Parliamentary Reporters.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 8228, 8 June 1895, Page 3

Parliamentary Reporters.

Sir Frank Lockwood, Solicitor-General in the English Government, was lately the chief guest at the annual dinner of the Sheffield Press Club, and in replying to the toast of his health made his hosts a humourous speech, about themselves. In seeking for a subject to talk about he said Politics were tabooed, and he asked what was the good of talking to the Press about religion. The only subject left was one which would profoundly interest them—themselves. The Press must always be the object of his keenest admiration, the most intense interest. Sometimes when he made a speech—and he did not often trouble them in the House of Commons—he had watched with the keenest interest the faces of the reporters. He wondered to himself what they thought about it up there. It was not their business to comment; it was merely their business to record. He had sometimes endeavoured so to move them as to ascertain what their feelings really were. At times, although his nature was not pathetic, he had given pathetic utterances which would have made the very gravestones weep. The results had been nil. He had tried them with humour. Sir Henry Stephenson had told them that he had positively achieved in that city the character of a humourist by retailing second-hand a speech he (Sir Frank) made some years ago. But, as his pathos had on these occasions been wasted, so his humour had been thrown away. One night he was doomed to bitter despair, “ for,” he continued, “as I spoke humorously I saw on the notebook of the reporter a tear fall. I saw that man afterwards, and asked him to explain to me that tear-drop. I saw that it was in a moment when I was speaking more humorously than I ever did in the whole course of my existence. He referred to his notes—he found the teardrop—and he told him that at that moment he was thinking of his mother. So it was. These inscrutable men sat up there more or less truthfully reporting what is said, and it is impossible for us, whether we be moving our present audiences to tears or laughter, to make the slightest impression upon them, or indeed even to seriously intererfe with their domestic reflections.”