He timed himself regularly in his daily burst up and down the reach with some first-rate oarsman, very often 'Bill' East, now the King's Waterman, whose photograph stood with one or two others on the mantelpiece of his study in Sloane Street. In the same way he kept a daily record of his weight, which up to 1904 ranged between fourteen stone and thirteen. Dockett was essentially a boating-place, a place for sun and air, where life was lived in the open or in the wide verandah hailed by Cecil Rhodes and others as the only 'stoep' in England. His son, who was travelling abroad much at this time, shared Sir Charles Dilke's love for Dockett, and was frequently there in the intervals of his journeyings. Other than boating friends came to lunch or to dine and sleep, for the mere pleasure of talk. Such were the Arnold-Forsters, the H. J. Tennants, Lady Abinger (the daughter of his old friend Sir William White) and her husband: and there came also members of Parliament--Mr. Lloyd George, or in a later day Mr. Masterman; and the knights errant of politics, Mr. Cunninghame Graham and Mr. Schreiner. Many nationalities were represented--often, indeed, through official personages such as M. Cambon, the French Ambassador, or some member of the French Embassy. Baron Hayashi and his wife came with many other Japanese friends, and the various representatives of the Balkan States met in pleasant converse. It was one of these who afterwards wrote: 'I never pass the house in Sloane Street without raising my hat to the memory of its former inmates.' That close friend M. Gennadius came also, and his predecessors in the Greek Legation, M. Metaxas, M. Athos Romanes, and half a score of other diplomatists, including Tigrane Pasha, and even Ras Makonnen, who was brought to Dockett by the British representative in Abyssinia, Sir John Harrington, a friend and correspondent of Dilke. Thither also for leisure, not for athletics, came Cecil Rhodes, described in _Problems of Greater Britain_ as a 'modest, strong man'; there came Prince Roland Bonaparte, Coquelin, and Jules Claretie, with a host of others, politicians, wits, and artists, English and foreign. M. Claretie thus, after Sir Charles's death, chronicled one visit: 'Nous avons canoté, mon fils et moi, sur la Tamise avec Sir Charles, un de ces "Sundays" de liberté. Quand il avait bien ramé, il rentrait au logis, et s'étendant en un petit kiosque au seuil duquel il plaçait des sandales, l'homme d'état, ami du sport, accrochait à la porte un écriteau où se lisait ces mots: "Prière de faire silence. Je dors." Hélas! Il dort à tout jamais maintenant le cher Sir Charles. Ce fut une énergie, un cerveau, un coeur, une force.' [Footnote: _Le Temps_, February, 1911.]