Personal recollections of Sir Charles Tomes and others.

  • Schelling, Carl.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Personal recollections of Sir Charles Tomes and others. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1890 at the Conjoint Examination Hall on the Thames Embankment, and found myself facing Mr. Charles Tomes as my examiner. He quite naturally appeared to be bored with the whole proceeding, but he was very fair and I passed without difficulty. Many years after I told him that the students were mostly nervous before him as he gave no sign of whether he was pleased or not, and he replied that it was his intention to be quite impartial (and so he undoubtedly was) and to show no emotion which might either damp the candidates’ hopes or unduly raise them. His manner was in no way encouraging, but distant, contemplative, dignified and judicial. Qualifying in 1890, I became an assistant to Mr. W. Tothill of Blackheath, S.E., and on my old friend Mr. Russell Barrett resigning his position with Messrs. Tomes, Betts and Baldwin at 37 Cavendish Square I was invited, having been proxime accessit to the Saunders scholars, to see Mr. Charles Tomes in 1894, with a view to taking Barrett’s place. In the room where this is being written I was received by Mr. C. S. Tomes, who was about to retire from the partnership, and for the first time had a very pleasant conversation with him on various subjects, and on turning to leave I noticed a little trout-rod in its case in a corner of the room. On my remarking that I had been an angler ever since I could hold a willow- branch with a worm on a bent pin on the line, he ave me a very interesting account of dry-fly fishing, which had only lately become well known, and which he was practising with success on the River Test at Hurstbourne, Hants. Mr. E. G. Betts and Mr. Harry Baldwin took me into partnership in January, 1895, and Mr. Tomes changed his residence to No. 6 Park Crescent, Port- land Place, W.1. Having joined the British Dental Association in the year 1891 I duly attended the first large social function of my life, and greatly enjoyed a
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