The Henson Journals

[177]

Friday, November 16th, 1928.

A brilliant sun–rise led in a woefully wet & gloomy day. The draft Report of the Street Offences Committee arrived. I attached my signature & returned it forthwith. That is the first, and, I doubt not, the last essay in public affairs which I shall be called upon to make.

A letter from Darlington informed me that some dubious layman, advertised as a 'famous ex–medium' was going to preach in S. Paul's Church next Sunday afternoon on 'The Witch of [177] Endor'. I telegraphed to the Vicar (a dingy–looking ex–Baptist named Jardine) that I would call at 3p.m. I did so, & (after enlarging on the enormity of allowing unlicensed persons to speak in the parish church) received his assurance that the aforesaid dubious layman should transfer his eloquence to the School room. Then, picking up Fearne at Windlestone on the way, we returned to the Castle.

I motored to Darlington after dinner to meet Ella. The train was an hour and 20 minutes late, being delayed by a furious tempest in the South. So I had a long wait on the platform, and we did not arrive at the Castle much before midnight. The rain had ceased.

[178]

"I saw, in the third civil war in France, certain caves in Languedoc, which had but one entrance, and that very narrow, cut out in the midway of high rocks, which we knew not how to enter by any ladder of engine, till at last by certain bundles of straw let down by an iron chain, and a weighty stone in the midst, those that defended it were so smothered as they rendered themselves with their plate, money & other goods therein hidden."

Sir Walter Raleigh. History of the World.

Book iv.c.16.

Ludlow in his account of Cromwell's Irish campaign records similar methods adopted by the English army against the Popish Irish. This method was one of the repulsive fractures of the French warfare against Abdel Kader in Algeria. It is no worse, perhaps, than the military methods with which the world became but too familiar in the course of the Great War: and yet it outrages one's sense of fair–play in a very special degree.

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