THE story of how I came to be christened Henry
will draw a smile to the faces of many Scottish people who remember how
serious a matter was the naming of the children in a Scottish household up
till within the past few years. Indeed, it still is, in many districts,
the immemorial custom for the oldest boy of a family to be called after
his father's father. Only exceedingly sound reasons must prevail for any
departure from this rule. I have known family relation ships to be split
asunder for ever because the parents of the infant refused to be bound by
tradition and bestowed on him some fancy "handle."
It was the grandfather's honour and privilege to
have the "namin' o' the wean." Correspondingly, if the child was a girl
the grandmother on the mother's side exercised her right. The more or less
rigid adherence to this cast-iron rule, of course, had its drawbacks. You
would often find six or eight or ten Johnnies, or Jamies, or Sandies of
the same surname in the same village. This applied also to the Maggies or
Marys or Leebs or Jeans. In my own family circles, the Lauders and the
Vallances, there are so many of the same name that I have often to work
out just who is referred to when any one of them is mentioned in
conversation. My own opinion is that the system is all wrong. It leads to
hopeless confusion.
Nowadays parents are
not so stupid, and grandparents less touchy. But I would most certainly
have been christened John Lauder had it not been for the fact that my
father had had a bit of a "tirravee" (dispute) with his father shortly
before I was born. So in revenge he insisted that I should be
called after my mother's father, Henry MacLennan. Old Henry died in our
house. He had lived with his married daughter for some years, being very
frail and unable to work. He was a typical old Highlander in looks,
speech, and general behaviour. I remember him sitting at the ingle-neuk
reading his Gaelic Bible and telling me to be a "goot poy an' fear the
Lord." He and my mother were thoroughly religious people and both took a
great interest in teaching me my prayers. Almost as soon as I was able to
lisp I learned the stock prayer of every Scottish infant.
As I lie down this night to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul may keep If I should die before I wake I
pray the Lord my soul may take.
Note how the Calvinistic element of gloom and sudden
death was instilled into the Scottish infant of fifty or sixty years ago!
Well do I remember lying in bed night after night thinking with horror of
the prospect of never wakening up again and wondering why the Lord should
want to come to Musselburgh and take away the soul—whatever that meant—of
a poor wee boy like me! But whatever the suitability of the prayers and
the religion of these days to the very tender minds of youth there can be
no doubt that they implanted themselves deeply on the mind. I am not at
all ashamed to confess that I still repeat each night the little prayer I
learned at my mother's knee.On Sundays no work was done in our house. The
food for that day was cooked overnight. The blinds were "drawn." The "auld
folk" went to church and, when I was old enough, I was sent to Sunday
School. In the evening my mother gathered us round and told us a story
about the Covenanters or David Livingstone or read a tale from the Old
Testament. Yes, Sunday was "the Lord's Day" in very truth. But to morrow
would be Monday!
At this stage of my early memories my mind goes bad to the first money I
ever earned. You see how the Adam in Harry Lauder asserts itself. If I am
ever stumped for a story or a subject in this book I can always turn on
the moneymaking tap. It will never fail me. Perhaps this is only to be
expected in the life story of a man who is supposed to think more of "siller"
than the average Scotsman and who is popularly reputed to have
collected—and kept—more than his fair share of it all over the world! But,
in the meantime, we'll "let that flea stick to the wa' !" It has been a
grand advertisement for me all my life and why should I complain of the
best free advertisement any public man ever had anywhere, at any time?
I would be about eight years of
age when a well-known worthy in the village called Wattie Sandilands gave
me the opportunity of earning my first few coppers. He kept a large number
of pigs. The "soocraes" at Wattie's place had a peculiar fascination for
me and many an hour I spent watching their inmates. One day the old man
said that if I would help him to feed the pigs he would give me sixpence a
week. Would I? I could scarcely answer him for the thumping of my heart.
