Edward Blyth

“ The Otter was a rival of the Red Rover in the early days of the latter yacht, and was a clumsy, rather ugly, ketch-rigged craft belonging to Sir Arthur Preston. Major Leathes’ (now Colonel Leathes) boat was a yawl named the Waveney Queen, and the Colonel tells me that he carried away his mast twice, each time because he would “carry on” too long.
I can’t ascertain who was the “new owner” of Ablett Percival and Jack—and if I could I suppose it wouldn’t do to name p. 198him, in view of FitzGerald’s stringent criticism of him. ”

“ FitzGerald thought very highly of that “carcase” of Posh’s, as will be seen from the story of the Laurence portrait, set forth hereinafter, as the lawyers, whom Posh hates so much, would say.
The sleeping partner throughout seems to have had more anxiety on account of Posh’s sea hazards than on account of business losses. How the mackerel paid I do not know, but Posh was in time to go north for the beginning of the herring fishing in July. ”

“ Even here, when Posh had obviously gone beyond his rights and bought another boat without consultation with his capitalist partner, FitzGerald shows his anxiety and solicitude for the man.
There is a good deal of dust flying about the net chambers; for the cutch and oil and thread all shred off and poison the air. ”

“ Then Posh began to have the fingering of a good deal of money, and FitzGerald had already had reason to doubt his abilities to keep his credit and debit sides of account in proper order. Moreover, the usual autumn gales had been bringing the stormy and dark nights which are as profitable as they are dangerous to the drifters. ”

“ He has made about the average fishing, I believe: about £250. Some boats have £600, I hear; and some few not enough to pay their way.
“He came up with a very bad cold and hoarseness; and so went off, poor fellow: he never will be long well, I do think.”
Probably Posh knew all about the best way of making a profit out of herring drifters, and FitzGerald may have been wrong in fearing that he did not. FitzGerald, with his superb culture, may not (I do not say he did not) have understood that Posh, on his native North Sea, may p. 132have been more than a match for all the culture in the world. ”

“ For years Edward FitzGerald had been accustomed to cruise about the Deben and down the river to Harwich in a small craft captained by one West. But in 1865 he was the owner of a smart fifteen-ton schooner, which he had had built for him by Harvey, of Wyvenhoe, two years previously, and of which Tom Newson was the skipper and his nephew Jack the crew. According to Posh, the original name of this schooner was the Shamrock, but she has become famous as the Scandal. ”

“ The Elsie was a yacht which belonged to a syndicate of Woodbridge yachtsmen, of whom Mr. Silver (a Woodbridge friend of FitzGerald’s) was one and Mr. Manby was another. The two friends who went to Mutford Bridge to look at the lugger were (so far as Posh can remember) Mr. Silver and Mr. Cobbold, of Cobbold’s Bank. Posh says that the lugger was a beauty. But nothing came of the visit, and the Woodbridge man did not buy her. ”

“ The boat referred to in this letter was probably a small craft in which FitzGerald had been in the habit of cruising up and down river with one “West.” It certainly was not the Scandal, for as transpires in the letter, that “Great Ship” was not yet painted for the yachting season.
Mr. Manby was a ship agent at Woodbridge.
p. 43The “Ship-wash” was, and is, the “Rattlin’ Sam” of Felixstowe, and Tom Newson, FitzGerald’s skipper, had evidently had a good bit of “salwagin’.” ”

“ However, he falsified both predictions, for he lived in the house ten years and died in Norfolk.
Mr. Durrant was still in default. I doubt if FitzGerald ever got those flowers. They were plants, Posh tells me, which FitzGerald wished to plant out at Little Grange.
I can find no record of the principal, the Martinmas or Autumn, fishing of 1868. But in the spring of 1869 the Meum and Tuum went to the “West Fishing” for mackerel, even as a large number of our modern steam drifters go now, to the indignation of the pious fishermen of Penzance, Newlyn, and St. Ives. These good fellows p. ”

“ William Hall’s steam launch towed us in.
p. 196I believe that when the little ten-ton Buttercup (unbeaten at her best) came down and gave the poor old Red Rover the worst dressing down she had ever experienced it broke Mr. Nightingale’s heart. He died soon after, and he left a direction in his will that the Red Rover should be broken up and burnt. It would, I think, have been a kinder and better direction to have left the yacht to Fred Baldry, who had steered her to victory so often. ”

“ But though FitzGerald had found himself obliged to end his association with Posh in the herring fishing, he never ended his friendship, even if, during the last years of his life, he neither saw nor wrote to his former partner.
The Meum and Tuum made several more voyages in the North Sea and to the west, and, when she was no longer strictly seaworthy, was sold to a Mr. Crisp, of Beccles, a maltster and general provision merchant, who turned her into a storeship, and anchored her off his wharf in the river Waveney. When she became so rotten as to be unfit even for a storage ship she was p. ”

“ One gentleman has been kind enough to try to help me, and thinks that she was the Scandal. But this cannot be so, for the Scandal was built for FitzGerald at Wyvenhoe in 1863, was first called the Shamrock and then the Scandal. Personally, I remember the names of a good many of the yachts of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast of the period, but I can’t identify the Sapphire. The Red Rover was a river craft, a cutter, with the one big jib of our river craft p. ”

“ I only left Lowestoft partly to avoid a Volunteer Camp there which filled the Town and People with Bustle: and partly that my Captain might see his Wife: who cannot last very much longer I think: scarcely through the Autumn, surely. She goes about, nurses her children, etc., but grows visibly thinner, weaker and more ailing.”
The “claim made by your yawl” refers to a claim for salvage made by the company of beach men (of which Posh was a member) owning a yawl. FitzGerald (as has been seen before) always took a humorous interest p. ”

“ I shall miss my Hobby, which is no doubt the last I shall ride in this world: but I shall also get eased of some Anxiety about the lives of a Crew for which I now feel responsible. . . .”
On January 20th FitzGerald wrote another letter to Laurence on the same subject.
“. . . I should certainly like a large Oil-sketch like Thackeray’s, done in your most hasty, and worst, style, to hang up with Thackeray and Tennyson, with whom he shares a certain Grandeur of Soul and Body. As you guess, the colouring is (when the Man is all well) the finest Saxon type: with that complexion which Montaigne p. ”

“ It happened that when the Fletchers were at Harwich in search of the stolen punt, Edward FitzGerald had come down the p. 34river, and Newson made his two Lowestoft friends known to his master.
There can be no doubt that at that time, when he was twenty-seven years of age, Posh was an exceptionally comely and stalwart man. And he was, doubtless, possessed of the dry humour and the spirit of simple jollity which make his race such charming companions for a time. At all events his personality magnetised the poet, then a man of fifty-six, already a trifle weary of the inanities of life. ”

“ That fine old East Anglian spirit of independence (which is so generally admirable) was in this particular instance sheer brutal ingratitude when shown by Posh to FitzGerald. No one has a greater admiration than I for this magnificent claim of a Man to be Man’s equal. It kept the race of Norfolk and Suffolk longshoremen worthy of their traditions until the cockney visitors, with their tips and their hunger for longshore lies, ruined the nature of many of our beach folk. ”

“ My dear Posh,
“As we hear nothing of you, we suppose that you have yet caught nothing worth putting in for. And, as I may be here only a Day longer, I write again to you: though I do not know if I have anything to say which needs writing again for. In my former letter, directed to you as this letter will be, I desired you to get a Life Buoy as soon as you could. That is for the Good of your People, as well as of yourself. ”

“ And I know that there is no Disease in the World which makes a young Man old sooner than Stone: No Disease that wears him more. You should take plenty of Tea; some Gin and Water every night; and no Ale, or Beer ”

“ Since Posh’s letter-writing powers received praise from one so qualified to bestow it, there must have been a falling off from want of practice, or from some other cause, for the old man is readier with his cod lines than with his pen by a very great deal, and it is difficult to believe that he ever wielded the pen of a ready writer. But perhaps FitzGerald was so fascinated by the qualities which did exist in his protégé that he saw his friend through the medium of a glamour which set up, as it were, a mirage of things that were not. ”

“ Even though the hero be no hero to his valet, the valet is fully aware of his master’s fame; indeed, the man will be so inconsistent as to pride himself, and take pleasure in, those qualities of his master, the existence of which he would be the first to deny. ”

“ One thing is certain: the person who took advantage of Posh’s ignorance will not be able to publish his ill-gotten gains in England so long as any copyright exists in the letters. For no letter of FitzGerald’s can be published without the consent of Dr. Aldis Wright, and he is not the man to permit capital to be made out of sharp practice with his consent. I have heard rumours of certain letters to Posh being published in America, with a photograph of Posh and Posh’s “shud.” ”

“ I declare that it makes me feel ashamed very much to play the judge on one who stands immeasurably above me in the scale, whose faults are better than so many virtues. Was not this very outbreak that of a great genial Boy among his old Fellows? ”

“ From first to last it seems that FitzGerald, the cultured gentleman, the scholar, the poet p. 164of perfect language and profound philosophy, regarded Posh as almost more than man—certainly as more than average man—and there can be no greater token of the sweet simplicity of the scholar. ”

“ In FitzGerald’s time if the herring were expected to swim deep the nets were sunk below the cables or warps which strung them together, and if they were thought to be swimming high they were buoyed above the warps, the system of fishing being called “sunk” in the former case and “swum” in the latter. Now all nets are “swum,” that is to say, all are above the warps and are buoyed on the surface. ”

“ I was glad to see that Posh no longer numbered me among “that breed.” But I was no longer surprised at the difficulty I had experienced in getting to close quarters with the man. From that time on he was the plain-speaking, independent, humorous, rough man that he is naturally. He has his faults. FitzGerald indicates one in several of his letters. He is inclined to that East Anglian characteristic akin to Boer “slimness,” and it is easy enough to understand that the breach between him and his “guv’nor” was inevitable. ”

“ Aldis Wright, whose courtesy and kindliness, the courtesy and kindliness from a veteran to a tyro which is so encouraging to the tyro, have been beyond any expression of thanks which I can phrase. I hope that the letters and notes may help to make a side of FitzGerald, the simple human manly side, better known, and to enable my readers to judge his memory from the point of view of those old shrimpers by the new basin as a “good gennleman,” as a noble-hearted, courageous man, as well as the more artificial scholar who quotes Attic scholiasts in a playful way as though they were school classics. ”

“ I only mean that a man ought to be able to point out at once, to himself or to others, all the items of an Account; to do which, you know, gave you great Trouble—You must not be too proud to learn a little of some one used to such business: as Mr. Spalding, for instance.
“If you think the Oil and Cutch are as good, and as cheap, at Lowestoft as I can get them here, why not get them at once at Lowestoft? About that green Paint for the Lugger’s bottom:—Mr. Silver got some so very good for Pasifull’s Smack last year that I think it might be worth while to get some, if we could, from his Merchant. ”

“ But the lecture which FitzGerald mentions so casually was surely one of the most delicately written warnings ever penned. The sterling kindness of the writer is as transparent in it as is his tenderness to an inferior’s feelings. No one but a very paragon of a gentleman would have taken the trouble to write so wisely, so kindly, so tenderly, and so earnestly. The appeal must surely have p. 54moved Posh, for the pathos of the reference to his patron’s loneliness could not but have its effect.
But to touch on the sacred “bare” of a Lowestoft fisherman is always dangerous. ”

“ I hereby desire my Heirs executors and Assigns not to call in the Principal of any Mortgage by which Joseph Fletcher the younger of Lowestoft stands indebted to me; provided he duly pays the Interest thereon; does his best to pay off the Principal; and does his best also to keep up the value of the Property so mortgaged until he pays it off. ”

“ Posh drove in here the day before to tan his nets: could not help making one with some old friends in a Boat-race on the Monday, and getting very fuddled with them on the Suffolk Green (where I was) at night. After all the pains I have taken, and all the real anxiety I have had. ”