In Galloper Jack (2002), Brough Scott, remembers his grandfather:

He was just an old man in a dressing gown, one of those red and blue silk paisley things as I remember. He had a hook nose, a rheumy kindly eye and was sitting on a chair taking sips from an oxygen cylinder. He pointed to a black box on the wall and said ‘that is called a Division Bell. When it rings we have to get up and rush across to the Houses of Parliament to vote.’ It was 1947. Jack Seely was 79. I was only four. My grandfather didn’t look like running very far.

He died later that year and, hard though I have tried, I cannot conjure up any other memories of the most flamboyantly heroic figure this country, let alone this family, ever housed. So on my mother’s knee I was told tales beyond the wildest storybook imaginings. How her father had swum a rope out to a stricken ship on the Isle of Wight’s stormy west coast when his local Brooke lifeboat could not be launched. How he sailed down to New Zealand a year later, and met a naked Maori princess out swimming with rather pleasant consequences. How he and my grandmother (not the aforementioned Princess) dined with Queen Victoria two days before he left for the Boer War with his white horse Maharajah now dyed brown for camouflage. How, after many amazing, bullet-ducking sagas, he came back two years later to discover he had been elected MP for the Isle of Wight by his wife going round in a horse and trap with a sign up saying ‘Vote For Jack.’ How his political career was locked onto that of his friend Winston Churchill who came down to Brooke to bully and inspire my mother and her sisters into building the biggest sandcastle ever. How Seely rose to Cabinet alongside Churchill but then, in the so-called Curragh Mutiny of 1914 became not the first, nor the last, Minister to crash over Ulster. How later that same year he and his famous horse Warrior were first off the boat to France and then survived the most astonishing front line adventures before both celebrated Christmas back at Brooke in 1918.

He may not have been a Prime Minister or Commander in Chief, but Seely was a hands-on witness to major moments in our history. He was also symbolic, not just of another age but of another set of values.