NOBODIES WHO HAVE RISEN.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18762, 29 December 1930, Page 11

NOBODIES WHO HAVE RISEN.

BRILLIANT CAREERS. Lord Birkenhead’s father said to him when he was a child, “ There is no reason in the world why you should not become Lord Chancellor.” Lord Birkenhead agreed with him, and 38 years later he made the prophecy come true. In the process he went through one of the most astonishing careers of this century and the last. As Lady Oxford so wittily said of him, “His brains went to his head,” and they have stayed there ever since. His life was a pageant that might be labelled “Success,” and it was a pageant well worth looking at —a scholarship at Oxford —a brilliant reputation in Oxford debate; an immediate success at the Bar; an astounding maiden speech in Parliament, when he had won a difficult seat after a hard fight; a place in the Cabinet; the Attorney-Generalship; the Chancellorship; and an earldom before he was 50.

And the man who did this began as a poor boy, without influence, without powerful friends. “I belonged to the class which could not have gone to Oxford unless its members obtained a scholarship,” he said. But having won the scholarship, he proceeded to make good use of it. He aimed high, put all fear and self-doubt away from him, anu almost at once began the climb that led him to the heights and delights of public glory. But, writes Mr Anthony Praga, in the “Sunday Express,” Lord Birkenhead, though he hitched his waggon rather to a comet than to a star, is no isolated case of the man who,

“starting from nothing, fights hard and conceives ambitiously,” until he reaches power and greatness in the State. You have Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice of England, who in some ways is the antithesis of Lord Birkenhead, and who yet rose as brilliantly as he. Lord Birkenhead was tall and commanding; Lord Hewart is short and rotund. Lord Birkenhead was agressive and bold. Lord Hewart is shy and retiring. Lord Birkenhead challenged the world as with the ring of a bugle call; Lord Hewart is a practised master of self-effacement. Even their voices were at extremes, Lord Birkenhead’s being full and strong, while Lord Hewart’s is high and small. Yet Gordon Hewart, the son of a Bury draper, who began to read for the Bar only when he was nearly 30, has a presence so forceful that a famous K.C. once remarked: “When I have to make an application to Hewart, I feel as if I am asking for an overdraft on dubious personal security.” He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, and then, like Lord Birkenhead, he won an open scholarship at Oxford. There he had a brilliant classical career, and he followed it by entering Fleet Street as a political journalist. He married, and after a few years decided to give up journalism for law. His success was immediate. He was called in 1902, took silk in 1912, and a year later entered Parliament. Then he came to be talked about as a future Prime Minister, but he decided in the end to make his career in law and not

in politics. Another astonishing career Is that of the Marquis of Reading, also in his time a Lord Chief Justice. He began life as Rufus Isaacs, and was destined for Cambridge. But he ran away to sea instead, came back chastened, worked in his father’s office, failed at high finance, and then took to law. Law brought him fame and riches. His powers of work became a legend—it is said that for years he never had more than three hours’ sleep a night—and so through the usual stages of promotion he rose and rose until, in 1921, he

became Viceroy and Governor-General of India. Two things are worth noting —one, that he was a Londoner, and the other that at the time he became Attorney-General he was only 50, having taken silk when he was 38.

But the list of self-made statesmen does not end with him. You have the romance of David Lloyd George— George the swift, George the highpressure politician, who spends his life in a condition of mental incandescence and has, in a sharp mood, been described by Lord Birkenhead as rather like an active wasp under a tumbler. His uncle, who was the village shoemaker, saw to his education, and had him articled to a solicitor. He was admitted in 1884. When he was first elected as M.P. for the Carnarvon Boroughs they called him locally the “boy M.P.” Previously he had been known as the “boy alderman.” And there is the present Prime Minister, Mr Ramsay Macdonald, who from a boyhood of bitter hardship—he was a farm hand at 12, and at 19 was addressing envelopes for a starvation wage in London—ro6e by his single efforts to the highest office of State in the land.