The War Illustrated, Volume 2, No. 31, Page ii, April 5, 1940.

How true is the saying that all good things have "the defects of their qualities!" To have many good friends is a thing to delight in and also a thing that must bring sorrow. My long and richly interesting experience of life compels me to subscribe with the greatest good will to that finest of epitaphs, Stevenson’s "Glad did I live and gladly die." In the gladness of living there is interfused so much sadness that at best we must measure our meed of life by the balance between debit and credit. It is never a one-sided affair. My credit side in the book of life is still ampler than that in my bank book. And yet...

My thoughts so run tonight in looking over the annual report of my favourite club. I have been a member of many noted London clubs in my time, and if I could emulate the lush tearfulness of Barrie’s sentimental moments I could, tonight, suffuse with lachrymose moisture the paper on which I write. For in all of these haunts of friendship, and in one especially, I am most acutely conscious of the good fellows I have known, and whose names, year by year, have been added to the "In Memoriam" list.

I was still a youngster when that half-forgotten Irish barrister, Theodore Parkes, wrote his jolly ballads of Bohemia that failed to win the literary fame he coveted-failed for good enough reason-and yet I can quote his rhymes today, because they caught me in my sentimental youth…

For autumn gales of life have blown these festal hours asunder,
And scattered wide by land and sea the steps of many a one,
And some alas! Beneath the sod, for evermore gone under,
Have left a rainbow thro’ the mist of grief that they have won,
But Slantha! To the hearts and hands of those yet remaining
Do carry down traditions of that bright Bohemian throng,
…and so on. Pretty punk as poetry, but somehow it "got" me, and his

Hip, hip, hurrah! Vive! Hoc! And Skoal! To Fleet Street and the Strand

Had a good deal to do with determining me to try my luck in the Street of Adventure...as little like the Fleet Street of today as the Krakowskie Przedmiescie of Warsaw under the Huns of today resembles its lovely self of eight months ago.

All of us who knew the London of late Victorian and Edwardian days know only too well that much sentimental beauty has vanished before the modern builder. As a realist I drop no tears at the loss, greatly though I loved what’s gone…"my heart remembers how." Nay, I rejoice in much of the new that has elbowed out the old, and although some thirty years of happy associations lost their local habitation for me when the Adelphi Terrace was demolished, I stand in admiration before the massy magnificence which soars upon its site. Joyful memories cling to the splendid men I knew there. Like Barrie at his mother’s grave, I exult in them, even at the mammoth mausoleum under which their memories are now interred. My youthful dreams of Babylon and Nineveh have come to reality in the palatial buildings that smother the old Adelphi byways. So don’t write me down a sentimental Tommy!

But all this flows from my receiving the annual report of a certain famous club-"my club" and the "Wigwam" of Barrie-where one day Edgar Wallace confessed to me that he would never return to its common luncheon table, as he had known there in the days that were gone. "Ghosts! Ghosts are all that I see here. They are more real to me than the living." He was as good as his word, and alas in a year or two he himself was one of my innumerable ghosts.

For only last year I ticked off in our "In memoriam" list one hundred and thirty who had passed beyond these scenes, all of them friends of mine, every one vividly alive in my memory at this moment. And what does the record of the year that’s past reveal? Of thirty-three who shall come no-more, twelve were my personal friends. There’s Lawrence Anderson, a nephew of the celebrated Mary Anderson-still happily alive-possessor of one of the finest voices that ever graced the English stage, cut off in his prime; Robert Courtneidge, whom I remembered as a struggilg young comedian in Glasgow pantomime and knew as one of the most successful theatrical managers of later years…"The Arcadians" and "Paddy the Next Best Thing" each made him a fortunes…dear Herman Finck, whose world-famous "In the Shadows" brought him some twenty pounds; Hope Goddard, who lived and died for "The Illustrated London News"; Sir Fred Hobday, who made the Royal Veterinary College a truly great and beneficent institution; unforgettable Leonard Merrick, a great novelist and deftest of story-tellers; Mordaunt Shairp, author of "The Green Bay Tree" and that memorable film "Dark Angel"; Ashley Sterne, wit and playwright; Harold Terry, whose play "The Man Who Stayed at Home" was one of the successes of the Great War days; Aubrey Hammond, the brilliant scenic artist, who left the club a few days ago with a merry "one for the road" and three or four days later had reached its end; and C.E. Lawrence, novelist and co-editor of "The Quarterly."

Through many years of our Adelphi days Lawrence and I discussed with tireless gusto most thing in life and literature. Once he began a challenging argument with "I’ve sat so long at your feet…" to which I retorted that I had more often felt him trampling on my toes. But of Lawrence and our causeries I can feelingly quote from old Callimachus on the death of Heraclitus:

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

And thus you see what I meant when I quoted the tag about good things having the defects of their qualities. The larger one’s circle of friends the greater one’s exposure to loss, yet though that be the defect of a merit, while memory endures friends are ever worth the making; their personalities live after them in the secret places of our hearts. So be it…life begins again tomorrow! "Slantha! To the hearts and hands of those who yet remaining…"

"Things no fellah can understand." In wartime their number increases beyond all computation. Most of these are concerned with the (to me) obscure, mysterious, and always wrong-science of Economics. Why bank rates should go up when you expect them to go down, why shares in steel producing companies should recede when the companies are choked with orders for their produce, why too much gold in a nation’s treasury should produce a devastating slump in industry…these and a multitude of other queer things can be glibly explained by our "economists." But one of the things I learned in the years of the Great War was never to do what an economist advises. The more distinguished he was the more surely would the event give the lie to his advice. Fact. Doing the exact opposite would have produced the most satisfactory result.

It was really a matter of whisky that prompted this great thought. I’m certainly no economist, for during the years when whisky sold at about three or four shillings a bottle I never touch it. Not until it had jumped to eleven or twelve did I discover a taste for it! But now that it has almost touched sixteen shillings, while an Egyptian or an Argentine or an American can get the same brands from the same distilleries, conveyed thousands of miles, for but a third or fourth of the price I have to pay-well, it makes you think. I am informed by those who know that there is in existence in Scottish distilleries enough of the stuff to last five to seven years-yet the distillers are ordered to cut their supplies to 70 per cent of pre-War quantities and up goes the price. It mayn’t be long before fifty per cent will be the proportion available…and again up will go the price.

Why? Because the Government wants to export as much whisky as possible to the United States as credit against our fabulous purchases from our kind Transatlantic cousins-so many of whom seem to be annoyed at the Franc-British armies for not having scores of thousands of daily casualties just to give them some hot headlines for their newspapers. Yet on every bottle that leaves Britain our Government loses ten shillings excise duty…for not even our millionaires pay such levy to the State as our whisky drinkers. Of course, one can be both. I can only assume that the Government’s need for dollar credits is so great that the loss of ten shillings excise duty on every bottle shipped to America is worth while. But it seems a big price to pay. Perhaps it is a subtle scheme for encouraging teetotalism in Britain.