Munro’s sister Ethel disposed of most of his papers once she had compiled and published The Toys of Peace, The Square Egg and her memoir of her brother. The J. W. Lambert archive, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a copy of the manuscript of “The Recessional” (published 8 July 1911 in the Westminster Gazette), which allows us probably the only glimpse we will ever get into Munro’s working practices (MS. Eng. c. 2347, fols. 265–75). Presumably Lambert acquired it while compiling The Bodley Head Saki (published 1963), though how and from whom remains unknown.

There are eleven pages in total. At times the copy has cut off the very final letter or two of a line. The manuscript is very clean and corroborates what fellow journalist A. Rothay Reynolds wrote in a memoir written in September 1918 (published as an introduction to The Toys of Peace): “His writing-pad was usually propped up with a book to make it slant and he wrote slowly in a very clear hand, rarely erasing a word or making a correction” (xx).