To "The Galloper" who tamed wild Irishmen, to scathing "F. E.," master of acrid but urbane debate in both Houses of Parliament, to Great Britain's youngest Lord Chancellor, to the great and frankly snobbish Earl of Birkenhead whose aristocracy was that of "first class brains," came last week a strangely gentle Death.
Propped up in bed a short while before his final, sudden relapse into coma, Lord Birkenhead scanned London papers, learned that he was "now almost recovered from his long illness." He died believing he would soon be well. His doctors, who had authorized the too optimistic early bulletin, issued a final one, brief, explicit:
"The Earl of Birkenhead passed peacefully away at 11:15 this morning. There had been a further increase in the pneumonic infection, and the heart muscles, feeling the effect of this, dilated and failed."
Black-Robed Benchers. Awesomely, like so many legal acolytes of Death, six black-robed benchers of Gray's Inn came for the great jurist's body. He should not lie in state at his house in dignified Belgravia but among the cloistered inns of court, snug in the chapel of his own Gray's Inn.
Recognizing that the Earl belonged first to Law, Margaret Countess of Birkenhead and her children stood aside. "He was a truly wonderful man," said Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, often target of the Earl's most scathing shafts. "To disagree with Lord Birkenhead in no way diminished the extraordinary respect which one had to pay to his powers."
"F. E." Not every Briton knows that Lord Birkenhead's grandfather was first a miner, next a fisticuffer who fought his way to the heavyweight championship of Yorkshire, finally a zealous house agent in grimy Birkenhead—just across the River Mersey from bustling Liverpool.
This fisticuffer's son went soldiering when a sprig of 17, wangled his way up in the hard-boiled Indian Service of Empress Victoria from Private to Sergeant Major, returned to help his father with house agenting, but drifted into Law. Thus when Frederick Edwin Smith was born at Birkenhead, on July 12, 1872, he inherited by right a wildcat's pugnacity and brawn, an old campaigner's slyness, a lawyer's bent.
As a schoolboy "Freddy" was incurably lazy, but too poor, too brilliant to loaf. Luxurious Oxford (which costs rich students $3,000 and more a year) beckoned. To Oxford, after seizing scholarship after scholarship by angry force of intellect, went poor Freddy. He stayed there nine years, squeezed dry every scholastic sinecure, was called to the Bar in 1899, and, as a young barrister of acknowledged, unparalleled brilliance, moved upon London.
In 1901 when only 29 Lawyer Smith, now "F. E." to every potent barrister in England, pocketed close to $200,000 as his outrageous fee for counseling British tobacco interests how to deal with America's then rampant tobacco tycoon, James B. Duke. To celebrate he took a bride from Oxford. She, Margaret Eleanor Furneaux, dutiful daughter of a canny old Latin Professor, had obeyed her father when he told her to put off marrying Freddy some years earlier, "because one meets so many rising young men who never seem to rise."
With his wise wife, "F. E." set out to storm Parliament. When some hecklers shied pebbles at him, later became fascinated and stayed