Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/54

 Ancient and Modern Imperialism which makes the best of his smaller books. Chance in 1912 led the editor of the Spectator to encourage him to review new books. Three consequent volumes of Political and Literary Essays attest omnivorous reading, a memory singularly retentive of all stages in a long experience, and an apostolic desire to impart all that he knew, or thought. Impatient of inactivity, he was eager at seventy years to preach free trade or denounce anti-vivisection and votes for women. The public, which had long labelled him man of action, was a little disconcerted by this fresh foliage budding on the eve of winter; and malice sneered that the new laurels were torn from his old crown. But unheeding he went on his masterful way, fulfilling a green old age.

In 1913 he broke long silence about Egypt by calling attention, in the Nineteenth Century and After, to the continued curse of the capitulations. Next year the outbreak of the European War found him ready to do any service that still in him lay. From various experience he expounded German policy and methods, and in 1915 issued a supplement to his Modern Egypt, embodying notes, long discreetly suppressed, on his relations with Abbas Hilmi, ex-khedive. A more arduous service was to be his last. He was invited, in 1916, to preside over the Dardanelles Commission; and overcoming a Thucydidean distaste for such inquisitions in time of war, he put on government harness again. Assiduous in attendance at the sittings, he would summon the commission to meet at his own house if he were forbidden to go out of doors. After one such meeting in December he collapsed. During rallies he demanded always the draft report, and in January 1917 seemed about to renew his lease of life. But the flicker was brief, and on the 29th, a month short of his seventy-sixth birthday, he died.

Lord Cromer's portrait was painted by J. S. Sargent, R.A., in 1903; a memorial tablet, with a medallion portrait in relief on the base, was designed by Sir W. Goscombe John, R.A., for Westminster Abbey; there are also drawings made by William Strang in 1908 and J. S. Sargent in 1912.



BARNABY, NATHANIEL (1829-1915), naval architect, the eldest son of Nathaniel Barnaby, by his wife, Anna Fowler, was born at Chatham 25 February 1829. His father was an inspector of ship- wrights at Sheerness dockyard. Here, at the age of fourteen, young Barnaby became a shipwright apprentice; and after five years of apprenticeship won a scholarship at the Portsmouth central school of mathematics and naval construction (1848). On leaving the school in 1852 he was appointed draughtsman in the royal dockyard at Woolwich; two years later he became overseer of the Viper and the Wrangler, ships building in the Thames for service in the Crimean War. In 1854 he was appointed to the naval construction department of the Admiralty; there he assisted in the preparation of the designs for the last of the wooden sailing ‘line of battle’ ships and also in the design of the Warrior, the first British iron-armoured seagoing battleship.

When Sir [q. v.], who had married Barnaby’s sister, became chief constructor of the navy in 1863, he made Barnaby head of his staff, and in this capacity Barnaby worked on most of Reed’s designs, including that of the Monarch, Reed’s conception of a fully-rigged seagoing turret ship as compared with the Captain (which subsequently capsized) designed by Captain [q. v.].

On Sir Edward Reed’s retirement from the Admiralty in 1870, his work was carried on for a short time by a council of construction with Barnaby as president. In 1872 Barnaby was appointed chief naval architect, a title changed in 1875 to director of naval construction. As successor to Reed he had to deal with the designs of the Devastation and Thunderer and of the Fury, afterwards named Dreadnought: the first two vessels, of 9,380 tons displacement, with no sail power, had an ‘all big gun’ armament of four 12-inch 35-ton muzzle-loading guns, two in each of two turrets at the ends of the vessel; the Fury was of similar general design but somewhat larger with increased armour protection. In one bold stride Reed had evolved a 28