Sixpence a week for doing a job which I would gladly have done for
nothing! So the bargain was struck. Each night for a fortnight I slipped
along to Wattie's, helped him to unload the refuse from the tins in which
he collected it all over the town, mix it and dump it in the troughs. For
two Saturdays I got my sixpence and proudly took it home to my mother. She
was not exactly enamoured of my first job, not because of its humble
nature, but owing to the fact that Wattie had the reputation of being a
very short-tempered man and quick with his hands. My father, when
consulted, only laughed and said that if I was feeding pigs I was being
kept out of mischief in other directions. "Besides," he added, "Harry may
be a farmer some day and the experience will do him good." (The words were
prophetic. I was a farmer many years afterwards but any experience I had
as an assistant pig-feeder did not prevent me making a colossal failure of
the business.) Alas, my weekly sixpence did not continue after the
fortnight for one of Wattie's pigs choked itself to death through trying
to eat a piece of hard dumpling which had been thrown away by some
housewife. Probably it was the first she had ever made. In any case, the
pig died and old man Sandilands blamed me for letting the pig eat it in
the first instance and for not immediately acting as veterinary surgeon
when I saw that it was in difficulties. I was sacked on the spot. To add
to the injustice I was unable to sit down with any degree of comfort for a
week or ten days.
My next job was to help a market gardener pick
strawberries. The chief qualification for this job was the ability to
whistle. No boys were engaged that couldn't whistle. They were supposed to
whistle all the time they were picking the strawberries and the gardener
walked round the beds watch ing and listening. The boy who was working
alongside rue was an expert whistler. In fact he whistled so loud that
occasionally I left off—and had a good feed of strawberries. The pay was
fourpence a day. I managed to get away with two days' pay, but on the
third I fell into a trap laid by the gardener. He had evidently been
suspicious of my honesty because he creeped down the side of my strawberry
bed and pounced out on me when I was "gobbling" the best and biggest of
the berries and making a hopeless attempt to whistle at the same time.
Once more the parting between employer and employed was of a painful
nature. I have never liked strawberries from that day to this. They make
me feel ill whenever I see them on the fruit-stall or on the table.
In between these various—and
vicarious—jobs, I was a caddie on Müsselburgh Links, at that time the
great golfing resort of the Edinburgh gentry. We boys used to meet the
golfers at the train and bombard them with requests to be allowed to "cairry
yer clubs, sir, balls an' all, sir!" Although I was very small I could
generally do my fair share of shouting and elbowing at the station and I
got my "cairries" with the best of them.
There were no caddie-masters in
those days. The contract was a simple one between golfer and boy, the
price twopence a round. An understanding ruled, however, that if the
caddie did his work faithfully and well and lost no balls he got an extra
penny at the end of the round. Many a day I earned sixpence or ninepence
as a caddie. My mother got the money as a rule, but occasionally I was
tempted to spend some of my earnings in sweets or ladies' twist. This was
a sort of tobacco rolled up into long oval balls and a penny worth would
represent ten or twelve inches of material for all the world like a length
of rough string. I do not know how I became thus early introduced to the
nicotine habit. Probably I had seen the older boys buying it. In any event
I learned to chew the tobacco and for years afterwards ladies' twist was
always a temptation and an addiction.
The caddie-boys at Müsselburgh
had another way of se- curing pocket-money. The golfers of that time had
no Dun lop, or Silver King or Spalding balls to smack up the middle for
two hundred and fifty yards. They played with the old gutta ball, a pill
which had to be well and truly hit if the golfer's arms and spine were not
to be shattered by a stonelike hitting. These guttas sometimes split in
two when struck by the club. This was a joyful sight to the caddies for we
were allowed to collar the pieces and put them in our pockets. At home we
got hold of our mother's stew-pans and boiled the remnants of the balls
until they were soft. Then the soft and "claggy" mass was rolled out on
the kitchen table and shaped into whips which we sold to the miners'
pony-drivers in the Carbery Coal Pits near Müsselburgh. When I became a
miner myself a few years later I used to regret my financial transactions
in this direction for the whips were vicious things and could give cruel
blows to the puir wee horses working in the damp and eternal darkness of
the mines.
I learned to hit a
golf-ball before I was eight or nine years of age. Little did I then think
that in the years to come I would myself play golf all over the world, or
that my name would be associated with so many golf stories exemplifying
the "nearness" of the Scottish race! Some of the best of these tales I
shall tell against myself in their proper place during the course of these
reminiscences. I must have a better collection of golf stories than any
other golfer in the world.—and most of them are true, seeing they are
mostly told against myself.
