An odd little ill-printed and much inisprinte,d booklet (The Mystery
of Victor Grayson, Pendulum Publications, 2s.), revives memories of a sensational by-election in I9o7 and a strange, turbulent, revolutionary figure who flitted across the stage of the House of Commons till 191o, when the man who had topped the poll in Colne Valley three years earlier found himself at the bottom. All that is forgotten now, but in 1907 it looked as if Colne Valley might be a portent, and the scenes when Grayson was more than once suspended from the service of the House for deliberate breaches of its rules of order prepared no one for his coming defeat and swift eclipse—an eclipse which ended in the still unexplained mystery of his complete disappearance. He went to Australia and New Zealand and fought in a New Zealand regiment in the last war. He married, and lost his wife in child-birth. He took to drink, and in 1920 he vanished, leaving a boy behind at a London hotel. He must almost certainly be dead, but no one knows whether he is or not. A man who said he was the rebel Socialist turned up at a Labour meeting at Maidstone in 1924, but it was probably not he at all.
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