rite that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my
memory." One witness must be checked against another: there will be
discrepancies in detail but the main facts will in the end emerge.

Just now and again, however, a biographer, like a judge, meets a
totally unreliable witness.

One event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything
else: the Marconi scandal and the trial of Cecil Chesterton for
criminal libel which grew out of it. As luck would have it, it was on
this that I had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. I had seen
no clear and unbiased account so I had to read the many pages of Blue
Book and Law Reports besides contemporary comment in various papers.
I have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. Cecil
Chesterton had brought accusations against Godfrey Isaacs not only
concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also
concerning his dealings with the government over the Marconi
contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked
Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel and other ministers of the Crown. But in
the witness box he accepted the word of the very ministers he had
been attacking, and declared that he no longer accused them of
corruption: which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main
position.

Having drafted my chapter on Marconi, I asked Mrs. Cecil Chesterton
to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. She gave me
a long and detailed account of how Cecil had been intensely reluctant
to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by
his father and by Gilbert who were both in a state of panic over the
trial. Unlikely as this seemed, especially in Gilbert's case, the
account was so circumstantial, and from so near a connection, that I
felt almost obliged to accept it. What was my amazement a few months
later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after "a great
deal of close research work, re-reading of papers, etc." (in
connection with her own book _The Chestertons_) and after a talk with
Cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that Cecil had acted as
he had because "the closest sleuthing had been unable to discover any
trace" of investments by Rufus Isaacs in English Marconis. "For this
reason Cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure.
That pressure, _I still feel_,* was exerted, though possibly not
until the trial was over."

[* Italics mine.]

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