On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me … ten lords a-leaping
The order of the gifts for days 9-12 of the Twelve Days of Christmas carol varies a lot across the versions, and the lords can be as few as nine or as many as twelve.
Let’s keep it at ten. That’s the number in Frederic Austin‘s 1909 version of the carol, which the Wikipedia entry takes as standard. It’s a good metric number.
I have never seen lords a-leaping, probably because I have had very little to do with lords. Maybe it is a common sight among excited peers in Westminster’s upper house, especially when they are in full regalia and in the presence of the monarch. If so, it is not something the cameras have witnessed.
A lord, whom my wife and I sort-of followed in 2023, is Rufus Alexander Buxton, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton of Aylsham. To say we followed in his leaping footsteps would be untrue. We cycled a bridge over an estuary and seventy years earlier Noel-Buxton had waded across the same estuary on foot.
Destined to be a lord
His Lordship lived from 1917 to 1980. Called Noel Alexander Noel-Buxton at birth, he changed his name by deed poll in 1944 to Rufus Alexander Buxton. His father, the first Baron Noel-Buxton, was ennobled in 1930. As a result, our hero’s memoir Westminster Wader recalls a terrifying incident in school.
It’s hard to track down the reference in the autobiography, as there is no index and none of the chapters has a title, but I’ve found it now! Pages 47-48.
In front of the morning assembly of 400 boys, the headmaster, without warning, summoned him up to come and tell the company what he thought of his father being made a lord. Young Noel-Buxton had given the matter, and his own future career, quite a bit of thought. He made his way up to the platform, looked over his fellows, and said:
“Personally, I’m rather annoyed, because it debars me from being in the House of Commons.”
Laughter. As he says in the book, that wasn’t bad at thirteen.
A true and noble wader
Faber’s dust-jacket blurb for the book begins: “Enchanting to read, impossible to describe, Westminster Wader celebrates a number of themes very close to Lord Noel-Buxton’s heart.” In fact, a fair description, in more ways than one, would be to the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’.
Noel-Buxton gives a view of the duties and perks of lordship, seen from the standpoint of a right-wing Labour peer, with descriptions of Westminster in different centuries overlaid. Some paragraphs and pages are given with dialect respellings. Some short passages are in verse. And one chapter, indeed one section, has a final page lifted (with permission) from the Peters edition of Bach’s B minor Mass. Before he inherited the peerage in 1948, his day job was as a radio producer.
Stream of consciousness. Yes. Big streams indeed.
His Lordship had a fascinating if not eccentric hobby – that of fording estuaries on foot. Muddy ones to boot. Sadly this fact gets less than its due in Westminster Wader. The Humber and Severn estuary adventures are mentioned in passing. But the wading of the Thames at Westminster gives the book its title, and there’s a graphic description of the very uncertain ground that he had underfoot. For some of it, if I understand the book aright, he had to swim.
A-wading or a-leaping?
So. A lord a-wading. But “a-leaping”? At my second time through the book, I deliberately looked out for references to leaping, and don’t recall finding any. Unless he really did have to swim and we apply such a term to his leaving the pathway and leaping into the river waters.
As far as I know, the second Lord Noel-Buxton was honoured everywhere. Hilaire Belloc, a contemporary satirist, poet and politician, would have had no grounds to make one of those famous cautionary tales about him. So instead, I’ll have a bash.
LORD NOEL-BUXTON
who found fame in tracing shallow paths across great rivers
Lord Noel-Buxton was a peer who forded rivers with no fear and fashioned chapter ends as though doing it on the radio. Water-writ fame! His Humber ford, not on Brough Haven's tourist board, yet inspires track of his designs by bridge and in East Anglia Bylines.
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