Peers as Toilers.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 9 August 1910, Page 4

Peers as Toilers.

MEN OF MANY PARTS

A peer who has brought to the House of Lords the knowledge of what it is to have to toil fk>T daily bread is Lord Lyveden. He is well known in the United States as the organiser of visits of municipal authorities and of members of Parliament to America for the purpose of instruction and of the promotion of a better understanding between the two great knglish-speaking Powers. Lord Lyvedon as Courtnny Vei'non, having failed to .pass his examination for a commission in the Army enlisted in the Royal Artillery, then be came an actor in the Bancroft Haymnrket comply, migrated to Xew York, where, losing his money, he became in turn, waiter in a .Bowery restaurant, a market gardener in Wilmington, Det., a 'hackmaji in New York and in Charlotte, N.C., the part-ower of a small fishing boat at Charlesotn, which foundered on the night of the earthfjnnke in 1880. A CABTN STEWARD on the American ocean liner City ot Paris, purser on some of the lake steamers, impresario of a company touring the l T nited States, and caterer to a navigation company °n its vessels running between Hamburg and Harwich. He is a tall, breezy man, with plenty of conversation of an amusing kind, especially when be is relating his experiences, with considerable wit, as is fitting in the chief of the family which produced that wit rt[)d raconteur, Sidney .Smith, canon of St. Paul's CathedThe present patronymic of the family is Vern«n. but it was formerly Smith. About sixty years ago the first Lord Lyveden, brother of Sidney Smith, obtained permission from the Crown to change his name from Smith to Yernon "U tho strength of the fact that his mother had been a member of the Vemoii family.

Lord Egmont. too. had a varied carrer before he succeeded to the earldom and to the historic Cowdray estates in Sussex, which he sold a year ago for a large sum to Si) , Weetman Pearson, a millionaire contractor from America. Born in New Zealand, Lord Egmont received his education on the train inK-sh'ip Worcester on the Thames, but failing to graduate as mate in the merchant marine, lie shipped as a wjiilor

BEFORE THE MAST. Tiring of the sen. lie joined the London Fire lirigade as a fireman, married an American S>rl, a Miss Kate Howell of South' Carolina, who was earning her living as a barmaid at the Sbnne square station on the underground railroad, and then got employmet as janitor of the Chelsea To\v u Hall. He lost his berth there through having been led by his pronounced Tory sympathies to turn the hose upon the members of a Radical political meeting being held in the hall. Then ho worked as n labourer in a salt mine in Cheshire and was a sergeant of the Natal Police when the death of a remote cousin sent him home to England as eighth Earl of Egmont and as chief of the historic house of Percivnl, which figures ■so largely i n the annals of England, one of its best-Known members, Sydney Percival, having beeu murdered i n the lobby of the House of Commons nearly a hundred years ago while holding the office of Prime Minister.

Lord Hardwicke, during the bitter controversy between the House of Lords and the House of Commons had occasion last winter to roveal that he had spent ten years in mining <in the United States before succeedinfg to the earldom, and that during three of those years ho mil worked

AS A MLNER in a gold mine in Montana, wheie lie was known as "Charlie" and as "Number 126" to the Ho has for the last two ye°,n lin-n O]|e of the pioneers of aerial ti(>]), and tlie news of ' h death last year and of his suvpv sion to the family hotvours a n d to a seat in the House of IYkls (Mistook .him while he was at Pi. «it!i the Wright brothers, taking [vt i>) thoir flying machine cxpj'• ■pj:t,.