T. P. O’CONNOR

Hokitika Guardian, 17 May 1929, Page 3

T. P. O’CONNOR

TALES OF PARLIAMENT. HTS ROOK OF MEMOIRS. The first pages of Mr T. P. O’Connor’s hook of memoirs suggest an autobiography. He starts his narrative 1 with his arrival in London in 1873 as : a journalist, with two sisters and a| brother to support, first on a salary of two pounds a week and then for seven vear without regular employment. 1 By the end of that period he was already known as a political orator to his countrymen in London. I spoke, I think, in nearly every taproom in the East End, especially where the landlord was an Irishman. I remember a strange experience when I found myself announced as a speaker ■it a meeting in a public-house in Harrow Alley, which was off Petticoat-lano 1 found the landlord—a very good-hum oured Irishman—surprised that 1 had" turned up; he confessed that his annoucement of my presence was just a little trade device. In compensation he put before my companion and myself a good glass of whiskey, and when he had brought me to a genial state of mind he suddenly announced that the meeting was awaiting me. I went into the next room to find one of the strangest gatherings I 'have ever addressed. It consisted entirely of East End dews, and there was not even a single Irish face in the audience LETTING THE HOUSE KNOW. After Mr O’Connor’s election to Parliament in 1880 the strain oi autobiography rapidly disappears, and lor a time it looks as if the I ook :s going to develop into a history of the Irish.parliamentary party. There are some admirable sketches of House ol Commons figures, Irish and English—lsaac Unit, Randolph Churchill, (Stafford Northcote, Charles Rradlaugh, and Gladstone, Gladstone was in the minority when the House refused to admit Rradlaugh without taking the oath,- and “This led to a curious piece of acting ivy Mr Gladstone, which showed his marvellous power of finding the exact and the dramatic means to meet a situation in the House of Commons. On the day alter the defeat and when the struggle was to he renewed. AllGladstone took his place, as usual, on the Treasury Bench, but two or three things were at once remarked by the House, always qttick to seize the significance of things.

“First, he did not occupy his usual

seat as Leader of the House, which is by immemorial custom immediately opposite one of the two boxes that stand on the table in front of the Speaker; and even more picturesquely did Mr Gladstone signify his position. He came down to the House in a frockcoat, not of the usual black, hut of the ultra-grev, amounting almost to cream colour. If I remember rightly, he also wore a whitish-grey tall hat; when summer c-amc. Mr Gladstone was the most summery in dress of all the men in the House; he might, indeed, pass for an elderly dandy. It was also remarked' that he took his seat holding his walking-stick in his hands and with his gloves on. “ All this was intended to proclaim i....t, as he represented not the majority hut the minority of the House, his responsibility for its future action with regard to Mr Rradlaugh devolved not on him but on Sir Stafford Northcote.” Rut the real nature of the hook only becomes apparent from the time when Charles Stewart L’arnell begins to take the centre of the stage. Mr O’Connor then settles down into what is almost a. direct biography of the Irish leader.

Parnell, it appears, really preferred the type of debate that his party imposed on the House of Commons. 1 “ With no special powers of speech, except in moments of great passion and great emergency, Parnell was usually a i dreary and a costive speaker. Yet you could see him there, standing up in the empty House, talking hour after hour quite indifferent to the fact that there was nobody listening and nobody to listen; and the tall, thin figure, the impassive fact, the inscrutable eyes | gave to this spectacle an almost uncanny look. An observation he made to me about the absence of any hearers I while lie droned out his dreary speeches to the empty benches was very charac- | teristic of the man. He said he rather liked an empty House: it gave him more time to think.” I The whole story of Parnell’s extraor- . dinnry career is fully told; but Mr O’Connor devotes himself especially to his protagonist’s wonderful triumph at the inquiry into the Pigott forgeries, | immediately followed by his no less dramatic fall, owing to the O’Shea ! divorce. 1