In many ways, he seemed hardly the man for the job. He was a frail, redheaded Cornishman, known to most Britons simply as "Q." He wrote swashbuckling romances like Dead Man's Rock and The Astonishing History of Troy Town, so cock-a-hoop with adventure that he himself was "amazed ... at my own immoderation." He had been a dandy at Oxford, with a taste for bowler hats of different colors and loud checked suits ("What, another pair of trarsers!" Trinity's president would cry). He was also something of a radical who had denounced the Boer War.
In spite of all this, in 1912...
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