I am one person away from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy, four from Napoleon

 

From 'The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-Maker: The Story of Britain Through Its Census, Since 1801' By Roger Hutchinson (2017)

I wrote before in this blog that Frederic Harrison said his first memory was of his father paying a very rare visit to the nursery in 1837 and saying,

'Frederic, I am going to tell you something now that you will remember for the rest of your life. The King is dead.'

'I said, "Oh, papa, who will be King now?" and my father said, "We are not going to have a king. We are going to have a queen."

' I said, "So, it has come to that." '

I met Harold Macmillan who aged 6 met Mark Twain, who died in 1910, and was friends with Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. 

Via King Michael of Romania and Lord Home I am one remove from Hitler.

I used to see each day, when I worked at the House of Lords, Lord Ampthill, who was one of the deputy speakers.

He had been the Russell baby in the celebrated and very scandalous Russell Baby Case in 1923. 

His mother, Christabel Russell, had been a virgin when he was conceived, with a partially intact hymen. 

His father had used 'Hunnish practices' to inseminate her. 

Lord Ampthill's mother was convicted of adultery but the verdict was overturned by the House of Lords (the Judicial Committee, of course).

The court reports of their divorce proceedings (poor things) provided sex education to a generation of young readers and resulted in the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act 1926, which prevented reporting of indecent details from divorce trials. King George V requested this law.

In the House of Lords I used most mornings to pass someone who looked like a tramp asleep on a leather bench behind the throne. 

He was the fourth Earl Russell. 

His father, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, knew his grandfather, the first earl, who as Lord John Russell had been Prime Minister. He is nowadays remembered for having been Prime Minister during the Irish Potato Famine.

Lord John Russell, as a young man, met Napoleon in 1814  in exile in Elba.

Four removes from Napoleon to me is not especially impressive.

At the next table to me in the United Oxford and Cambridge Universities Club, when I was an undergraduate member, I heard the father of the club, Victor Hill, saying that Rupert Brooke and he had chased the same girl at Cambridge. Brooke died in 1915.

My father on his bike in around 1934 knocked over George Bernard Shaw who shortly after left London for the countryside.

I knew and loved Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who lived at the Travellers' Club. He officiated at one of Evelyn Waugh's weddings. He also met Belloc and Chesterton when they spoke at Fisher House at Cambridge, but those people are recent enough.

I remember when I was 8 or 9 a friend of the family telling my mother that as a small boy he had watched Chinese immigrants on their way to be deported and asking why being told it was because of the Boxer Rising. 

I already precociously knew about the Boxer Rising, which happened in 1900, and was surprised because he did not look nearly old enough. 

My Auntie Rose (my great-aunt) was told as a little girl in the First World War that our men were fighting the Germans in Belgium and imagined that they were trading fisticuffs.

My grandfather, in whose house I grew up, fought at the Somme. 

I so regret that I have lost his diaries. 

After 1945 he worked in the War Office, where his boss was called Mr. Burgess. 

One day Mr. Burgess did not come to the office and they discovered that he had gone to Moscow.

Meanwhile that evening my first boss, Maurice Macmillan, went out on a blinder with his employee and close friend Alan Maclean, the spy Donald Maclean's brother. Like his father Maurice was an alcoholic. After that he never had another drink. Nevertheless drink killed him at 63.