Henry Metcalfe

No one was likely to drop in at the Century of an afternoon without running across Captain Henry Metcalfe. Even before the casual visitor had entered the dining-room at lunch-hour, the sound of a high-pitched chuckle in the exchange of conversation would usually notify him that the Captain was at the table. Metcalfe, while not disposed to intimacies, knew everybody in the Club and everybody in the Club knew him; he was, indeed, one of those men to whom the Century was an essential and indispensable part of their daily life. He had taken his turn on all the Club’s committees and had even reached the House Committee chairmanship.

That was before the days of Club-house reconstruction or Century Ordinaries or special monthly dinners with one or two hundred covers; it is only by retrospect that we realize today how the tasks and the services of that useful and self-immolating body have multiplied. In the days of Metcalfe’s incumbency, the House Committee chairman alternately played the part of genial host, of promoter of salutary regulations, and of scapegoat for whatever went wrong within the Club-house. Perhaps the Captain’s administration will be remembered for the suave and benignant grace with which he dispensed the Club’s hospitalities—to the guests at the Art Exhibitions, for instance. But no House Committee chairman, even in those simpler days, was free from the responsibility, traditionally attaching to that office, for whatever caused displeasure in upholstery of the chairs or arrangement of the lights or color of the carpets or flavor of the food, or, for that matter, in occasional eccentricities of members. Even if the House Committee had not created those abuses, its business was to correct them. Perhaps the Captain’s most trying official ordeal came when frequenters of the library called on him to remonstrate with fellow-Centurions who dropped off over their books and gave audible evidence of contented literary slumber. But he met the test, considering this only an incident in the day’s avocations of an old-time House Committeeman.

Metcalfe did not often talk of his army service, but it had distinction. Graduating from West Point in 1868, he served first as executive ordnance assistant at the Springfield Armory and four of the larger arsenals, where in 1873 he invented the first detachable magazine for small arms. While still a lieutenant, he wrote and published a book on determining cost and promoting scope of ordnance production and administration, which went to a second edition and called forth the hearty commendation of distinguished engineers. Commissioned captain and ordered to West Point as instructor, he found the Academy’s basis of ordnance instruction obsolete and out of step with the great advances of the period, and undertook to bring the whole course up to date. This task, with the wide research and abstruse mathematical calculations which it necessitated, had recognized effect in reforming the Academy’s curriculum. The book embodying his conclusions ran through three editions; but the work upon it, performed during the exacting routine of class-room instruction, so greatly injured Metcalfe’s eye-sight as to compel his retirement from the service.

All who knew Metcalfe well understood that his impulsive temperament belonged to a generous and considerate nature, and found him always a genial companion with a fund of varied and accurate information.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook