Burke Manuscript

Burke Manuscript: Page 096

This is a sort of likeness of Captain Wilson, (once I think of the S.S. Airedale, one of the old fleet that ran in the sixties and seventies up and down the Coast, the Lord Ashley was another). He was a big, heavy man with a voice that thundered out commands like a roaring bull. He was simply superb as Chief of the Fire Brigade in the Sixties. He actually armed himself with a speaking trumpet and thinking of old times, roared orders out as if from his quarter deck. He did not last long. He took to healing, magnetism, or some other idea; reduced tumours, and that sort of thing. He treated one lady for a considerable time for an immense tumour, and the more and more he coaxed it, the more and more it grew, until at last her friends called in old Scotty Turnbull, who curtly said “She would be worse, till she was better” and so it turned out, she brought a fine boy to add to the population. The Captain got somewhat chaffed. Even called a charlatan by that outspoken other Wilson, the Nabob.