Prime Ministers at Home
Private and Official. By Nourah Waterhouse. (Cape. as.) LADY WATERHOUSE has attempted, with considerable success, experiment in what may be termed autobiography by proxy. M wives have written biographies of their deceased husbands, husbands have written lives of themselves. Here is a case of a turned vales sacra to a husband still (fortunately) very much aui on the basis mainly of material that can only have been supplied himself. Sir Ronald Waterhouse has had a varied and adventur career in many lands, not the least of his achievements, and one w a fundamental bearing on his future, being his insistence on surv after a rifle-wound through the heart in the Boer War ; in hospi he was put in a bed just vacated by his cousin Claud, who, has been shot through the brain, also recovered in the best fa tradition.
After diverse experiences in the Great War, in which he was some time private secretary to Sir Frederick Sykes first Chief of Air Staff, and at the Peace Conference Sir Ronald (he was not, fact, knighted till 1923) became private secretary to Sykes' father- law, Mr. Bonar Law, and a private secretary in Downing St either at No. ii or No. to, he remained till 1928, when this ends. His career and his present wife's had run parallel for so years, for while the one was private secretary to the Duke of Yo now King George VI, the other was private secretary to the Duch and while Lady Waterhouse was secretary to Mrs. Baldwin Ronald was principal private secretary to successive Prime Minis Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. Baldwin among them. H then is all the material for sensational revelations of the secrets • Downing Street. Lady Waterhouse is too sensible and too hone able to descend to that, but she does give a series of instructive highly interesting glimpses of various aspects of life at to, Down • Street and at Chequers. The picture of Bonar Law, the I familiar Prime Minister of the twentieth century, is of parti
• value. Of both him and Mr. MacDonald she speaks with w regard, the sub-acid flavour which marks all the references to Baldwin being the more noticeable in consequence.
The volume contains some interesting pieces of history, am them the statement, buttressed by ample circumstantial detail, the Royal Flying Corps was to have bombed Berlin for the first on November nth, 1918, and that, to the deep dejection of the o commanding the squadron detailed for the purpose, the order countermanded through the medium of Sir Ronald Waterhouse 5.30 in the morning of that historic day. One statement proff . as history.: "Three times Ronald had seen Lord Curzon weep Bonar's shoulder," I take leave to doubt. The tears may have genuine but the posture defies credence at least I should wan see it depicted by a reputable artist. credence; the book as a whol packed with entertaining anecdote. It is a pity it comes no ne
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