of the Oxford XI. of 1895-96.

His enthusiasm for cricket is extraordinary, and
he has followed summer round the globe so often that
there is no need for him, like some less fortunate folk
who stay at home, to take any alternative interest
in winter games. In fact, he has devoted himself
so whole-heartedly to cricket that he does little
else. He has never hunted ; he is an indifferent
fisherman ; and, singularly enough for one whose
eye is so deadly straight at the wicket, he is any-
thing but a cunning shot. It is commonly said
that a straight eye and a steady hand alone are
required for proficiency in any and every game ;
and, as usual, when we leave the realm of theory
and apply the maxim in a personal case, we find
such fine generalising to be all wrong.

In the match against Cambridge he did indif-
ferently, but to Middlesex he has been a tower
of strength, his services to that county being
comparable to those of C. B. Fry for Sussex or
Lord Hawke for Yorkshire, though the cricket
145 K

MR. P. F. WARNER

of all three is absolutely distinct. Like some
other great players, he has his favourite ground,
and on his day at Lord's he is worth travelling
some distance to watch.

It is, however, less as a player than as the
Captain of the eleven sent out to challenge the
federated colonies that Mr. Warner has recently
been before the public. The somewhat disagree-
able episodes attending the appointment of captain,
in which the choice of the authorities was vindi-
cated in the Times by a lately-deceased Middlesex
player of other days, and the final composition of
the team, must still be fresh in the memory of
lovers of the game and its best traditions. The
fortunes which attended Mr. Warner and his
colleagues are of still more recent date, and the
banquet given to those who " brought back the
ashes," as well as the match against the " Rest of
England " at Lord's, also calls for only passing
mention. Mr. Warner's triumph won " from our
public cares a day of joy," and that was something
to be grateful for. This has been his Annus
Mirabilis, for his wedding, early in June, was
actually permitted to interrupt a match at Lord's,
his best man being Lord Hawke, who was play-
ing for the victorious Zingari against the gentle-
men of England.

THE COUNTRY HANDBOOKS

A SERIES OF ILLUSTRATED VOLUMES
DEALING WITH COUNTRY LIFE. SUIT-
ABLE FOR POCKET OR KNAPSACK.
EDITED BY HARRY ROBERTS.

Foolscap 8vo. (6^ x 4 in.).

Price 3/- net, Bound in Cloth. Price $1.00 net.

Price 4/- net, Bound in Leather. Price $1.20 net.

It is the aim of " The Country Handbooks " to supply in a practical,
yet readable, form a series of volumes which may be useful to the man
out of doors. There are many means of voyaging through our country,
and most of us have a great deal to learn about each. It is pleasant, too,
to know the names of the birds, and to recognise the several kinds by
observation of their flight, or their song, or their plumage; to know
the names of the trees, and to learn how to tell them by the sound
of the wind passing among their branches, or by their leaves in the
summer, or their leafless forms in winter ; to know where we may hope
to find the hedgehog asleep, or the rare butterfly disporting; and to
know how to construct the roadside fire, to cook a humble meal thereby,
and to pass the summer night with comfort and safety far from the houses
of settled men.

Every aspect of country life is exhaustingly dealt with and many
valuable hints are given on walking, riding and the management of^
horses, bicycles and automobiles.

Each volume is well printed on antique paper, profusely illustrated,
and bound in cloth and in leather; and is of a size (6J in. by 4 in.)
suited to the pocket.

Vol. I.— THE TRAMP'S HANDBOOK.

By HARRY ROBERTS. With over fifty illustrations by William

Pascoe.
A volume written in defence of vagabondage, containing much valu-
able advice to the amateur gipsy, traveller, or cyclist, as to camping-out,
cooking, &c.

Contents: A Defence of Vagabondage— Methods of Wandering: Walking, Riding,
Cycling, Caravanning, &c. — Tents and Tent-Life — The Outer Man (Clothes and Bath-
ing)—The Inner Man (Food)— Wild Fowl— The Roadside Fire— Roadside Cookery-
Sleep under the Stars — Weather Wisdom — Vocabulary of Romany and Traveller's

The Daily News—" An attractive little book, written from the point of view of a
practical man and a philosopher. The illustrations will fascinate any one who has evsr
camped or tramped. "

Vol. II.— THE MOTOR BOOK.

By R. X- MECREDY. With numerous illustrations. Second
Edition.
An invaluable handbook that should find a place in the library or
car of every motorist.

Contents : The Motor— Change Speed Gear and Transmission — How to Drive— Care of
the Car — Repairs and Adju

Vol. III.— THE BIRD BOOK.

By A. J. R. ROBERTS. With numerous illustrations.
A guide to the study of bird life, with hints as to recognising
various species by their flight or their note.

Contents : General Structure and Flight— The Music of the Birds— Around the House-
Birds of the Hedgerow— Birds of the Field— By the Riverside— Woodland Birds— By
Marsh and Mere— Moorland Birds— Birds of the Shore— Along the Rock-bound Coast.

Vol. IV.— THE STILL ROOM.

By Mrs. CHARLES ROUNDELL. With numerous illustrations.
A book of information upon all subjects pertaining to preserving,
pickling, bottling, distilling, &c., with many useful hints upon the dairy.
Contents : The Pickling of Meat— Butter, Eggs and Cheese— Bottling Fruit and Veget-

Vol. v.— THE TREE BOOK.

By MARY ROWLES JARVIS. With numerous illustrations.
Containing varied and useful information relating to forests, together
with a special chapter on Practical Forestry.

Contents: Some Famous British Forests— In the Sweet of the Year— Autumn's Fiery
Finger— The Woods in Winter— The Music of the Trees— The King of the Forest—
The Beech and the Elm— Plane and Poplar, &c. &c.— Practical Forestry.

Vol. VI.— THE WOMAN OUT OF DOORS.

By MINNIE MURIEL DOWIE. With numerous illustrations.
A book of practical value and interest to every sportswoman, lady
gardener, and out-of-door woman of every kind.

Vol. VII.— THE STABLE HANDBOOK.

By T. F. DALE. With numerous illustrations.
*.f.* A concise, practical handbook on the feeding, grooming, training,
housing, and general management of horses, written by a well-known
breeder. Especially useful to the owner of one or two horses.

Vol. VIII.— THE FISHERMAN'S HANDBOOK.

By EDGAR S. SHRUBSOLE. With numerous illustrations and

diagrams.
Believed to be the most practical book on the subject as yet published.
*^* A book that all fishertnen should possess.

Vol. IX.— THE SAILING HANDBOOK.
By CLOVE HITCH. With numerous illustrations.
Written more especially for the amateur who wishes to be his own
captain.

Vol. X.— THE KENNEL HANDBOOK.

By C. J. DAVIES. With numerous illustrations.
A thoroughly practical book on the care of dogs, equally valuable to
the breeder as to the owner of a single pet. The points of the leading
breeds are enumerated.

Vol. XL— THE GUN ROOM.

By ALEXANDER I. SHAND. Author of "Shooting" in "The
Haddon Hall Library." With numerous illustrations.
Written for the man who shoots for sport, not for the battue-lover.

JOHN LANE: LONDON AND NEW YORK.

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