2110-5-4-13

[in pencil: Acknow.]

Personal

Glenrothay York Rd Cheam

30th August 1929

Dear Mr Buchan

I have just finished reading, for the first time, your memoir of Lord Minto (it is one of the privileges of retirement from the Civil Service that one has an opportunity of reviewing events which one had seen from a particular angle, from another, quite different, point of view). You will not expect me, as an Ex-Ass^t Private Sec^ry to Lord Morley, to endorse all you say of the relations between my S[ecretary] of S[tate] & your Viceroy, but as one who took his share in trying to smooth down my old Chief's ruffled plumage - "tantrums" would hardly be too strong a word - I must admit the general truth of your estimate; and I cannot refrain from writing to tell you how sincere is my admiration for your presentment of Lord Minto's character and achievements. To a private tutor with a strong distaste for anything approaching "preachment", pages such as those with which you end your book are as gold and silver; and I hope you will not think it an unwarrantable /presumption

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presumption if I write & tell you so.

You may remember commending a school story of mine to Messrs Nelson's Readers at Edinburgh. They did not see their way to accepting the book for publication and I am not surprised, for school stories are all too plentiful on this side of the Atlantic. But I am not without hopes that my tale will find a home elsewhere. (In any case it [at least the operative part of of it] has already been in private circulation for a considerable time, & has not been without result).

Meanwhile, as a final contribution to my I.O. work, I am engaged on a collection of Documents illustrative of the progress & record of the British Administration in India since the transfer from the Company to the Crown. If published, this will - I hope - serve as a reference book, giving chapter and verse for the view which, as your Memoir shows, Lord Minto and Lord Morley held in common, that the British can survey their work in India "with clear gaze & good conscience".

When we met in the train going up to Oxford in the early summer I was not aware that as I took my M.A. degree I should find graduating as B.A. the son of "Nelson, of Univ." It was a curious coincidence, which seemed to afford Farquharson /uncommon

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uncommon satisfaction. I daresay he realised (though, if so, it must have been on general principles) the attitude of dumbly- reverential hero-worship which a "Heron Exhibitioner" of the 'Nineties from a provincial Grammar School was prone to assume towards men like Nelson - an attitude that was brought vividly to mind by the sight of a son so like his Father.

I am reminded of this by your tribute to Lord Minto's son Esmond who fell at Ypres. My own campaigning - entirely undistinguished - all took place round about Meteren, Hazebrouck, & Armentières, & the early part of it - in the spring of 1918 - alongside the Guards Division; so that that page of your book (p.341) comes right home to me and is one that I (and many others I doubt not) will often think of with gratitude, and turn to again & again. It is such passages that make one feel that pen and ink, and the printing press, have their uses after all.

With kind regards, believe me,

Yours sincerely

Percy H. Dumbell

P.S. My "Illustrative Documents" above-mentioned are promised careful consideration by the Cambridge Univ. Press when the Syndics reassemble in October. If for any reason they turn the project down, do you think it would be worth while to submit the typescript to Messrs Nelson? It ought to get published, if at all, about the time the Simon Commission Report is "released".