Memoirs Civil of a Servant.

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17679, 2 September 1929, Page 7

Memoirs Civil of a Servant.

N "Reminiscences of an Old Civil Servant," the late Sir John Arrow Kempe has left us the record of a long and distinguished career ■of public service, in the .course of which

ho was .secretary to ;Sir Stafford Northcote at the Exchequer, mfTiber of , a Commission ' .on .the communications between lighthouses and light, ships and. the shore., and Deputy-Chair-man of the Board of Customs. Many interesting anecdotes throw light on his life and times. /

leisurely D- i. ' (3ir John's recollections of his schooldays mark significant changes in the condition •of London in the last eighty years:— "Every mdrning an Islewortla bus stopped at our door after breakfast and the conductor in a white top-hat, standing on a small step behind, holding on a strap, descended and rang our bell if we were not ready, to rattle us over the macadamised and sometimes'cobbled roads, with straw on the floor to keep our feet warm. If we were not ready we had to wait, perhaps, five or ten minutes before another .bus plodded leisurely up." Newgate Sights.

London in the 'sixties was perhpps more picturesque than it is to-day, but some of its spectacles have passed umegretted:— "Every morning rny brother and I took bus from Piccadilly to St. Paul's. We occasionally had the disagreeable privilege of seeing, at the end of the street as we passed Old Bailey, a victim suspended from the gallows opposite Newgate; once there was the horror of the twelve bodies of the pirates of the Flowery Land swinging together. This barbarous exhibition was abolishe 1 before our schooldays came to an end."

Starting Fair. As a boy Sir John spent happy holidays on the Cornish coast: — "The vicar of thJ next parish was .the Rev. P. S. Hawker, the well-known poet, author of 'And Shall Trelawny Die ?' When he first went to Monvenstow the piace was notorious for its 'wreckers,' who were said even to show false lights on the shore to clecoy vessels to their destruction lie laboured to put this' down, orid very successfully. We saw a greatdeal of him and . his eccentricities. A

The Coronet Which Sat • Askew*

story was told us of him (I do not know whether it appears in his 'Life') that he was preaching one Sunday, when a man put his head in at the door and called out: 'Wreck!' The congregation immediately sprang up. Hawker raised his voice to stop them; came down from the pulpit and went to the door, tucking up his brown Armenian cassock, which he always wore, as he'went, and calling out: 'Now we'll start fair',' set off running to the scene of the wreck to keep his wild congregation in order." Misplaced Emphasis.

The author's father was Rector of St. James's Church, Piccadilly, then, as now, a fashionable place of worship:— . "Another distinguished and frequent attendant at church was the old Duke of Cambridge (Commander-in-Chief). He generally occupied a seat in a pew reserved for stray bishops in front of the Rectory pew. One Sunday the old Archbishop of Armagh sat next to him, and the Duke, seeing that he had no hymnbook, offered a share of his. I was told (1 did not hear it myself) that the Duke was heard to whisper in a loud tone (he was always emphatic in his language) : 'Damn it, sir, you are singing the wrong hymn!'" The Painted Crown.

Recalling his friendship with a wellknown art-dealer who was like Mr Quinney in his reluctance to part with things of beauty, Sir John points out how he utilised art for his own adornment:—

"It was said (I know not with what ti'uth) that when his hair became scanty, instead of donning a wig he had the top of his head painted with the representation of hair! I cannot say that I ever noticed it myself, which is, of course, a tribute to the excellency .with which it was carried out!" A Misfortune to Mankind.

The attention of the Lighthouse Commission upon which Sir Jonn served was drawn to the wireless system of signalling just invented by Marconi. He was granted £SOO for his experiments and the Commission witnessed some of them:— "It gives one to think of the extraordinary changes which the innumerable discoveries in the application of electricity have made in the world during a single generation; and yet we do not know what electricity is! Mr Preece, while on board the Enchantress, once told us a story—l do not know whether it was an old one,

but it is at least thirty years since lie told it to us—of a Professor who was lecturing upon an electrical subject and thought one of his listeners was dropping off to sleep. 'Mr Jones, what is electricity V 'Electricity, sir, I have forgotten." 'Gentlemen,' said the lecturer, 'this is indeed a misfortune to mankind. We have among us one who once knew what electricity is, and he has forgotten." Smugglers' Devices.

The Deputy-Chairmanship of the Customs Board affords some interesting memories:—

"In those days we had in the Custom House a museum of objects- in which smuggled goods had been discovered. It had probably been originally intended for initiating the examining officers into the arts of the smuggler, but it had become also an exhibition for the public, and we decided to abolish it. /The devices included life-buoys, hollowed-out Bibles, hollow brooms, and numberless other articles which it would be too tedious to describe. But even more simple devices could be. niade the source of a comfortable income. • One of the objects in the museum was a small lamp which used to hang in the -passage of one of the Channel steamers. A candid old sailor remarked at the investigation of the case, 'Well, it's time you found it. Why, that lamp lias come across full of cigars every day for the last twenty years.' If this was true, half a pound of cigars a day would represent, at the then rate of ■duty, a profit of some £45 a year to the smuggler, and the boats often made the double passage twice a day."

An Ordeal of Knighthood. In 1909 Sir John was made a C.B. In preparation for the ceremony a small hook was fixed on the left breast of each person to be honoured:— "I sat next to Sir H. Poin.aby, and he. explained to me that formerly Her j Majesty used to fix the order on to the; chest with a safety pin, but on one occa-! sion the recipient was an Indian Rajah, j clad in a tight-fitting golden gown. Her : Majesty, in pinning on the order took up! a fold of his skin with his garment, and | ran the pin through it. The Rajah had; the nerve to make no sign until he got out! of the presence chamber, when he fainted. After that the device of the hook was' adopted." The Jaunty Cock. > Even the solemnity of the Coronation of. King Edward had its lighter side, as the following story shows:— "Looking back, I rememlir most distinctly the figures and coroneted heads of the Duke of Wellington (looking much the same as at Valescure, dignified but slightly bored), bearing the Imperial Stan-; dard, with his train held up by the 'little i Wellesley boy'—Lord Kitchener, very stiff and impassive, wearing his coronet as if he had done so all his life—Mr Balfour, a most impressive Commoner in plain hair—and lastly the figure of the Lord Chancellor (Halsbury), with his wig, of which jauntily cocked on one side rested his coronet! The effect was too comic, and a scarcely suppressed titter ran down the nave as he passed along. Our impression is that he rather , enjoyed the effect produced upon the : Cononation guests by his appearance. v