On Memory’s Stage— An Aucklander’s Reverie

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 116, 6 August 1927, Page 24

On Memory’s Stage— An Aucklander’s Reverie

“THAT NASTY OLD ‘IRON DUKE’”—LADY WITH THE LAMP DAN O’CONNELL'S WHITE HAT

VICTORIA’S POKE BONNET—THE BEAUTIFUL EUGENIESQUAT NAPOLEON 111.

(Written -for THE SUN brj

ERIC RAM SEEN)

■ HAT is your name, child ? ” Annie Hamilton, aged 14, and the daughter of Her Majesty’s loyal sergeant of the 58th, gave the little Queen the information she sought. ‘You have pretty hair, child,” said Victoria, as she ran her mittened hand through Annie’s tresses. Her heart almost bursting with joy, the sergeant’s daughter again curtsied and said: “Yes, your Majesty! ” Her ardour was somewhat damped a few minutes later, however, when one of the non-commissioned officers at Chatham barracks demanded to know why she did not bend her right knee to the Queen. Now, Annie Hamilton had not lived with the regiment in Ireland for nothing. And, besides, was not her mother half Irish? “Sir,” she replied, “the right knee I reserve for the Queen of Heaven. To the Queen of England I bend my left knee!” This young daughter of the regiment, needless to say, was a good Catholic. Dreaming in her little bedroom in Clarence Street, Ponsonby, Mrs. Annie Fergusson still recalls this meeting with Victoria. At eighty-seven her

memory is unimpaired, . her sight is good, and until a few weeks ago her faneywork was her pride. “Vicky,” as she familiarly alludes to the Queen, Mrs. Fergusson will tell you, wore a blue poplin gown, a black lace mantle, and a little poke bonnet surmounted by a nodding white feather. On that memorable occasion she was accompanied by the Prince Consort, the Princess Royal (destined to die of a broken heart as the Empress Frederick of Germany), and the Prince of Wales, better known to this generation as Edward VII. Later, when Mrs. Fergusson’s family resided at the Wellington barracks in London she saw Victoria and Albert, driving with the Third Napoleon and his beautiful Eugenie. THE SECOND EMPIRE. Those were halcyon days of the Second Empire. The handsome Spanish adventuress who had refused a less creditable offer from Napoleon 111.-—did she not say that the path to her heart lay through the chapel?— became his wife, and, to the amazement of all Europe, found in Victoria the social sponsor that she so vitally needed. “Yes, yes, the Londoners in those days called ‘Vicky’ and her husband ‘the long and the short of it.’ ’Twas the same with Napoleon and his wife; she was a pretty woman. They used to say that it would have been better if ‘Vicky’ and Napoleon had made a match of it because they were so short, you see.” The old lady smiled.

Eugenie, whose magnificent shoulders she had admired as the Empress drove in State to a Buckingham Palace ball, died a few years ago, a w'eak, helpless woman of over ninety, blind in one eye; all her wealth could not save the sight in the other. Years before, the' ex-Emperor, wracked with disease, died in exile at Chiselhurst, leaving his widow to wander round Europe until death found her half a century later. ’ “A DEAR, SWEET WOMAN.” “Yes, yes, I have seen Florence Nightingale. What a dear, good woman she was, to be sure. It was after the men came back from the Crimea. She came to the barracks at Chatham. Nothing pleased her better than to sit round and talk to the children of the garrison. To be sure, a dear, sweet woman! ” And so the Lady with the Lamp whose indomitable will drew attention to one of our great national weaknesses, despite what Mr Lytton Strachey has to say of her, flits with credit across the stage of memory. * * * “The Duke of Wellington? Of course, I have heard of him. Did I not watch his funeral? I think the State hearse they carried him in is still in London.” Mrs. Fergusson summed up the Iron Duke: “A warrior, mind you, but —a nasty old man! He was no good to a soldier and his wife. It was the wicked old Duke who ordered flogging in the Army, and did he not cut down our rations ? ” Decidedly of no use to a soldier and his wife. Closing her eyes, she recalled a flogging at Chatham barracks. A young man of the Guards it was; and such a nice young man too, mind you. A soldier’s wife, more enterprising than the rest, peeped from a window. She was drummed out of barracks for noting the bloody back of that ‘nice voung man of the Guards.’ ” “Curiosity killed the cat ” triumphantly added Mrs. Fergusson from the depths of her blankets. * * * Then another figure walked on to the stage. He wore a white hat, which he gaily doffed to the cheering Cork crowd. He drove through the streets in “as fine a carriage as ever you did see, sir,” and behind two spanking white horses.

THE PEOPLE’S PATRIOT. It was none other than Dan O’Connell, the People’s Patriot, back from the House of Commons, his honours thick upon him. And Dan, still waving the little white hat, drove by. The carriage and pair trotted away back into the years. Few to-day recall the great" Irish famine of ’47. Ireland has been poor, but never so starved as in that year. Potatoes there were none. Annie Hamilton, then a mere toddler, saw beef and carrots being prepared for the Major’s table—but never the sign of a ’tatie. Those were the days when, weeping, many an Irish lad carried his mother to the workhouse door. “I know, because these tired old eyes saw them! ” Then, in the ’seventies, came the long voyage to New Zealand. “Fergusson,” as the old lady referred to her husband, left the army a coloursergeant after twenty-one years’ service for his Queen. His first and only appointment in Auckland was as a warder at the gaol. Death claimed him soon after his arrival, and Mrs. Fergusson was left a widow with a large family to support. “Yes, I have had my troubles,” she confided softly. The old woman’s eyes closed for a moment. Back came the roguish Irish sparkle: “But, if I had my life over again I would want nothing better than to be the wife of a common private! ”