Sport played
quite a prominent part in my early boyhood days at Müsselhurgh. My father
took a keen interest in foot- racing. He had been a runner himself, but
after marriage he confined his interests to training the runners of the
district. Sprints, half-mile, mile, and long-distance races were
tremendously popular in the midlands of Scotland about this time. Wee
Johnnie Lauder had the reputation of being a peculiarly clever trainer and
to get into his "stable" was considered something of an honour. He trained
the winners of many races, including one Powderhall Handicap. Up till a
few days ago I could not have told you the name of this victor in the
historic Scottish race, but—so curiously do events work out—I have before
me at this moment a letter written by an old man of seventy-one, now
living in Buckie, Banffshire, telling me that he was trained by my father
when he won a big Edinburgh Handicap in 1877. He signs the letter "William
Young" and in it he says he has just noticed in the papers my return from
America and took the notion to write me after all these years. I need
quote only one sentence from Mr. Young's letter, a sentence that made a
lump rise in my throat as I remembered the father whom I only knew as a
little boy, "Johnnie Lauder was a straight, honest man and a thorough
sportsman—what a pity he didn't live to see your success, Sir Harry !"
And so my boyhood's years slip awa'! I am not twelve
years of age, not very big, but broad and strong and as healthy as a young
animal. There are seven boys and girls in the Lauder family, and I am my
mother's mainstay for nursing, running messages, and generally assisting
in the house. I can cook a meal, bathe a baby, and do a household washing
if need be. There is great excitement one evening. My father comes home
with the information that he has been offered a good situation in
Pearson's Pottery at Whittington Moor, Derbyshire.
A Council of Ways and Means and
Future Prospects is immediately called. The pros and cons are studied and
dis cussed. My mother is very silent and undemonstrative all through; she
does not like the idea of leaving Scotland for the "wilds of England." All
her sentiments and affections are for her "ain folk" and for the land she
knows and loves. I do not know it at the time, but in after years she
confesses that "her heart was never in the shift." The Highland strain in
her make-up foresees danger and disaster ahead; she has a premonition of
impending fate. But my father is full of the bigger wages he has been
offered. He thinks there will be better chances for the bairns in England.
His enthusiasm wins the day. In less than a month the family packs up and
we find ourselves at Whittington Moor near Chesterfield.
The few weeks we spent there seem
like a dream to me now. I can only remember clearly the one big event
which shattered the whole world for a poor young woman and her brood of
seven children—the sudden death of my father from pneumonia. And one scene
stands out, cameo-like, from the drama. It is the picture of my mother
coming out, moaning, from the little room in which my father was lying.
She catches me to her arms and sobs out "Oh, Harry, Harry, yer faither's
deid, yer dear faitlier's been ta'en from us. What'll I dae, ma son, mu
puir wee laddie? God help us a' in His mercy an' compassion!'
There is no need to enlarge upon the scene and the
grim tragedy of the whole situation. I was very, very young— not yet
twelve years of age—but I did my best to comfort my weeping mother by
telling her I loved her, that I would never leave her and that soon I
would be able to work for her and my wee brothers and sisters. My father
had been insured for £15 and this sufficed to
bury him in the little churchyard at Whittington and leave a balance over,
along with what the pottery people gave us, to take the family back to
Scotland. My mother had relatives living in Arbroath, a little town in
Forfarshire, and it is here that I again take up the story of my
individual life once more.
Arbroath at that
time was, and still is, a fairly prosperous township. It had quite a
number of industries such as flax-mills, engineering works, tanneries,
boot factories, and fishing. A good deal of shipping used the little
harbour in my time, steamers of fair size landing cargoes of raw flax from
Russia and the Baltic countries.
I had no
difficulty in getting a job as half-timer in Gordon's Mill at the Brothick
Brig. There are no half-timers in Scotland now; the law put a stop to this
form of child-labour many years ago. But forty or fifty years ago it was
common all over the country, particularly in the large manufacturing
districts. A half-timer was so called because he put in one day at the
mill and one day at the school; in other words he would toil from morning
till night on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the factory, while on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays he would attend a school run by his
employers in connection with the establishment. It may have been the other
way round so far as the days of the week were concerned, but you get the
idea.
Well, my task at Gordon's Mill was to be a "towie."
That is, collecting the tow after it had passed through the heckling
machinery and stamping it into a bag or a large tin receptacle. The "towie"
had to be very careful not to break the tow in its
passage from the machine to the bag or the tin. When one receptacle was
filled, carefully pressed down in coils or layers, another took its place
and so the job went on, changeless and mechanical, all day. The only
relief came by thinking that tomorrow there would be no work to do and
that school, even under such a schoolmaster as Auld "Stumpie" Bell, was
far, far better than handling an endless film of tow from six till six.
