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The father invariably arose at 5 or 6 a.m. to make his private devotions and go to Holy Communion, taking his son with him from an early age. He also had a lively interest in spooks, visited haunted castles, collected accounts of ghosts, of startling dreams, of premonitions which came true. After his death—at the age of 94—his son dutifully prepared his father's ghost stories for publication. In the U. S. they were printed in Hearst's Sunday supplement, the American Weekly.
No Snob. At Eton, Edward Wood made a scholastic record his father was proud of. At Christ Church, Oxford, he was equally studious in modern history. Unlike many a future British statesman, he took no interest in politics at Oxford. But in his schooling he acquired neither the snobbish "Eton manner" nor the equally snobbish Oxonian accent.
In 1910 the Conservative Party persuaded young Edward Wood to run for Parliament from Ripon, near York. So at 28 he became an M. P. By then he was already well married to Lady Dorothy Onslow, daughter of the Earl of Onslow, one time Governor General of New Zealand.
During World War I he served as lieutenant colonel in the Yorkshire Dragoons, was mentioned in dispatches and at war's end was one of 200 Conservative M. P.s who signed a demand for harsher terms for Germany. Meantime his parliamentary career had moved slowly but surely.
Prayer. No one in British politics ever mistook him for the ordinary kind of politician. He was patently of a different breed, a law-abiding, churchgoing, public-spirited English gentleman of high birth. Such have their uses in politics. In 1922 he got his first Cabinet job as President of the Board of Education, first under Prime Minister Bonar Law, and then under Prime Minister Baldwin; in 1924 he became Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries.
The British political world was surprised when Stanley Baldwin suddenly gave him, at 44, the biggest job of the British Empire outside Britain itself—that of Viceroy and Governor General of India. His sole qualification for that job seemed to be that his grandfather, Sir Charles Wood (the first Lord Halifax), had been Secretary of State for India. Actually his best qualification, as events proved, was that he was a charming, quiet, high-minded British aristocrat.
The story is told that Edward Wood was reluctant to leave his fox hunting to become a Viceroy. He asked his father for advice. "Let us go to church and pray," suggested the father. On leaving the church his father said: "I think you will have to go." Replied the son: "I think so too." Since a Viceroy is traditionally a peer and Edward Wood had not yet inherited his father's title, the King made him Baron Irwin of Kirby Underdale.
Viceroy. On Good Friday 1926, the new Viceroy's ship rounded Point Colaba and anchored off the ornamental Gateway of India in Bombay Harbor. Ashore India was prepared to greet her new ruler with the customary fanfare. India waited. Lord Irwin sent word that he considered Good Friday an inappropriate day for pomp. Instead he went ashore unofficially to attend a three-hour Good Friday agony service in Bombay. Not until the next morning did the new ruler officially step from his launch to Indian soil while the white warships of the Indian squadron boomed 31 guns.