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Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885

S >> Stuart J. Reid, ed. >> Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885




It was on Sunday, however, that the full severity of the Scotch
Puritanism of that day made itself felt in my inmost soul. Oh, the dreary
monotony of those Sabbaths at St. Andrews! The long, long service and yet
longer sermon in the forenoon, the funereal procession of the
congregation to their homes, the hasty meal, consisting chiefly of tea
and cold, hard-boiled eggs, which took the place of dinner, and the
return within a few minutes to the kirk, where the vitiated atmosphere
left by the morning congregation had not yet passed away. Even when the
second service had come to a close, the solemnities of the day were not
ended, for the Sunday School met in the late afternoon, and remained in
session for a couple of hours. But it was not the public services,
terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of
Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her
home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat
lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal--perhaps
one might say more advanced--than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had
to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round the
blinds were closely drawn, lest the rays of the sun should dissipate the
gloom befitting the solemn day, whilst no voice in the household was
raised above a sepulchral whisper. Lucky for me was it that I was sent to
bed early, and that thus the horrors of the Sabbath were in my case
abbreviated. The older members of the family sat in a silent semicircle
round the smouldering fire, each holding, and some possibly reading, a
book, the suitableness of which for use at such a time was beyond
question. The Bible, the metrical version of the Psalms, and one or two
volumes of discourses by divines of undoubted orthodoxy, formed the only
literature recognised on these occasions. For myself, I had brought with
me from home a copy of the delightful, though now forgotten, book called
"Evenings at Home." and my Sabbatical sufferings were intensified by the
sight of this volume on a high bookshelf, where it remained beyond my
reach from Saturday night till Monday morning.

My life among these grave, elderly men and women would probably have been
a sad one but for one fact. Adjoining my grandfather's residence was a
small printing office, which he had established some years before for the
benefit of a widowed daughter-in-law. A door opened from the house into
the printing office, and through it I would steal whenever I got the
chance. It was not only that the journeyman printer (there _were_
journeymen in those days) was the kindest of men, whose memory I cherish
with affection to this hour, and who never failed to welcome me with a
smile and a pleasant word when I invaded his domain. The place had a
charm of its own for me, mysterious, inexplicable, but absolutely
enthralling. The cases of type, the presses, the ink-rollers, the damp
proof-sheets--chiefly of bills announcing public meetings or the "roup"
of some bankrupt farmer's stock--filled me with wonder and delight. Child
as I was, I saw in these humble implements of the petty tradesman the
means by which one mind can place itself in contact with many.

It is not to be supposed that I had even the dimmest perception of
anything beyond the most obvious features of the printer's business, but
the seed was sown then which was to fructify throughout my whole
remaining life, and from the day when I first felt the fascination of
that humble printer's workshop, I never ceased to regard myself as in a
special degree a child of the printing-press. How delightful were the
hours which I and David, the journeyman aforesaid, spent together when
business was slack--and it was often slack! Then it was that together we
would compose the most wonderful announcements of the great enterprises
to which I was to commit myself in after life. Now it was the prospectus
of a "genteel academy" of which I was to be the principal, and again it
was the announcement of the opening of a vast emporium for the sale of
goods of every description under my direction, that we thus composed and
printed. These advertisements were invariably printed on gilt-edged paper
in the bluest of ink, and, when I subsequently returned home, excited
prodigious envy in my elder brother, who had never been privileged to
"see himself in print."

My stay at St. Andrews ended at last in a somewhat melancholy fashion. As
the place seemed to agree with me, it was settled that I should remain
for a year at least; and in order that the time might not be wasted I was
sent to school, the school being the well-known Madras College. Here both
boys and girls were taught together. Of the present state of that famous
institution I know nothing, nor do I wish to utter a word of
disparagement of those who were responsible for its management fifty
years ago; but to me, a timid boy who, in spite of his Northumbrian burr,
was turned to ridicule as a Cockney by the Fifeshire lads and lasses, it
wore the aspect of a veritable place of torment. That classic instrument
of discipline, the tawse, was in use at every hour of the day, girls as
well as boys receiving barbarous punishment under the eyes of their
class-mates. Perhaps the cruelty was not so great as it seemed to me, but
at all events it was enough, so far as I was concerned. My dread of the
terrible lash grew into a brooding horror, which poisoned my days and
destroyed my nights; and before I had been a month at the school I was
seized with an attack upon the brain which nearly proved fatal.

