People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 20 May 1915, Page 41

People We Hear About

Lord Aberdeen, late Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, is a man of many hobbies and accomplishments (says a Home paper). \ ri . He is a skilled landscape gardener, quite an expert engine-driver— as a ■": boy he took delight in travelling on the engines of the local railway, oftenf acting as fireman—and plays a good round of golf. He is thoroughly democratic, and is idolised by: his tenants in consequence. Two of his younger sons, the late Hon. Archibald Gordon and the Hon. Dudley Gordon, ; who, like their father, loved all things mechanical, were apprenticed to a big shipbuilding" firm, and used to go to work at six every .morning, leading the life?: of : ordinary apprentices, and submitting cheerfully,to all sorts of rules and regulations. ' : ~;>-V'" ~ : " There is scarcely a page in Scottish history in which I the name of Seton does not figure, and students VofShakespeare may recall that the immortal bard described Lord Seton as being* in attendance on Macbeth (says an American exchange). The family is represented to this day in the aristocracy of Sweden, and occupied for three centuries a conspicuous place" in the aristocracy of Milan. It is indeed because of the lustre of the name of Seton in the history of Europe that Archbishop Robert Seton was admitted as a youth to the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, which is restricted exclusively to theological students of noble birth, and he enjoys the distinction of being the only Catholic prelate of American birth who has ever graduated from that institution. The Archbishop is the last of the Setons of Parbroath, in Scotland. His ancestor, came to America a couple of hundred years ago, and married a Miss Curzon, of Baltimore. One of the family—namely, the wife of William Seton, after the death of her husband devoted herself to the foundation in Frederick county, Maryland, of the first house of Sisters of Charity in the United States. She was the grandmother of Archbishop Seton and of his elder brother, the late Col. William Seton, who distinguished himself in the Civil War, especially in the battle of Antietam, where he was badly wounded. " .; ; .v .v; *.'■ An incident in the life of General French in 1893, when he was forty-one years of age, "makes strange reading in view of his brilliant achievements during the South African campaign, and the tremendous responsibility which now rests upon his shoulders in the present great war. In the year mentioned Colonel French (as he then was) was actually retired on half-pay, in spite of his brilliant work-in the Soudan and the skill he had displayed, both in England and in India, in regard to the reorganising of cavalry training. This retirement on half-pay was in accordance with the rules of the army, which allows the middle-aged officer to make way for youth. But, as Mr. Cecil Chisholm remarks in his authentic biography of Sir John French, ' the spectacle of a French dispatched, into obscurity at the ripe age of forty-one has its tragic as well as its comic side.' For., two years Sir John French was actually in despair as: to his career. Then his old chief in India, Sir George' Luck, one of the most brilliant of cavalry trainers, was brought back from India to institute certain reforms, and the first thing he insisted upon was a revised cavalry drill book and it was Colonel French who was ultimately called in from his retirement and installed in the Horse Guards for the purpose of writing it. The result was a masterpiece of lucid explanation and terse precision, and no sooner was the book issued than the authorities were asking who was to carry out the drastic alterations recommended. Many suggestions were made, but it was ultimately decided that no man \ was more? fitted for the task of reorganising the British cavalry than Colonel French, who had written the drill book which -had attracted so .much attention. And thus it came about that General French, the man whom Britain is depending upon at the present time, was finally recalled and ensconced at the War ■; Office .as Assistant Adjutant-General of Cavalry. r l: \; I"