Recollections and Reflections

RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS BY THE RIGHT REV. J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D Dean of Manchester CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1915 3>f :&* - PREFACE IT is never worth while to publish writings which need not have been given to the world, and then to offer an apology for their publication. I do not seek, there fore, to excuse myself for writing this book. I will only say that nearly at the same time two firms of publishers applied to me for my memoirs, and soon afterwards the head of a third firm expressed his willingness to issue them. It has been a pleasure, not wholly free from sadness, to revive so many old associations. The experience of most people who have lived some time in the world is, I suppose, that they form, more or less unwittingly, certain conclusions which they themselves hold strongly, perhaps too strongly, and which they think may be of some use to others. If among my own conclusions there are any which may be felt to suggest or emphasise the true course of public duty or wisdom, I cannot be sorry that I have made them known. But when I had finished the book, it was found to be a good deal longer than I had promised or the publishers had expected, " " and a part of the Reflections has, therefore, to my regret, been omitted. It will perhaps appear some day in another form. I know how difficult it is to use frank language without giving pain, especially in reference to con- VI Preface and trasted and, in some sense, opposite, institutions ; I have been officially connected not only with the Far Eastern as well as with the Western world, but with the South and the North of England, and with Eton and Harrow. Should the book, as it now stands, do any injustice to any persons whom I have met in my various offices at home and abroad, nobody, I hope, could more deeply regret it than I. It is meant to be a candid record, not unsympathetically expressed, of such incidents and such inferences from them as have been natural to a life not particularly distinguished, but, owing to circumstances, a little more varied, perhaps, than most educational or clerical lives can easily be. J. E. C. WELLDON. September, 1915. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1. FORMATIVE INFLUENCES . i 2. FORMATIVE INFLUENCES (continued) . 26 3. FORMATIVE INFLUENCES (continued] 47 ETON v. HARROW 4. ..... 72 ETON v. 5. HARROW (continued) . 100 6. EDUCATION I36 EDUCATION . 7. (continued) . .152 8. EDUCATION (continued) ..... 175 9- INDIA 200 10. INDIA (continued) ...... 223 11. INDIA (continued) ...... 258 12. WESTMINSTER ABBEY ..... 294 WESTMINSTER ABBEY . 13. (continued) . 317 MANCHESTER 14. ...... 337 MANCHESTER 15. (continued) .... 365 16. MANCHESTER (continued) .... 394 INDEX 4o9 RECOLLECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS CHAPTER I FORMATIVE INFLUENCES has always been a pleasure to me that I was born ITon St. Mark s Day, April 25th. For the story of St. Mark, as it is told in the New Testament and in eccle siastical legend, has strongly appealed to me. The the mystery, vicissitude, the mingled light and shadow which surround it, are pleasing to the imagination. I cherish the thought that St. Mark was, as Irenaeus 1 the and says, pupil interpreter (^aOrjr^ Kal tpwv&rrfo} of St. Peter, and that his is, if not the original, at all events the earliest extant Gospel. Nor do I honour his memory the less because of the cloud which fell at one time upon his relation to St. Paul. How it seems to vanish that passing cloud as at sunrise, before those " touching words of the aged Apostle, Take Mark, and him with thee for bring ; he is profitable to me for the " ministry : words which may not unfairly be said to consecrate the friendship of St. Paul s two young fellow- St. 2 disciples, Timothy and St. Mark ! Never, I think, have I passed through Alexandria, often as I have been without there, recalling how St. Mark, according to a tradition 3 recorded by Eusebius, founded churches there, 1 Contr. i. i. * Haeres, iii., 2 Timothy iv. xi. Hist. Eccles. ii. c. 16. B 2 Recollections and Reflections 1 and how, if Jerome s authority is worthy of credence, he died and was buried there. When I visited Venice for the first time many years ago, I could not help looking upon the lions of St. Mark as though I had a right to claim a sort of proprietary interest in them. But there are other associations than these attaching to St. Mark s Day. April 25th is the birthday of Oliver Cromwell and John Keble, and they have both been, although in different ways, objects of admiration to me all