Belloc's Lord High-Bo

Bibliographic bliss. Three years ago, on my own blog, I posted a request about a mystery poem that my wife and I remembered, but which was proving unusually difficult to find. We were more or less certain it was a Belloc, in the flavour of his Peers series in Cautionary Verses. But there was no sign in anthologies. However, sources have come at last into the Google Books database, and it is indeed a Belloc poem, Lord High-Bo.

Lord High-Bo, getting tired of trains,
Would binge about in Aero-planes,
A habit which would not have got
Him into trouble, had he not
Neglected what we know to be
The rule of common courtesy.
Past bedroom windows he would sail,
And with a most offensive hail
Disturb the privacy of those
About to wash or change their clothes.

Google Books finds two sources: William Cole's 1959 The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry, and Robert Speight's 1958 Letters from Hilaire Belloc. Neither of us recalls reading either of them. Still, it's great to know it's not a mutual figment of the imagination. It's certainly a little-known one though.

A search tip that may be useful: it's often quite feasible, as I had to with this example, to reconstruct text from search hits that are restricted. We remembered this much ...

[someone?] ... growing tired of trains
Would binge about in aeroplanes.
Past bedroom windows he would sail,
And with a most offensive hail
Disturb the privacy of those
About to wash or change their clothes.

... which turns out to have a couple of minor wording mistakes, lacks the identifying name, and misses out a central section. A search on a phrase we were most sure of, "most offensive hail", found two books giving only snippet view search (i.e. fragments of variable usefuless including the search phrase). Inside one, Letters from Hilaire Belloc, searching on some remembered phrases - "tired of trains", "binge about" and "would sail" returned some snippets- not enough to complete the poem but indicating that the title character to be Lord (High?-??). Passing "Lord High" to The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry found it's "Lord High-Bo". Passing "Lord High-Bo" back to a general Google Books search got the whole intro to the poem, ending with the words "not neglected what we". And so on, a process of search refinement, correlating the snippets and the Google Books results until there was enough crossover to complete the text.

This kind of iterative search and "Dead Sea Scrolls" approach can be very useful in getting the gist of texts that show up on Google, but don't give full access. As well as books, this also works with journals in restricted-access archives such as JSTOR or Project MUSE, which contain a lot of interesting literature-related material. More on this later.
- Ray