# Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History

MEMOIRS OF TRAVEL, SPORT, AND NATURAL HISTORY
Frontispiece. [Photo. Elliott and Fry.
THE AUTHOR AT HOME.
MEMOIRS OF TRAVEL, SPORT, AND NATURAL HISTORY
by the late
HENRY JOHN ELWES, F.R.S.
Sometime President of the British Ornithological Union , the Entomological Society and the Royal English Arboricultural Society, and author (with Professor A. Henry) of "The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland"
Edited by Edward G. Hawke, M.A., F.R.G.S.
With an Introduction by
The Right Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bt., F.R.S., LL.D., D.C.L.
And a Chapter on Gardening by
E.A. Bowles
LONDON
ERNEST BENN LIMITED
Bouverie House, Fleet Street, E.C. 4
1930
First Published in
1930
and
Printed
in
Great Britain
INTRODUCTION
"When one preserves one's senses and faculties and suffers no pain, old age would be no grievance, but for one—yet oh! that is a heavy calamity—the surviving one's friends."—Horace Walpole to Horace Mann.
Most of the schoolfellows whom I left at Eton sixty-eight years ago, numbering between eight and nine hundred, must have passed to their rest by this time—many of them having risen to distinction in science or literature, in arms or civil life, in politics or commerce. Among them was Henry John Elwes, whose life-work was at once so varied and so thorough as to win a distinction well-nigh peculiar to himself. Born in that section of society which its detractors denounce as "the idle rich," from middle life onward an opulent landowner, he fulfilled Francis Bacon's ideal of a life of "leisure without loitering," travelling far, frequently and adventurously, never without a definite purpose.
My acquaintance with Elwes at Eton was slight. We were in the same school division, but were boarded in different houses. He figures in memory of those far-off days as a handsome, dark-eyed boy, holding somewhat aloof from his schoolfellows and showing no effective interest in games. I have learnt since that he spent much of his play hours rambling by the riverside and in country lanes watching birds. Ornithology was certainly his first love, the earliest of a long series of contributions to the literature of that branch of science being a paper in the Ibis in 1869 on the wildfowl of the Outer Hebrides. Elwes and I had each been entered for a commission in the Scots Fusilier Guards (now the Scots Guards), but whereas he passed the qualifying examination successfully, I failed ingloriously to do so, and many years passed before we met again. Five years' service with the colours did nothing to abate or divert his keen interest in natural history, and in 1870, perusal of Hooker's fascinating Himalayan Journals having fired him with a desire to visit India, Elwes carried it into effect with characteristic promptitude. Not only so, but having traversed Sikkim in Hooker's footsteps to the frontier of forbidden Tibet, on being turned back from the Donkia Pass by the Tibetan frontier guard, he slipped aside to another pass, through which he penetrated as far as the Cholamo Lake, returning thence to Sikkim from the north by the same pass from which he had been turned back on attempting it from the south.
It was during this expedition that Elwes first took serious note of trees and herbs. To his early passion for birds he had already added the study and collection of Lepidoptera, and his fellow-traveller on this occasion was ​W.T. Blanford, an accomplished naturalist, but hitherto he had given no more than casual attention to the vegetable kingdom- Howbeit it was not possible that one so susceptible of beauty in nature should remain indifferent to the marvels of the Sino-Himalayan flora; wherefore, little as Elwes may have been conscious of it at the time, the impressions received during this year of travel proved the source of his valuable services to botany and horticulture in years to come. Not until after his marriage in 1871, when he took up house at Miserden, some five miles from his father's mansion of Colesborne, did he give any attention to the cultivation of a garden. Even then he had not the means for employing a trained gardener; it was an old Quaker in his neighbourhood who by precept and example aroused his interest in the collection and care of plants.
Of Elwes's travels in many lands, collecting butterflies, and plants, shooting big game and paying close attention to other forms of life, especially birds, much information will be found in the following pages, and I will only refer to the last of these expeditions as affording a typical instance of his extraordinary vitality and energy. Having received in 1913 a special invitation to visit Nepal, a realm which had long been almost hermetically sealed against Europeans, he was preparing for a start when he became disabled by a painful disorder, rendering a serious operation necessary. After that was over, I visited him in a nursing home, and expressed a hope that all was going well. "Oh, well enough, well enough," quoth he; "but you see they had to cut through three or four inches of fat to get at the trouble, and that makes recovery slow."
Slow! That was in the second week of December, and he sailed for India in January. Those who listened to his lecture before the Royal Society of Arts in February, 1915, giving account of his experience in Nepal, well understood that he had not spared himself as a convalescent. Elwes was a ready linguist and had acquired enough fluency in Hindustani to converse with his bearers, who became devoted to him.
The enterprise and diligence of collectors during the last forty years have resulted in the introduction to this country of a greater number and variety of hardy exotics than in any similar space of time. In no genus have so many new species been discovered, described, and cultivated as in that of Rhododendron. Had Colesborne been situated on the greensand or in some sheltered dale of the west, one may imagine the enthusiasm with which Elwes would have undertaken their cultivation; but his lines were cast on a Cotswold upland, where a cold, cretaceous soil forbids success with that fascinating family of plants, and he knew better than to attempt it. Perhaps horticultural science lost nothing from the limitations imposed on the cultivator by oölitic rock, which caused him to concentrate attention on plants agreeing with an alkaline soil. The scope of his contributions ​to botany and horticulture may be roughly gauged by the fact that no private garden has supplied so many subjects for plates and description in the Botanical Magazine as that of Colesborne. It gratified Elwes to learn, shortly before his death, that the number of species contributed by him for illustration in that venerable periodical amounted to one hundred.
It will be long before the presence of Elwes at the fortnightly meetings of the Council of the R.H.S. will cease to be remembered. There and in all similar gatherings he was ever conspicuous, both by reason of his massive frame and handsome, dark-bearded countenance, which ensured for him in any company
"Digito monstrari, et dicier hic est,"
and by his deep, resounding voice which sometimes tended to dominate discussion. That voice gave occasion for an amusing incident when, several years ago, the English Arboricultural Society visited the woods of Perthshire under invitation from the Scottish Arboricultural Society. Elwes, as President of the English Society, was a prominent figure in the party, commenting vigorously upon what he saw. In course of the second day's peregrination, one Scottish forester, indicating Elwes to a companion, was overheard asking: "I say, is that a man or a gramophone?"
Elwes spoke from fullness of knowledge and ripe experience. If at times his eager emphasis betrayed impatience with opinions expressed by others, none was more grateful than he for sound information from persons qualified to give it—none readier to own up when he was in the wrong. Nothing brings absent or departed friends more surely to mind than plants received as their gift. Many such gifts did I receive from Elwes, the latest of them being Cupressus formosensis, which is mentioned in Elwes and Henry's great work on trees in 1910 with the remark, "No seeds of this remarkable species have as yet reached Europe" (Vol. V., p. 1149).
Howbeit, seed having been received from Formosa shortly after that date, Elwes sent me a seedling which is now a shapely plant ten feet high. I never pass it without kindly remembrance of the donor.
We have parted with a warm-hearted, open-handed friend, and horticulture and sylviculture have lost a foremost pioneer and ready craftsman in Henry John Elwes, of whom it may justly be said:
Strenuus vixit: fortis obiit.
HERBERT MAXWELL.
CONTENTS
chapter
APPENDICES
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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