A SHOWMAN'S JUBILEE.*
Ma. PLOWMAN'S title is innocently misleading. He was no rival to Barnum or Buffalo Bill, nor did he pass from Fair to Fair for fifty years, accumulating scanty revenue• but a 'wealth Of human experience. Mr. Plowman has done smoothing with his life much more "respectable," but, we must confess, with rather less promise of exhilaration, from the point of view of the reader of his memoirs. He is the doyen of County Society officers ; the Secretary and Editor of the Bath and West and Southern Counties Society, the oldest and at the same time one of the most liberal-minded of such organizations. Mr. Plowman must have been keenly interested in bestial, as they say in Scotland; but evidently he believed that the proper study of mankind is man. Many notable farmers pass through his pages, and many notable men who were only incidentally tillers of the soil, and that by proxy.
Mr. Plowman's duties brought him occasionally into touch with the great ones of the earth, and he could no doubt draw up a list of " the nicest Royalties I have met," arranged in order of merit. He writes about them with a courtiership which is clearly quite candid. He is a little surprised,. as well as grati- fied, that a King or Prince should tell him to keep his hat on in a showyard, to avoid sunstroke : and when a Princess repeats this courtesy on the same day Mr. Plowman's naive pleasure bubbles over.
At a General Election, apparently in the early " eighties," Mr. Plowman was disturbed one day in his duties as editor of the Oxford Journal by Lord Randolph Churchill, who came to sound him as to his chances, and about cross-currents. Lord Randolph profited by Mr. Plowman's local knowledge, and scraped in by sixty votes. Among the eminent landowners cited are Lord Redesdale and "Honest Lord Althorp "—who writes precise instructions to his agent, for the road transit of two cows, in 1819, from Yarm in Yorkshire to Leamington, " in sixteen days, at nine miles a day, with one or two days' rest." At a municipal banquet in Cardiff Lord Tredegar made a witty one-word speech, in reply to the toast of the. House of Lords. He was down on the list to speak twice : so, his first oration, after loud cheers and an expectant silence, was merely " Resurgam "—a model of after-dinner oratory.
Mr. Plowman was in 1910 Mayor of Bath as well as Secretary to the Show Society. As Secretary he had to write to himself es Mayor and invite himself to the Show. Then as Mayor he had publicly to read his own invitation to himself, and to ask the City Corporation if he might accept it. This permission being granted, the Mayor had to write a letter of thanks to himself as Secretary to the Show, and then as Secretary to read that letter to his Society. On the great day the Mayor had to apologize for the temporary absence of the Secretary to the Show, which absence was due " not to any lack of cordiality but to physical reasons." Finally, the President of the Show rounded off the joke by offering to take the Mayor round the Show (which the Mayor as Secretary had organized), and to indicate to him its leading features, and' explain the origin and altos of his own
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