How to Ride a Tricycle
SERVANT OF THE COUNTY. By Margaret Cole. (Dennis Dobson, 15s.) li!'s+ the-late Mr. Sidney Webb married the late Mrs. Sidney ii:°1) he gave her a ring. According to H. G. Wells, it was ribed 'pro bono publico'—`and these words were no idle thee,ar Nor were they. For the first offspring of the union was London County Council.
LCC was born in 1888. Its birth marked the Valmy in the Tiedub's war to the knife-and-fork to convert the ruling class to Phrase Over-all Planning. The LCC is exactly what that ominous 6ri!se means. It is the apotheosis of co-ordination. It was the like I Fabian nursery, where all the toy soldiers were dressed ;tithratepayers. There was (and is)only one thing wrong. It was ; born. Hardly anybody takes part in LCC elections. The Conn- ryti `3 Chosen in fact by a tiny handful of voters, scarcely more ilia4lerous than the burgesses of Gatton or Old Sarum. Its proceed- 54, go unreported. The chairman of the LCC resembles the kilo'ws ?resident, or the husband of Miss Diana Dors: nothing is arld".? of him beyond the fact that he exists. Among the three "three-quarter millions of men and women ruled by the LCC
a pollsters' probe anywhere about the doings of their mas would always produce 100 per cent. 'don't knows.'
Once only, during its sixty-odd inglorious years, has the made history. That was in 1907, when Lord Northcliffe mobil! London to throw out the Radical-Socialist alliance that had I'. the Council from the beginning. In the grief of election n G. K. Chesterton was moved to write a splendid 'Song of Def, for the next morning's radical Daily News. It began : 'The I breaks, and the guns go under.' In the glowing coals of Ches ton's elegy 1 see a picture of Mr. Webb, Napoleonic at Waterloo—watching tight-lipped while his Fabian grenadiers back broken from the iron squares of Tory misrule, casting their pamphlets as they flee. But progress came back. Socialists resumed their reign over the LCC in 1934. And it 5 slumbers on.
The LCC is a planners' pipe-dream. If local government i5 be an electoral reality, it must be local. But a local governor that stretches from Woolwich to Highgate is a contradiction terms. A man may interest himself in Hackney, or Putney' Notting Hill; but no ordinary Londoner ever did, or ever 0 take the smallest interest in the LCC. Either abolish it outr or, if that is 'administratively impracticable,' then turn it into Senate, elected not by individual citizens but by local author!' But dull though the LCC is, a book about it need not be d Mrs. Margaret Cole proves that in Servant of the County. She spent a great many woman-hours sitting on the LCC, and she clearly fascinated by it. She conveys her fascination in 10; sharp-cut English, with never a cliché anywhere. I expected account of the LCC to be as unreadable as that classic work , to Ride a Tricycle. But any Londoner will read Mrs. Cole s' c, enjoyment—even though, like me, he will never watch his COl plc at work until it moves from County Hall to Madame Tussall,, Mrs. Cole's prose is all the more exhilarating because of "1 eagerness to pour away the baby with the bath water. Thust5 attacks the 'snobs' who live north of the Thames and who des!i) s (so she says) the south Londoner. Then she attacks Miss Reh; Afr West for writing that William Joyce's woeful destiny was to sl 'south the river'; and she adds darkly, 'This equation of s° ,1„4 London with the wrong side of the tracks nearly caused 001; r in the habitations of ancient Deptford.' In her next edition I!co acsi Cole, I hope, will enlarge on this literary panic. I am al (113141 to know how many Deptford death certificates give the cause 0e death as 'Rebecca West.'
CHARLES
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