Let me mention here, by way of testifying to the orthodoxy of the
religious training given to my young soul, that on the first night on
which I became delirious I was pursued by a phantom, plainly visible to
my overwrought imagination, which wore the exact guise of the Evil One.
Horns, hoofs, tail, and trident, were all clearly seen, and I sprang
wildly from side to side of my bed trying to evade the fiend's attempt to
capture me, until at last I took refuge, trembling and almost fainting,
in my grandfather's arms. My youth and my good constitution carried me
safely through an illness of no ordinary severity, and one day, as I lay
in bed in the first stage of convalescence, I had the joy of hearing my
mother's voice, and of knowing that she was with me once more. A few days
later I returned with her to Newcastle, and thus ended the attempt to
make a Scotsman of me.

My visit to the North, however, had the effect of stimulating my
intelligence, and giving me a real interest in things around me. Travel
had, in short, done its usual work of instructing and vivifying the mind.
Henceforward I had a standard of comparison to apply to home scenes and
experiences which I had not previously possessed. One favourite resort of
ours at home was a grove of trees situate midway between the outskirts of
the town and the village of Benwell. To us children, and to certain other
young folk who were our playmates, it was known as Diana's Grove, though
whether the name came from some fancy of our own or some bygone
tradition, I was never able to ascertain. On the maps of those days it
bore quite another designation. It was a delightful spot, and when,
accompanied by our nursemaid, my brothers and I set off to spend a long
summer morning there, we seemed to have reached the height of bliss. The
grove was separated from Elswick Lane by sloping fields, where wheat and
barley grew luxuriantly, and the narrow path by which we ran, shouting
with joy, through these fields to our haven among the trees led past a
little fountain at which we always stopped to drink. The grove itself was
a small wood of oak and fir trees, covering a piece of rising ground from
which the most delightful views of the beautiful Tyne Valley and the
country lying south of the river were to be obtained. How often as a
child, when tired with my boyish games, I have sat with my brother
beneath one of the trees of the grove, and looked with eyes of wonder on
the scene before me! The noble river seemed to flow almost at our feet,
and the only signs of life upon its surface were the great keels passing
slowly up and down. Beyond it were the green meadows of Dunstan, whilst,
rising behind them, was the fine amphitheatre crowned by the pretty
village of Wickham and the woods of Ravensworth and Gibside. Young as I
was, I could quote poetry; and I remember how, as I looked upon this
scene, there invariably occurred to me the lines--

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood
While Jordan rolled between."

Away yonder, across the brimming river, was the Canaan of my
imagination--the mysterious, unknown land into which my little feet were
so eager to wander, reckless of what might happen there. Why do I dwell
upon this simple scene? I do so because, alas, it is now a scene of the
past. Where my young comrades and I made merry fifty years ago in the
shade of the oak trees, or beside the well in the meadow, there is now a
vast cemetery, and some of those who played with me there now sleep
peacefully almost in the shadow of the Diana's Grove we loved so well.
And the prospect from the grove--where is it now? Along the north bank of
the Tyne, at that very spot, stretch the immense works of Lord Armstrong,
whilst the houses of his workmen, in thickly-planted streets, cover the
fair meadows of my youth, and the dense cloud of smoke for ever rising
from forge and furnace blots out the prospect of the southern shore.

Hardly less melancholy is the change which has overtaken the favourite
seaside resorts of my childhood. Tynemouth was the earliest
watering-place of which I knew anything. In those days the pleasant
village, not yet defiled by the soot of Shields, consisted of three
streets, called respectively Front Street, Middle Street, and Back
Street. There was no great pier casting its mighty arm into the sea
across the mouth of the river, and the favourite resort of visitors, the
place where we children played and bathed, and our elders lounged and
read or flirted, according to their tastes, was the quaint little haven
now given up to the pier works. How high the breakers were that rolled
into that haven as I stood, a wondering child, and watched them from the
shore! I have tossed on many seas since then, and have stood on many a
storm-swept headland; but nowhere have I seen waves so high--so
irresistible in their majesty, as those waves at Tynemouth seemed to my
innocent eyes to be.

