Postscript . . .
THE Times, which is mindful of such matters, for it knows where its readers lurk, re- cords that 'one of the last citadels of masculine exclu- siveness is beginning to crumble—London clubs are more and more admitting women to their hushed drawing-rooms.' I should have thought that except for the fastnesses in St. James's Street the process had been going on for some time, at a pretty steady pace: as the Times itself recalls, the In-and-Out has had associate lady members since the 1930s. And Anthony Sampson, in his fascinating articles on clubs in the Observer, quotes a wonderfully baroque entry by Patrick Leigh Fermor in the suggestions book at the Travellers' on the damage the admission of women guests has done to the club's decor.
Now the Oxford and Cambridge, which has long had lady associates, is talking of admitting them, the Times says, to the club-house proper, if only at weekends: they seem to be all over the shop at the Garrick and the Reform already. (Which ought to dispose of the notion that it is the English male especially who is anti-feminine in these matters: such. New York clubs as the Tennis and Racquet, the Brook, or the Century, would be horrified; and at the Travellers' in Paris it was the French members who defeated the Anglo-American proposal to admit ladies.
A club of which I was long a member, but am no longer, first admitted lady associates after the war, but in strictly limited numbers, and this proved to be unfair, for once the permitted num- ber had been elected, it meant that other mem- bers' wives and daughters were effectively barred until the first lot had resigned or died. There was an extraordinary general meeting to discuss the problem, and one elderly member came up specially from the depths of the country to address it. His solution was admirable—that each lady associate should be elected for a term of years only, and should then automatically resign and go back to the end of the queue. But what he said, as he stood up in front of the meeting, was, 'My proposal, gentlemen, is that we should turn the ladies over, once every two years.'
I know that it is the lowest form of humour to make fun of a fore:gner's Babu English: I'd look pretty silly if some French columnist got held of the schoolboy howlers I still make in his language. All the same, there seems to me a special charm in this letter that Mr. Woodrow Wyatt received at Christmas from an outraged Portuguese patriot, and 1 can't resist quoting from it.
LISBON
We surely already know of your most nasty speech at the Commons last Wednesday against the Portuguese people, immediactly followed by another made by a member of your Govern- ment probably in terms a bite more polite but after all meaning the same more or less.
The history tells us throughout the centuries of a brigand people following the Portuguese everywhere and spoiling them from the terri- tories that we have been discovering and we pretended to civilize, such people only target being to milk those territories to the ut- most. . . .
We know very well of what you have been able in the past to get richess through starved peoples and even in these supercivilized (?) days, we understand you when we see the Queen of a 'glorious' Empire dansing with a negro probably just arrived from jungle, where he may have been a canibal. . . .
I forsee that tradition englobing common sense, inteligence, culture, real democracy, etc.,, i.e., the greatest fortune of Europe, will sur- vive and like a lighthouse will guide the world in the dark, after those nations without soul actually causing poor humanity most tremen- dous nightmares vanished themselves away, either by eating or killing each other.
I wonder if you are in fact a socialist. The way as you act you look more like a comunist and if this feeling of mine is correct no doubt you are betraing your party, your country and your country's most faithful and oldest allied. Your are therefore a miserable, you are a most filthy b d! May I express you to finalize n t Y,, most effec-
ive despise.
'In a good year unbeatable; in a bad year undrinkable.' Thgre is an echo of the Churchil- lian mot on Montgomery in this comment from an eminent student of German wines on those of Schloss Vollrads, the great and famous Rhein- gau estate run by the Count Matuschka- Greiffenclau. The Count made no 'Kabinett' wines from 1953 until 1959, but those were good —indeed great—years: we drank the 1959 Schloss Vollrads Kabinett (blue-gold capsule) at the luncheon that followed a recent tasting of S. F. Hallgarten's flowery, fruity, 1959 Nahe wines (all of which are worth looking for— particularly the enchanting Kreuznachers). The Schloss Vollrads is already a fine, big wine, with immense character. We drank it with veal steaks, and it is easy to see why Germans become im- patient with the French insistence on red wine with meat : this was full and bold enough to drink with anything, and I should like to drink it with a saddle of venison in cream sauce, or with a steak of wild boar, as I have drunk other big hocks in Germany. Hallgarten's ship it them- selves and Harvey's have it at 27s. 6d. a bottle, which seems to be cheaper than some other retailers.
CYRIL RAY
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