New Spalding Club > House of Gordon > Gordons under arms

xviii HOUSE OF GORDON.
deaths, which give supplementary information untouched by the Gazette ;
so it was really no waste of time to start with them. The task of
searching these files, and also that of the Times, as indexed by Palmer,
was not completed till months later, at the British Museum ; and was
then followed by a corroborative search in the printed Army Lists at
the Museum, with a few missing ones at the Royal United Service
Institution, and the War Office's own copy, annotated in manuscript,
at the Record Office. One might almost suppose that the inquiry had
set a fashion, for during the past summer a charming young girl,
chorussed by a bevy of beauty, has been telling Londoners in the
musical play Autumn Manceuvres at the Adelphi that
No book can e'er
In the world compare
With an Army List.
Mrs. Skelton herself was not of that opinion, for she set about compar-
ing the Army List with the appointments as notified in the London
Gazette, only to find constant small discrepancies.
In trying to solve these and other points Mrs. Skelton resolved to
go back to the bed-rock of the whole matter, namely, the manuscript
data in the Record Office, and therefore transferred her activities
from Bloomsbury, where she had received constant encouragement from
the Library staff, to Chancery Lane. The wealth of material here,
thanks to the much criticised red tape of the War Office, and to a less
extent of the Admiralty, is simply bewildering. Indeed the officials
themselves are still unable to say how much they possess, or at any rate
to describe the precise type of information contained in different classes
of documents — registers, records, returns, correspondence of various
departments. It will give the reader some idea of this vast undiscovered
country when 1 say that great masses of documents through which
Mrs. Skelton ploughed had never before been examined by any student,
and thousands of them had to be officially stamped for the first time to
enable her to use them. Another glimpse of the ground to be covered is
afforded by Mr. Gerald Fothergill's Records of Naval Men, which appeared
(igio) after Mrs. Skelton had more or less completed her work. He
enumerates and describes no fewer than 280 different types of docu-
ments dealing with the Navy alone. To examine all these in search of
Gordon material would be the work of a lifetime, and Mrs. Skelton very