Far greater than the change at Tynemouth is that which has taken place at
Whitley, another of our favourite summer resorts, on the delightful
Northumbrian coast. What Whitley is now I do not know; but when I last
saw it, more than a dozen years ago, it had become a rambling, ugly,
ill-built town, chiefly given over to lodging-house keepers, though
redeemed by its fine stretch of hard sand. Very different was the Whitley
with which I first made acquaintance in 1849. There was no lodging-house
in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast of
church or chapel, and which had only one small shop. My parents used to
hire a charming little cottage belonging to the village blacksmith. Its
front opened upon the village street, and behind was a garden, full of
the simple cottage flowers which are so strangely unfamiliar to those
doomed to dwell in towns. A summer-house, clothed in honeysuckle, was one
of the features of the garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in
those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer
holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else
seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so
that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost
to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the
yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming
Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must
still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island
where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of
that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet,
whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never
again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these
pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's cottage at Whitley has
been vividly brought back to me under rather singular circumstances. In
the spring of 1895 I was dining in Downing Street with Lord Rosebery,
then Prime Minister. Next to me at dinner was seated Sir James Joicey,
the millionaire colliery owner and Member of Parliament. Sir James is,
like myself, a Northumbrian, and our conversation naturally turned upon
our native county. I spoke of the blacksmith's cottage, and the bower of
honeysuckle at Whitley, with the enthusiasm which old memories evoked. To
my surprise, there was an answering gleam of pleasure and tenderness on
my friend's face. "_You_ lived in the blacksmith's cottage?" said
he. "Why, so did we when I was a boy!" We found, on comparing dates, that
the Joiceys had followed my own parents as tenants of the tiny house when
the latter gave it up. To both of us it seemed a far cry from the honest
blacksmith's modest cottage to Mr. Pitt's dining-room in Downing Street.]

It was in the autumn of 1850 that a rather curious adventure befell me,
which might well have cut short my career, and prevented these pages from
ever seeing the light. We were about to remove from Summerhill Terrace to
a house not far distant which had just been bought by my father, and, as
it happened, one dull afternoon I was left alone at home, my mother and
the servants being all engaged at the new house. I was left with strict
injunctions to "put the chain on the front door," and to bolt the kitchen
door, which was on a lower level than the other. The first order I
obeyed, but the second, under the temptation of an entrancing story in
_Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_ which absorbed my thoughts, I entirely
forgot. I was devouring this story, as only children do devour stories,
when I heard the front door opened. I was sitting in the parlour, at the
back of the house, so that I could not see anyone enter the garden.
Running to the door, under the belief that my mother had returned, I
found myself confronted by two men. They were--or pretended to
be--pedlars; and one of them carried a case filled with sham jewellery.
Their great desire seemed to be to get me to unchain the door. I was
simple enough to tell them that I was alone in the house, but my
simplicity did not carry me so far as a compliance with their urgent
request. After arguing with me for several minutes, and even endeavouring
to bribe me with a trumpery jewel, the men withdrew, muttering. I watched
them for a moment, and took note of the keen, earnest gaze they bent upon
the house before leaving the garden. But the voice of the charmer in
_Tait_ was calling too loudly to allow me to dwell upon anything
else, and I was quickly back again in the parlour and deep in mystery.

It might have been twenty minutes later that there fell upon my startled
ear a sound which under the circumstances was distinctly sinister--that
of a man's foot on the sanded floor of the kitchen passage below. A timid
child at all times, there is no need to say that when I crept to the head
of the stairs, and, after listening there breathlessly for a few seconds,
ascertained beyond doubt that more than one man was moving about in the
rooms below me, I was filled with almost a paralysing sense of terror.
Here at last the "robbers" of whom I and my brother had so often talked
in frightened whispers in our beds, were come in good earnest. What was
to be done? And then there flashed upon me, like an inspiration, the
recollection of a plan which we had talked over together when discussing
the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever
enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any
ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose
colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there
would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee
affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I
seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and
when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish
treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in
the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried
scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two
friends the pedlars flying through the yard, and pausing not to look
behind. I ought, of course, to have forthwith gone downstairs and done my
duty by that back door, which I had so shamefully neglected earlier in
the day; but I am ashamed to say that my momentary access of courage had
entirely died away by this time, and that for no imaginable sum of money
would I have dared to descend those stairs, and pass through the dark
passage leading to the back door. The thieves were in due time captured
and transported for another offence; but my parents refused to prosecute
them in order that I might escape the ordeal of a public examination.
They were desperate ruffians, and the police declared their belief that
if they had known I was alone in the house they would have murdered me.

I now come to my schooldays in the distant years 1852-4. My father, as I
have already said, was a minister of religion for fifty years at
Newcastle. He was one of the gentlest and noblest of men, one whom I have
never ceased to revere as the very pattern and exemplar of a Christian
gentleman. But those who follow such a calling cannot expect to gain
riches as their reward, and my father was a poor man. Despite his
poverty, he was resolved that his sons should have the best education
that he could procure for them. That meant that they must be sent to the
best school in the town--Percy Street Academy. So when my elder brother
in 1848 was of school age, he took him to Mr., not then Dr., Bruce, to
enter him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation,
knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his
small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of
Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an
unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He told my mother how Mr. Bruce,
after examining my brother, had pronounced him to be fully qualified to
enter the school; and then my father asked about the fees. The answer he
received was, "My dear Mr. Reid, I never take a fee from a minister of
religion." And so it came to pass that not only my brother James but
myself and my two younger brothers were educated at Percy Street without
any fee being paid on our behalf. No one will wonder that I cherish Dr.
Bruce's memory with unstinted gratitude and reverence.

