F. Y. Eccles, E. C. Bentley and Lucian Oldershaw all claim to have made the momentous introduction, Mr. Eccles adding that it took place at the office of the _Speaker_, while Gilbert himself has described the meeting twice: once in the street, once in a restaurant. Belloc remembers the introduction as made in the year 1900 by Lucian Oldershaw, who was living at the time with Hammond. Mr. Oldershaw usually has the accuracy of the hero-worshipper and upon this matter he adds several amusing details. For some time he had been trying to get the group on the _Speaker_ to read Chesterton and had in vain taken several articles to the office. Mr. Eccles declared the handwriting was that of a Jew and he prejudiced Belloc, says Oldershaw, against reading "anything written by my Jew friend."
But when at last they did meet, Belloc "opened the conversation by saying in his most pontifical manner, 'Chesterton, you wr-r-ite very well.'" Chesterton was then 26, Belloc four years older. It was at the Mont Blanc, a restaurant in Gerrard St., Soho, and the meeting was celebrated with a bottle of Moulin au Vent.
The first description given by Gilbert himself is at once earlier and more vivid than the better known one in the _Autobiography_.
When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things. When I have said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not merely _bons mots_, I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men of my time.
We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. . . .
The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most of us were writing on the _Speaker_. . . .