through my life. It has sometimes seemed to me that a combination of their qualities would be the ideal of Christian manhood. I am fond of observing the association of special names, not only in history but in literature, with special days. I have made what I may perhaps call a hagiology, or at least an historical calendar, of my own. Every morning I try to recall the memory of some beloved and honoured person whose birthday or whose death-day it is. It is natural for me, then, to remember that April 25th was Amelia Sedley s first for she is one of favourite characters. wedding day ; my It has been my habit to ask people, and especially very old people, what were the earliest events of which they retain any clear, positive recollection. In the year 1898, I think, I paid a visit at Norwich to a distant kinswoman, who, if her life had been spared two years longer, would have been able to say that she had lived in three centuries. She could remember, or she fancied she could remember, something of the sensation caused by the deaths of Pitt and Fox in 1806. Sir William Drinkwater, when I had the pleasure of talking to him in his old age at his beautiful residence in the Isle of Man, told me he could recall the illuminations of London after the battle of Waterloo. To have seen a man who had seen the great Napoleon on the deck of the Bellero- 1 De Vir Illustr. Ch. 8. Formative Influences 3 phon, as was once my experience, may almost be said to lift for a moment the veil of ancient history. But I have never felt the attraction of Napoleon, as so many writers, and among them Lord Rosebery, have felt it I have not been able to a ; overcome genuine moral of his career detestation ; and more than once, when I have noticed his portrait upon the wall of some classroom in a Public or Elementary School, I have turned it to the wall, as it was difficult to understand why English boys and girls should be taught to venerate a man who was, perhaps, in view of the late age in which he lived, the worst of all human beings, as having been the author of more widespread and lasting misery than any other person, and who was certainly, at least until the out break of the war now raging, the most bitter and the most dangerous of all the enemies of England. A dear old friend of mine, Mrs. Rotch, who died at Harrow, soon after I left it, at the age of 100 years and six months, in the house to which she had come as a bride 82 years before, could describe the anxious state of English opinion during the Napoleonic wars. But her favourite reminiscence, although it belonged to a later date, was that she had been a passenger at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 by the train in which Mr. Huskisson was killed. Mr. Huskisson s death I was, think, singularly tragic ; for it was in order to speak to the Duke of Wellington, with whom he had not been on good terms, that he got out of his carriage on to the permanent way, and, while " he was standing there, an engine, the Rocket," ran over him. It was to the vicarage at Eccles that he was carried, and there he died. Fanny Kemble, in her 11 x Record of a Girlhood," tells the story of his death. I could not help doubting, however, whether Mrs. Rotch 1 s " Frances Ann Kemble Record of a Girlhood," vol. ii., pp. 188-191. 4 Recollections and Reflections did actually travel by that train. Old people are apt to imagine that they have seen or done more than really happened to them. Memory, as the Greeks so wisely fabled, is the mother of the Muses. When I was a headmaster, I used to say that all old Public School men, after a certain time of life, thought they had been, or might have been, in the cricket eleven of their schools, as maiden ladies think they have refused offers of marriage in their youth. Anyhow, it is an interesting fact that Tennyson was a passenger by the first train on the Liverpool and Manchester line. I have heard him tell the story, almost in the words quoted in the annotated edition of his poems by his son, the present Lord Tenny 1 son, how it was a black night when he travelled by the the train at stations railway ; crowd around the the was so dense that he could not see the wheels of the railway he ran in that carriages ; thought they grooves ; and was the origin of the metaphor which used to puzzle me as " a boy when I first read Locksley Hall" : " Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." My own earliest vivid recollection is that I was taken out of doors late at night, and set on the garden steps outside my father s house at Tonbridge School, to see the great comet of 1861.

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