There were perhaps fifty
half-timers in Gordon's. Their educational requirements were attended to
by the said Mr. Bell, a "character" if ever there existed one among the
dominies of Scotland. He was a little man with a shrivelled leg so much
shorter than the other than he wore an iron standard on his boot. This
certainly brought both limbs on something like equality for length but I
always thought that the leg with the ironwork attached to it was easily
the more useful of the two! Because he used it with deadly effect upon my
anatomy more than once! My first impressions of "Stumpie"—the nick-name
was, of course, inspired by his infirmity—were that he regarded each and
every one of his pupils as a child of Satan, choke-full of the most
terrible kind of original sin. He was the sternest disciplinarian I have
ever come across in my life. He ruled us with a rod—and a foot!—of iron.
Only the slightest provocation roused his temper and it was God help the
poor kid who came under the storm of his wrath. He walloped the life out
of us boys day in and day out. But we loved him. He was just. He was hard
but he was fair. And he earned the respect of every boy who passed through
his drastic curriculum.
Curiously enough, his educational ideas were pretty
much on a par with those of Mr. Fraser, the Müsselburgh teacher of whom I
have already written. Not because he believed implicitly in the
"fundamentals"—.-the good old three R's again---but because he was another
fervent Scot to whom the rest of the world didn't matter. Scottish history
meant far more to him than the story of the Incas in Peru or the building
up of the German Empire. And the geography of Forfarshire, including such
a fact that the Bloody Graham of Claverhouse had his castle just outside
of Dundee, was of more vital importance than the coast-line of Japan or
the latitude of the Andaman Isles. For his own town of Arbroath he had a
warm admiration. He abjured us to honour it all our lives and never, under
any circumstances, allow anybody to say a word against it. Thus did he
instil into his pupils a sense of local patriotism in the same way as his
brother-dominie Fraser had inspired me with a sense of national pride.
There was a little public-house
not far away from the school in the Applegate. To this house of
refreshment "Stunipie" was wont occasionally to repair at the lunch hour,
and whenever any of us detected the teacher coming out of its kindly doors
we sent round the word that "Stumpie" had had a "hauf or twa," This meant
that we must all be on our best behaviour for the rest of the day. For if
the teacher was a taskmaster when sober, he was a tyrant with a couple of
drinks in him! Woe betide any of the half-timers who gave a wrong answer
to Maister Bell under these conditions! I have seen him work himself into
a state of the most ungovernable fury, blinking his eyes, licking his
teeth and lips, snorting with rage and keeping his iron-heel constantly on
the move as if he were only waiting for a chance to bring it into action
on a pupil's shin or—well, higher up! The class sat trembling, each boy as
quiet as a mouse, until the dominie calmed down a bit, which he always did
very soon.
One
day Ord's circus came to town and spread its tents on the Common. The
visit of this "mammoth combination" —ten vans of "raging, tearing
man-eaters and other beasts of prey"—caused a sensation among the
half-timers. We held a meeting in the playground the night before and it
was decided that a committee of the bays should approach "Stumpie" in the
morning and ask for a day off to see the circus. I was one of the
committee. When the morning came I, for one, rued my appointment and the
other two members of the deputation did the same. You see, we knew our "Stumpie"
and we had all come to the conclusion that there wasn't a thousand to one
chance of him listening favourably to the request. We trooped into school
and the circus was never mentioned. But at the dinner hour we held another
meeting and ten or a dozen of us decided to take the bull by the horns and
play truant for the rest of the day.
We had a glorious time on the
Common among the circus tents. When the evening performance came along I
burrowed my way underneath the canvas and had a spell-binding view of the
proceedings for about half an hour. Suddenly the spell was broken by aij
attendant gripping me by the nape of the neck, bending me over his knee
and administering severe corporal punishment with a horse brush. Then he
flung me towards the canvas and ordered me to clear out the way I had come
in. No snake ever wriggled quicker through the jungle than I did below the
flapping canvas. Sore but satisfied, I was a hero among the other chaps
for days after the circus had departed. This it did on a Sunday evening.
We boys followed the cavalcade as it wound its way out of town to the
north. The wooden sides of a van containing several lions were still down
and naturally this was the vehicle which focussed our fascinated
attention. Once, out of bravado, I dashed up close to the side of the
"cage" and yelled fearsomely at the lions. One of these snarled at me and
stuck an angry paw through the bars. I received such a fright that I fell,
and in failing I spiked my hand against a projecting bit of iron on the
wheel-rim of the next caravan. The mark is there to this day.
