Letters to the Editor
LORD MONTAGU OF BEAULIEU
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sue,—!t seems impossible to realize that John Montagu has passed on. If ever a man was full of joie de vivre it was he. I suppose few men have been mourned by such a large circle of friends. They were to be found in all walks of life, and John had a friendly word for all of them.
I first met him twenty-five years ago, when he was serving as Parliamentary correspondent for the Daily Mail—that was before he succeeded his father in the title. Shortly before midnight he used to come straight from Westminster with his copy into the dingy little office of the night news editor overlooking the court-yard, where the newspaper vans useJ to load up, at Carmelite House. Every member of the somewhat jaded night staff, down to the tape-room boy, who ran messages for us, used to feel cheered up when Mon- tagu popped his head into the editorial sanctum with a word of greeting for all of us. He used to give us a vivid description of the night's events at the House, and the dullest debate sounded interesting when he described it.
His interests were extraordinarily varied in those days, motoring, farming, sport, journalism, railways, shipping—in fact it was hard to find a subject on which John was not an 'authority. I remember Lord Northcliffe used to say that "if only John Montagu had been taught to concentrate when -oung he would have been one of the most successful men of his generation."
The years passed and I saw little of him for some time, and hen a journey across the Atlantic, on the ' Mauretania ' just fore the War, threw us together, and it was the same Mon- , full of enthusiasms and bubbling over with good corn- eship and interest in life.
In recent years my meetings with him were not as frequent s of old, usually at dinner at the Beefsteak Club. He had hanged but little and seemed to have taken on a new lease of life with his second marriage. Perhaps his enthusiasms were of quite so many, certainly his interest in transport problems mained unchanged and on several occasions he wrote on ds and motoring in the Spectator. He took a deep interest the Spectator's recent history and gleefully told me, one of he last times I met him, that he was sending the paper each
eek to an old lady, who could not afford it, as a Christmas resent.
To see John Montagu at his best was to visit him in the untry, in his beloved New Forest. He was never so happy
s when he had friends staying with him at Beaulieu, to whom e explained his plans for the improvement of his estate or whom he piloted round the neighbourhood.
His voice was unlike that of anyone else, slightly high- pitched, slightly hoarse ; it had a charm of its own. How we shall miss those cheery greetings, that infectious enthusiasm. Perhaps he would have been more successful if he had concen- trated his efforts on fewer things. Personally I should have been sorry if Montagu had been different. What more satis- factory epitaph could anyone have than "he shed happiness and cheerfulness around him "—this John Montagu did most
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