Roy Jenkins was a British MP with a colourful career of his own, but who is best remembered today for his engagingly written biographies of past prime ministers. His biography of Churchill is still one of the best-regarded around. On my travels recently I downloaded onto my kindle and read his biography of William Gladstone. Gladstone is obviously a much-less interesting figure than Churchill, but I was still amused by Jenkins’ style:
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None of these temptations, however, was conductive to finding Gladstone a wife. This he set about without guilt but also without guile. His first target was Caroline Farquhar, the sister of an Eton friend and the daughter of a Surrey Baronet of considerable and somewhat older wealth than the Gladstones. The family did not therefore regard Gladstone as a particularly good match, but nor would they have been likely to be resistant had miss Farquhar, who was considered by Gladstone and others to be a ‘beauty’, been responsive.
She was exactly the reverse. Gladstone persuaded himself that her religious position was satisfactory, but may well have over-estimated the aphrodisiacal effect of telling her this. He also mistakenly believed appeals to her father and brother would advance his suit. He had no idea how to interest her. She had no insight to the qualities behind his awkwardness. Her main contemporary comment (a little unreliably recorded in Farquhar family lore) was the exclamation, when she saw Gladstone walking across her family’s park at Polesden Lacey with a case in his hand: “Mama, I simply cannot marry a man who carries his bag like that”.
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He started on 31 August [1893] which was a few days after the third and most farcical of his three accidents of that summer. After an afternoon drive with his wife he “walked and came unawares in the quietest corner of the park on a dangerous cow which knocked me down and might have done serious damage”. There are slightly more dramatic versions, including Magnus’ statement that he had to lie down, feigning to be dead, until the cow’s attention was distracted and he could escape first behind a tree and then back to the Castle. The malfeasant beast was apparently not part of a dairy herd but a wild heifer which had intruded into the park and was subsequently shot. It was compensated by the tributes of having its head permanently displayed at the Glynne Arms in Hawarden village, and of evoking an elaborate wreath dispatched with the card inscribed “to the patriotic cow which sacrificed its life in an attempt to save Ireland from Home Rule”. Gladstone, although he had walked home and sat down calmly at dinner, suffered a few weeks of mild ill-effect, which was not surprising at nearly eighty-three.
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Then in June 1893 two British men-of-war, Camperdown and Victoria, collided with vast loss of life. The combination of circumstances produced a naval panic, which was carefully fanned by the Times and some other newspapers. It cannot be said it was wholly logical. It was not obvious, for instance, that the answer to the problem of British ships running into each other was to have more of them.
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