The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1879-02-08 00:00:00

DEATH OF COLONEL HOME.

In speaking of the death of Colonel Home, at the early age
of 41, the Pall Mall Gazette gives the following brief :sketch
of his brilliant career :
-

Not many years ago the King of Prussia announced
to his people that he had lost in the person of Dr.
Abeken one of those to whom he was most indebted
for the success which had crowned all the efforts of the '
little kingdom which developed into the German
Empire. Startling as the announcement was to a
people who knew the names of Von Moltke and of Bis-
marck, and for whom Abeken was only a shadow in the
background, the habit-is of an autocratically governed
people tended to make them ready to accept as a
matter of course the great honour which was thus
suddenly bestowed on the memory of an almost un-
known man. We fear that we can hardly hope so com-
pletely to carry with us national feeling when we say
that an almost similar event to the death of Abekan has
just occurred among TM A man died early on Thursday
morning [in last week], of whom it may truly be said
that though his services and his name were barely
known to the public at alt, yet during the last few
years those services have been of almost the first rank
in political or military life.
Colonel Home was the son of a man of considerable
ability who, after some years of service in the army,
settled down as a land agent in lrelaed. The son was
early cast on his own resources, and, at the time when
commissions in the Engineers were thrown open to
public competition during the Crimean war, won his
place in the corps. He at a very young age passed
brilliantly through the Staff College, being obliged
all the time to pay his way by literary efforts which
not a little interfered with his other work. He
achieved his first marked success in a little anonymous
pamphlet on " Army Administration," which attracted
no inconsiderable notice at the time by its trenchant
exposure of then existing abuses. By the time that "The
Battle of Dorkieg" appeared his reputation was so
well established that for a long time before the real
authorship of that brilliant jeu d'esprit was known
Colonel Home was often said to have been the writer,
on the simple ground of competence. Not long af Le:-
wards he was on the staff o! one of the bodies of troops
engaged in the autumn maeceuvres, and there fell
under the notice of Sir Charles Ellice, the present
Adjutant-General of the army, who from that moment
trusted him entirely, and at a later period
became the cause of his employment in much
more important concerns. His selection by Sir
Garnet Wolseley for the all.important position of
commsnciing engineer during the Ashantee war gave
him the first chance of showing publicly his gr6at
practical ability. On his return from that expedition
he was engaged in succession on all the important im-
provements which were being introduced into the
organization of our army. No one would have acknow-
ledged more freely than himself the defects in the
scheme for the mobilization of the army of which he
was the active worker, but the defects were inherent
in conditions over which he had no control. Of other
yet more important schemes of army improvement
and effective national defence of which he was the
moving spirit, circumstances hardly yet permit
report. But the original and admirable regulations for
the organization of the communications of our army
in the field were in all the main outlines his work. In
short, it will be found that the more any man has the
opportunity of knowing the history of the many im-
provements which have of late years been introduced
into our army the larger will be his estimate of
Colonel Home's share in them. More important still
were the services which Colonel Home rendered
during the late European crises. Under the Foreign
Office and in the actual stress of affairs, the clear
knowledge of all the facts of the case which Colonel
Home had obtained were of the largest service.
Twice he was entrusted with the charge of im-
portant missions to Turkey. On the second ecca-
!don he was employed as the chief English Commis-
sioner for the Roumanian boundary. At Constanti-
nople he was seized with typhoid fever, and came home
to die. He was just forty-one years of age with every
prospect before him of a brilliant career; age,
if he was
little known to the world his merits had been well
ascertained, and he was marked for use wherever or
whenever great capacity was demanded. Life had
been for him one long hard battle, in which he had
exchanged many hard knocks. The fruit of all his
labours was just within his reach when a frame already
over-exhausted by excessive and over-exciting brain
work succumbed to the fatal fever.

In the presence of a large gathering of pereone, both
civil and military, the remains of the late Colonel
Home, C. 8., were interred in the cemetery at
Brorapton on Monday,