AN ABLE NEW ZEALANDER

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 283, 5 June 1907, Page 4

AN ABLE NEW ZEALANDER

Some notes about Sir Eldon Gorst are published in M.A.P. this week. The writer says : — "Lord Cromer's successor as British Agent at Cairo is Sir Eldon Gorst, who thus gets a nice little 'rise' from £1200 a year, as Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, to £6500 and a palace. The Gorsts descend on the distaff side from the ancient Sheshire family of Lowndes, and Sir Eldon's grandfather took that name. Sir Eldon is tie eldest son of Sir John Gorst, who, with Mr Balfour, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, and Lord Randolph Churchill, started the famous 'Fourth Party' in the 'eighties, and afterwards became the enfant terrible of the Conservative party. The. son inherits the singular ability of his father, but he has it under much better control. The father never got beyond minor office because he could not 'suffer fools gladly,' or, indeed, on any terms ; the son, trained for nearly twenty years in the hard school of Lord Cromer, is externally the bland, impassive diplomat, incapable of the 'blazing indiscretions' of tongue and pen in which Sir John used to revel. Another quality which Sir Eldon inherits from his father is an iron constitution, testified by ruddy cheeks and sturdy frame. He was bora forty-six years ago in New Zealand, his mother being a daughter of the manse there. The Khedive did him the honour of being present at his marriage to Miss Evelyn Rudd, daughter of Mr C. A. Rudd, the great South African financier, and they have one little girl. Lady Gorst, wife of Sir Eldon Gorst, is a pretty, attractive woman, who will make a charming chateline of the British Agency at Cairo. Her father Mr Rudd, is one of our richest South African financiers, who owns a fine estate and the forest of Ardnamurchan, in Argyllshire."