It started with my hunt for the original use of the metaphor indicating retribution, chickens coming home to roost (
3 May 2023), which I found in
The Persones Tale, the last story in Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales. My copy of Chaucer was inscribed on the flyleaf,
Ronald Seaton, May 1943, and cost six shillings. Strange, since I had said goodbye to my father in 1942 as he left for Africa in his army uniform. Where could he have bought a copy of Chaucer's works for shillings?
Fortunately, he kept a diary. This showed that in May 1943 he was aboard a troopship that was dodging U-boats and taking African soldiers from Sierra Leone, where he had been stationed, to an unknown destination which turned out to be Bombay. On the way, the ship refuelled in Cape Town and there he recorded buying several books including Chaucer. He also bought some carved animals as presents for me which I remember receiving, one of which I still have. Old books bring back memories.
As a child I loved my father's bookcase, a tall mahogany one mounted on cupboards that contained drinks and, for a while, cigars. It had been his father's and contained mysterious medical books that his grandfather had won as prizes in the mid-19th century. But it also held many works that my ancestors had read, including my grandfather's collected volumes of Thackeray and Scott. When my father retired, he set about reading them but when he saw his time on Earth was limited, he kindly gave the bookcase and its contents to me. I have given some of the books to younger relatives, but it remains a treasure trove. It tells more than the content of its books – it shines a light on the interests of my forebears. Many were doctors, but their interests were literary and political.
When my turn came to retire, I joined a group of fellow ex-consultant physicians who meet monthly to hear a lecture, usually on a non-medical topic, and to have lunch together. During lockdown, we quickly became familiar with meeting online and were able to keep in touch and support each other. There were challenges, but we had the help of younger technical people from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Now we meet in person again but also transmit the lectures online, allowing us to engage those of our members who have difficulty getting into Edinburgh.
We are all pretty old and have different degrees of disability, but a number of us still manage to go for walks together and next week it falls to me to lead one. I decided to take them from Cramond Brig round the Dalmeny estate, a six-mile walk just west of Edinburgh, across the farms and woods owned by the Earl of Rosebery, quite close to where I stay.
Our walks are enlivened by some discussion of the area and its inhabitants and ecology. By chance, my bookcase contains two volumes of
Miscellanies, Literary and Historical, a selection made by John Buchan of the essays and lectures of the fifth Lord Rosebery. The books are inscribed to Douglas Seaton from JBS, Xmas 1921. Douglas was my medical grandfather and JBS his elder brother, James Buchanan Seaton, who was shortly to become Bishop of Wakefield.
The essays cover a wide range of subjects, including discussions of Scott, Burns, Scottish history and Scottish patriotism. They remain relevant in the present context of debate of the merits and disadvantages of independence and clearly illustrate the personality and interests of Rosebery. Some of you will recall that he was briefly Prime Minister after Gladstone and was famous for his racehorses. He was, until our present Prime Minster, the richest person to hold that office, and his extreme wealth was acquired similarly, from his marriage. In Rosebery's case, this was to the heiress to the Rothschild fortune. But this Christmas gift told me much also about my grandfather and great uncle, whose Scottish father had died while they were still at school.
Among these essays was a talk, entitled
The Struldbrug, given in 1911 by Rosebery as Rector of St Andrews University, to celebrate its 500th anniversary. In it he described in detail the role the university had played in the complex and often bloody history of Scotland and its remarkable move to enlightenment. I imagine many in his audience were puzzling as to the meaning of its title, as was I and perhaps are you.
You have to read the first 12 pages of the address before Rosebery writes: 'Have any of you heard of the Struldbrugs, one of the weirdest conceptions that ever proceeded from the powerful and morbid brain of Swift? If you have not, I ask you to remember that the hapless Lemuel Gulliver in the course of his travels lit upon the island of Luggnagg after leaving the kingdom of Laputa, and that there he heard of the existence in that nation of a race doomed to immortality, born with a circular spot on their foreheads which marked their perennial fate'.
Rosebery pointed to Swift's lesson, that youthful dreams of immortality fade as increasing age and its accompanying decay and illness bring us all to confront the reality of our mortality. He then spends the remainder of his lecture speaking as a Struldbrug whom he imagined to have been Rector in 1411 and had seen (and, unusually for a Struldbrug, recalled) all that had happened over those 500 years.
By now, you will not be surprised to read that also in my bookcase sit six leather-bound volumes of the works of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Dublin, published in MDCCLV, 10 years after his death in 1745. Inside the cover is the bookplate of Edward Seaton, another of my great uncles, together with two other earlier bookplates. In the first volume is the complete account of Gulliver's travels and there on page 199 is Gulliver's description of the Struldbrugs.
Having first imagined how wonderful it would be to live forever, growing wiser and famous for one's wisdom, the Struldbrugs faced the reality. By the age of 30, they started to become melancholy and at 80 had not only all the usual follies and infirmities of age but also many more from the prospect of never dying, becoming 'opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection'. Envy and impotent desires were their prevailing passions, 'the envy being directed at the vices of the younger and the deaths of the older'. This volume also contains a detailed life of Swift written by those who knew him. Sadly, this shows that his fears of old age and its infirmities were realised and that eventually he longed for death.
I never met my father's uncle Edward, but have seen his portrait hanging in the headmaster's study in the Nizam's school in Hyderabad. He had been a scholar at Oxford and had played rugby for Yorkshire while a grammar schoolboy in Leeds. His bookplate features inter alia palm trees, a golf bag, a rugby ball and a case of books. In the famous museum in Hyderabad, there is a room celebrating the life of its founder, Salar Jung, after whom the museum is named and who had been Prime Minister of that princely state. It contains his school report commending him for his grasp of Persian and Arabic, signed by his headteacher, Edward Seaton.
When we old doctors meet for our next walk, the conversation may touch on our growing collective disabilities and medical adventures at the receiving end. Some of my friends may have read this and will be forewarned but the others will learn about the Struldbrugs… if I can still recall the word. We can all be thankful that death awaits us but will hope that our exercising and reading books make our remaining time more bearable than were poor Jonathan Swift's final years. Even when we cannot any longer walk far, books can take us anywhere we want.
Anthony Seaton is Emeritus Professor of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Aberdeen University and Senior Consultant to the Edinburgh Institute of Occupational Medicine. The views expressed are his own