Schooldays, despite the popular theory, are, as a matter of fact,
generally as uninteresting to the schoolboy as their story is to the
public, and I shall not detain the reader with much about this period of
my life. Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the father, by the way, of Mr. Justice
Bruce, was then and long afterwards the most famous school master in the
North of England, and under him I received that small fraction of my
education which a man usually obtains during pupilage. Percy Street
Academy, Newcastle, has long since disappeared, after having counted no
inconsiderable proportion of the best-known residents among its pupils.
It occupied a series of rambling buildings with an imposing house at the
end of the row, in which lived "The Doctor," the assistant masters, and
the boarders. But though the school is gone, my old schoolmaster died but
recently, enjoying to the last the respect of his fellow citizens and the
repose of a happy old age. He is known to fame as the author of the
leading work on the Roman Wall, and as an antiquary of high repute. I
have a grateful recollection of many of his acts during my school career;
and, looking back, there are none I now esteem more highly than the
attempts he constantly made to interest his pupils in the general affairs
of the world outside the school-gates.

How well, for example, do I remember the school being summoned one
morning in November, 1854, to the large writing room! Here the Doctor was
standing at his desk awaiting us, armed with a copy of the _Times_.
It had just arrived, and it contained W. H. Russell's brilliant account
of the battle of Inkermann. In a few well-chosen words, the Doctor--who
was an excellent public speaker--explained that he had called us from our
tasks in order that we might listen to the story of a great deed done for
England of which every Englishman ought to be proud; and then he read the
whole story of the battle as it is told in Russell's graphic narrative,
whilst we boys cheered each deed of English valour and groaned at the
Russians as lustily as though we had been ourselves spectators of the
fight. It was a wise act on the part of Dr. Bruce, and many others
besides myself must have been grateful to him for having thus made us
participators in the emotion which in those stirring times thrilled the
nation.

It was before the Crimean War, however, that we in Newcastle passed
through an experience the like of which I shall hardly encounter again.
Newcastle was then notorious for its bad sanitation. A great part of the
town consisted of houses of extreme antiquity, crowded together in narrow
alleys in the neighbourhood of the river. These alleys, I may note in
passing, were known as "chares"--a designation which used habitually to
puzzle the Judges of Assize when they had to inquire into the
circumstances of one of the not infrequent riots which in those days
chequered the harmony of life on the banks of the Tyne. It was towards
the end of July, 1853, that the rumour spread, reaching even a schoolboy
like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was
with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town was
preceded by an extraordinary phenomenon which may, or may not, have been
connected with the epidemic. One hot morning in August, when I left home
for school, I was struck by the curious appearance of the atmosphere. No
sooner had I stepped out of doors than I found that the strange dimness
which pervaded everything was due to swarms of minute flies, which
literally darkened the skies and settled in innumerable hosts upon every
object animate and inanimate. It was impossible to breathe without
inhaling these loathsome insects whenever the mouth was opened, and in
order to protect ourselves my brother and I fastened our pocket
handkerchiefs over our faces and walked to school in this fashion. We
found that most other persons had adopted the same device. The plague
lasted in Egyptian intensity for the whole of that day. The next day it
had to a certain extent subsided, and on the third the dead flies might
have been seen literally in heaps, each one of which must have contained
countless thousands, in the corners of halls and passages. Everybody
connected this most disagreeable phenomenon with the approach of the
pestilence, and, whether they did so rightly or wrongly, the cholera only
too certainly followed upon its heels.

Its first appearance raised feelings of terror in many hearts. I confess
for myself that when I heard that three persons had died of cholera in
the town on the previous day I fell into a small panic; but it was then
that my mother, always a deeply religious woman, seeing how things were
going with us, called her children together, and in the happiest manner
succeeded in converting our dread of an unknown and mysterious evil into
a perfect and childlike trust in the protection of a Heavenly Father.
What she said I cannot now recall; I only know that from that moment,
whilst many of our companions in school and at play went about with
pallid faces and unstrung nerves, all our fears seemed as if by magic to
have vanished. But the reality of the plague was terrible indeed, and the
month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who
then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was
enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the
circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing
character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of
the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying
unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had
the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad
stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to
the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning
disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench
of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful
of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in
that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our
next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself came out to
smoke his evening pipe, and as usual he had a kindly word for each one of
us. We left him, when we went to bed, sauntering in the placid eventide
among the flowers he was wont carefully to tend. When I got downstairs
next morning a rough country servant, who was then in our employment,
bluntly told me that "that laddie B----" (naming our neighbour) had died
of the cholera during the night.

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