GAMBLER BY NATURE

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 59, 2 December 1933, Page 18

GAMBLER BY NATURE

Lord Tennyson’s Confession

“I have always been a gambler by nature. It is in my blood, and I have often been in the mood when I could bet on two flies climbing up a well.” Thus Lord Tennyson,, the cricketing peer and grandson of the poet, in his volume of reminiscences called “From Verse to Worse.” The volume is one of the frankest books of the year. About his gambling propensities, for example, Lord Tennyson writes without, reserve. At the age of 22, he says, he lost £12,000 in a little over a week on the turf. After the war, when some of his friends “belonged to the gambling set in London,” he lost £7OOO in one evening at a gambling party. When the first disaster occurred Lord Tennyson—then the Hon. Lionel Tennyson—was in the Guards. ( As he required the sum of £7OOO to meet his racing debts before settling day—he had £5OOO in the bank when he made his attempt to break the ring—two courses were open to him; moneylenders or his father.

The son went to his father, who had “a perfect horror of any form of betting.” Lord Tennyson writes: “The storm was so dreadful—so far worse than anything I could have imagined—that I cannot think how any members of the family—except

that human beings, as a general rule, seem able to survive pretty nearly anything—managed to survive it. . . . “My father, indeed, would speak to no one; muttered incoherent words to himself as lie stumped along in solitary agony through his shadowy copses or along the foot of his downs; groaned that he had known all along what would happen, and I would be the ruin of him yet.” The upshot was that the father paid the son’s racing debts, but insisted that he should leave the Guards and go, as had always been the parental wish, into the Rifle Brigade. After the war' his misfortun.es persisted. , ■

“The gambling fever in my veins was not so much allayed by the four years’ ordeal through which I had passed as considerably intensified. It had, in fact, become a confirmed habit of which nothing but bitter experience could break me. For a time, of course, all went well, and I purchased a black--and-white Rolls-Royce car, in which I drove in state to several race meetings. Alas! the black-and-white Rolls only lasted three weeks, and then the turn of the tide came. About this time I lost £7OOO in one evening at a gambling party in London.”