Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

My father was headmaster of Wellington College, where and when I was born, but of him there, in spite of his extraordinarily forcible personality, I have no clear memory, though...

In 1873 my father was appointed Chancellor of Lincoln, and the move there was made in the summer of that year, during July and August. We four younger children, Nellie, Maggie,...

Those three and a half years at Lincoln appear to have lasted for decades, so eventful was the unfolding of the world, and all the years which have passed since then, with their...

One morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. It came in the shape of two letters, one from the Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfi...

After Easter, 1878, I was sent to a private school presided over by Mr. Ottiwell Waterfield, at Temple Grove, East Sheen, and remained there three years. The house and grounds v...

After that first brilliant year at school, when I got so many prizes without taking any trouble, there ensued two extremely lean years, during which I took just as much trouble...

My father took me in person to Marlborough. I did not much relish that, since I thought, with private school ideas still hanging about me, that it would be a handicap to be know...

While I was still in my second year at Marlborough a thoroughly exciting and delightful thing happened at home, for my father was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, and up troo...

The dreadful “season of snows and sins” was already beginning to approach again: in other words more scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began to pile their fat clo...

The whole family went that summer holiday to the Lakes, where my father had taken the Rectory of Easedale, and in that not very commodious house five children, two parents and B...

Even away from Cambridge, which in those undergraduate years was necessarily the hot hub of the universe, life remained as highly coloured as at the time when Lambeth and Adding...

At Cambridge the study of archæology had forcibly taken possession of me by right of love, and at last I was working at that which it was my business to be occupied in, with dev...

A curious incident marked that Algerian tour. Before going, my father told Queen Victoria of his intention, and she had at first been against his travelling so far afield, putti...

So there was Athens again, with its bugles and its Royal Babies, and its eternal Acropolis, which custom never staled. Maggie jumped into the Hellenic attitude at once, adoring...