The sequel to our playing truant
is worth telling. We had to work in the mill the following day, but next
morning "Stunipie" was waiting for us in a condition of bottled-up rage.
Like Tam O'Shanter's wife he had been nursing his wrath to keep it warm! I
was supposed to be the bravest of the boys who had "skulked the schule,"
and it was decided that I should be the first of the miscreants to enter
the classroom. I didn't like the job at all, but I put as good a face on
it as possible and made a dash for my desk. But "Stunipie," moving with
unwonted alacrity, caught me before I got there or had time to utter a
word. He gave me a tremendous clout on the jaw. Fortunately, it knocked me
clean underneath a desk, otherwise I would have caught a swinging kick
with his iron-heel and that might have been the end of me.
The master never uttered a word.
His breath was going and coming in gasps, his eyes were glaring with fury.
He tried several times to voice the anger which was consuming him, but he
couldn't get the words out of his mouth. After settling my "hash" he went
for several of the other boys. The class was in an uproar. Two or three of
the younger pupils began to cry and others, thinking that Maister Bell had
gone mad, made their escape from the room and the building. I cannot
imagine a scene of such a turbulent nature to have taken place in any
school anywhere since education of the young began. It was an epic
contest. One of the fellows upset the master's desk in the struggle, while
I emerged from my place of temporary security and threw a slate which just
missed Bell's head by inches. Suddenly "Stumpie" shouted out, "We'll now
take the Scripture lesson!" Peace was gradually restored. And if my
recollection is trustworthy the lesson that morning began with the text,
"Suffer the little children to come unto me!"
Dear old "Stumpie" Bell! He had a
difficult task with us half-timers, as wild and deil-may-care a bunch as
you could have found in a day's march, but he left his imprint on our
minds as well as on our bodies. Years after I went back to Arbroath as a
"lion comique." Before going to the concert hail in the evening, I went
out to hunt up my old schoolmaster, but to my immense regret I learned
that he had died a year or two before. I don't mind telling you that I
shed a tear or two for his memory that evening.
My pay as a half-timer was 2/Id.
per week. My mother worked at whatever odd jobs she could get. She would
"mind" a family for a day while the parents took a holiday or she would go
out "washing" for the more prosperous of the town's lady citizens. She was
willing to do anything at all and her geniality and determination to earn
food for her children made her a general favourite wherever she went. I
was the only member of the family old enough to do a "hand's turn."
Naturally we had a thoroughly hard time of it but we always had something
to eat. Indeed, out of my wages I got the odd penny as pocket money. This
invariably went in tobacco; by this time I was a slave to the weed. The
"ladies' twist" did not last long. It was usually consumed by the Sunday
evening, and I had just to wait until the week-end, or until I had picked
up a penny elsewhere, before I could satisfy my craving for more tobacco.
Later, I got taken on as one of a gang of boys to deliver the Arbroath
Guide on Saturday mornings. I started out as early as five o'clock and
finished up in time to go to school. For deliver ing probably 150 copies
of the paper I earned as much as ninepence. This meant a most substantial
increase to the family resources.
Occasionally I got my brother Matthew to assist me in
my news-vending activities. At first I thought he wanted to do me out of
my job, but I discovered that all he wanted was to learn to smoke, like
me. So I arranged that if he would help me to deliver the papers I would
teach him to smoke. From one of the printers at the Guide office I got a
chunk of "thick black" one morning. This tobacco is not very well known to
smokers outside of Scotland and Ireland. It is a peculiarly pungent brand
much beloved of dock-labourers, blacksmiths, and coal-miners, you must be
a strong man to tackle it either for chewing or smoking purposes. I had
long desire to graduate from the more or less insipid ladies' twist to
this "Man's stuff." Here was a chance to try it out. If Matt could stand
it-well, it would be all right for me. So one Saturday afternoon I filled
up a clay pipe with the thick black, took Matt out to the Common and made
him get busy with his first smoke. In about half a minute he became
violently sick, groaned and rolled his eyes, cried bitterly and threatened
to go home and tell my mother. "Matt," said I, shaking a warning finger at
my wretched brother, "if you tell on me I'll tell on you! If you dinna say
a word I'll gie ye three brandy balls when I get my penny on Saturday !"
The brandy balls carried the clay. Matt lay on the Common for a long time
and crawled home, a sick and sorry boy, about eight o'clock at night when
he knew our mother would be out baking scones for one of the millowners'
wives.
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