LORD JELLICOE.

Taranaki Daily News, 6 October 1920, Page 5

LORD JELLICOE.

TfIRIOE ESCAPED DEATH. Mr. A. G. Gardiner, writing of Lord Jellicoe in 1916, saya that "if anyone might claim to have been preserved by an invisible hand for great ends, it is the Admiral, who, perhaps more than any other single man, has the destiny of the world in his keeping to-day," and he goes on to point out that Lord Jellicoe thrice escaped death almost by a miracle.

■\Vhen Admiral Seymour's ill-fated expedition went at the urgent summons of .Sir Claude Mac Donald to relieve Pekin, at the timcof the Boxer riot in 1900, our present "Governor-General as the, Admiral's Plag Captain was acting as his chief of Staff. At the battle of Peitsang he was so dangerously wounded that the doctor of the flagship despaired of hw life, and while in this condition he sent for a fellow officer and asked- to be told the true position. "Foolishly," sayß this officer, "I tried to make the best of things and told him there was no doubt at all of our ability to cut our way back to Tientsin or even to the coast, supposing the foreign settlemeut to have fallen. I do not think I shall ever forget the contemptuous flash of the eyes he turned on me or his impatient remark, "Tell me the truth; don't lie!' "

Earlier in his life (in 1886), when Lord Jellicoe commanded a gig manned by volunteers that went to the rescue of the crew of a steamer stranded on a sandbank, off Gibralter, the gig capsized in the heavy seas, and he was washed ashore.

Again in 1893, on the day when Admiral Sir George Tyron sent his flagship Victoria to its doom in the Mediterranean, Lord Jellicoe was the commander of the flagship. Unfortunaely, he was ill in bed, suffering from fever, and was k down, below while Captain Bourfce was doing his utmost to counter the Admiral's fatal order, otherwise, had he been present to back up the Captain's objections, the ■ calamity might, perhaps, have been avoided. On that occasion, says Admiral Sir 0. Hupps Hornby, in describing the disaster in the Fortnightly Review, Jellicoe was called to get up before .the ship sank, but instead of going up to save himself he went below to hurry np anyone who might be there. When the ship foundered he came to the surface very much exhausted, but with the help of a midshipman, who supported him in the water, he eventually got on board another vessel. 'lt is doubtful," says the writer already referred to, "whether any life more necessary, not to this country only, but to the world, was ever snatched from the jaws of death. How necessary we only fully understood 21 years later, in the tremendous hour when the nation realj ised that the Fleet alone stood between it and annihilation." The characterißI tics of Lord Jellicoe are said to be "a [passion for the naked truth," combined with "rare intellectual and mental gifts, a rapid and adaptable type of mind that is at home in all parts, that is at once comprehensive and minute, happy in thought and in action, at the desk or on the quarter-deck." Mr. Gardiner says of him that his is a nfind "wedded to no antiquated assumption, quick to seize the meaning of every fact and to correlate it with a strategic and tactical requirement—in short, a mind mobile, modern, unprejudiced, which faces the unknown with the keenest vision, the most instructive judgment, and the readiest accessibility to ideas."