By George!

My great half-uncle George wrote some “thoughts and recollections” that may amuse and interest you.

“I am Irish, and therefore by nature inclined to be against authority, but my parents managed to teach me to be respectful to my elders and betters and, in particular, to have loyal and even loving feelings for the King of England who ruled our country from “across the water”. Although, as I grew up, I learned that King Edward was sometimes referred to as “Tum-Tum” by his friends and that his private life was not spent entirely in pious meditation and prayer, my feelings of loyalty and humble duty never faltered – I remained for ever as loyal and devoted a subject of the Crown of England as ever came from Ireland.

In 1922 I was in London and looking for a job, having just come down from Oxford after a career there about which I suppose it is really best not to say too much. It was, however, better than that of some members of my family – my mother’s father, for example, William Reginald Joseph Fitzherbert Herbert-Huddleston of Clytha, better and perhaps much more suitably known as just Reggie Herbert, who in his youth only agreed, no doubt like many others of his time and kind, to attend that seat of learning provided he was not required to open a book. Later he became Master of the Monmouthshire Foxhounds for 18 consecutive years, lost a quarter of a million, mostly on the turf, and died aged 89, dearly loved by all his friends though heavily in debt to some of them. As one of his admirers observed, he could scarcely have done better had he been well educated. His racing colours, which he frequently wore himself, were, according to his memoirs, “rose and white diamonds”, but they were seldom first past the post.

My poor performance at Oxford, I have always claimed, was mostly due to my public school career. When I was sent to Wellington College in 1913, I was 4′ 10″ tall and the smallest boy in the school. Two years later I was still 4′ 10″ tall and still the smallest boy in the school. This naturally worried both my mother and me – my mother because I was such a shrimp, and me because my diminutive size always made me feel embarrassed, as well as providing a natural target for every bully in the school. But my dear and devoted mother found an osteopath, by the name of Raby, who was both a pioneer and a magician in his art. Within one year of his manipulating my bones I had grown a foot, which was such a shock to my system that I had to leave school prematurely. When a few years later, in 1917, I was of an age to fight for King and Country, my physique was still so frail and weedy that the army doctors graded me C3 because apparently there was nothing lower.

Wellington College has always been a school principally for the sons of soldiers and its motto is Heroum Filii, but my father was not a soldier nor, though the best of men, was he particularly a hero, except that he paid up bravely for my new clothes as I suddenly grew like a beanstalk.

I had hopes of being apprenticed to Knight Frank & Rutley, high ranking auctioneers and brokers of elegant houses who are still, 65 years later, one of the leaders in that field. I was in touch with them and had arranged a preliminary interview.

The reason why I aimed to be an auctioneer or house-agent was because of the love I have always had for fine old houses, both large and small, and for the pretty things they usually contain. Also it seemed to me – I admit perhaps quite wrongly – that selling other people’s property from a comfortable rostrum was as close as one could get to work without tears – which has ever been the true aim of the Irish working man.

But it was not to be. I telephoned Knight Frank & Rutley and excused myself. I knew that my future really lay elsewhere, perhaps in the arts or at least in things to do with them. I could see myself as a distinguished painter or art-historian or perhaps an international dealer in antiques. But in the end my calling turned out to be only on the fringe of these things; I became a professor-designate of the gentle art and discipline of heraldry or, to be more precise, I was appointed a herald at the College of Arms in London.”

Sir George Bellew, KCB, KCVO, KStJ,FSA.