Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

Milner's friends were his own college contemporaries and the young men whom he gathered round him. In those days we were a very young company, which Johannesburg, not unkindly, labelled the "Kindergarten. " Our _doyen_ was Patrick Duncan, who had been brought out from Somerset House to take charge of the Transvaal's finances. Milner himself and his personal staff lived in a red-brick villa, called Sunnyside, in the suburbs. His military secretary was Major William Lambton of the Coldstream Guards, and his aides-de-camp were Lord Brooke (afterwards Lord Warwick) and Lord Henry Seymour. Among the secretaries were Geoffrey Dawson, Lord Basil Blackwood, Hugh Wyndham and Gerard Craig Sellar. There was also a group who had special tasks assigned to them; it included Lionel Curtis, R. H. Brand, Lionel Hichens and Philip Kerr. Hugh Wyndham and I shared a staff cottage at the gate of Sunnyside, but most of my time was spent ranging the country from the Cape to the Limpopo.

It was a pleasant and most varied company, wonderfully well agreed, for, having a great deal to do, we did not get in each other's way. Loyalty to Milner and his creed was a strong cement which endured long after our South African service ended, since the _Round Table_ coterie in England continued the Kindergarten. When I look back upon that companionship my feelings are like those in Thackeray's _Bouillabaisse_ ballad and Praed's poem on his Eton contemporaries, for since those days "the world hath wagged apace. " Lionel Curtis, having arranged the affairs of South Africa, India, China and Ireland, is a philosopher on the banks of the Cherwell; Lionel Hichens is head of a great shipbuilding firm, and Robert Brand an illustrious London banker; Philip Kerr is Lord Lothian, a political thinker of international repute, and now British Ambassador at Washington; Patrick Duncan is the present Governor-General of South Africa; Geoffrey Dawson has for many years controlled the _Times_.