A Sporting and Dramatic Career

Abstract

When I came to settle in London after leaving Conway² I carried with me a letter of introduction to W. S. Gilbert from a Captain Charles Hunter who lived much at Llandudno, and had been a brother officer of Gilbert’s in the Aberdeenshire Highlanders. I never presented it, having made the dramatist’s acquaintance without. I do not know what truth, if any, there was in a story told about the future author of H.M.S. Pinafore when he was in the Militia. The anecdote relates that his enthusiastic Colonel was anxious to have a grand field-day when the regiment was out for its annual training. Gilbert with a certain number of men was to march out at daybreak and take up a position somewhere on one of the distant hills. He was to have a longish start, and then the Colonel with the remainder of his men was to seek him out and attack. The morning was more than ‘soft’ — even Scotsmen with their euphemisms for rain could not deny that there was a drenching and persistent downpour — but for hours the conscientious Colonel crawled through the heather, ascended steep eminences, waded through brooks, vainly seeking the foe, and finally returned to barracks with his object unaccomplished. The explanation was that Gilbert, having got thoroughly wet through, decided that it was not the sort of day to carry out such enterprises and led his gallant troops home, having been seated comfortably by the fire whilst his superior officer was looking everywhere else for him.

Alfred E. T. Watson edited and contributed to the Badminton Library and served as a sectional editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The range of his sporting interests may be identified by the titles of his numerous books: Sketches in the Hunting Field, Racecourse and Covert Side, Racing and ‘Chasing’, The Racing World and Its Inhabitants, and King Edward VII as a Sportsman.