Another voice
Between Hell and Hepburn
Auberon Waugh
Of all the horrors and indignities of the Heath regime—the refusal to honour P. G. Wodehouse on his ninetieth birthday, the villainous increases in welfare spending, the Obstinate and scarcely sane infatuation With Concorde, Maplin Airport and the Channel Tunnel, the terrible faces of Robert Carr and Peter Walker, the noises and smells of Hailsham, Rippon and Maudling of all these humiliations, the one I resented most was the decision to put Mark phillips's face on our postage stamps at the time of the controversial Royal wedding.
As decisions go, this one had every identifiable mark of the Heath government: its result was aesthetically unpleasing, to Ilse no stronger expression; its inspiration was a crass and cynical appeal to the vulgar taste; and it flopped. The whole sorry episode was a grievous miscalculation. Whatever qualities the young man may have possessed did not include that je tie soh quoi which is nowadays called charisma after the Greek word used to denote a special favour of God, usually conferred by baptism, and nowadays thought to ingratiate its bearer with the lower classes. President Kennedy had it and so, apparently, does the ineffable, indiarubber Jimmy Carter. Mr Heath doesn't and nor does the talented Captain Phillips. But when I made inquiries to establish Which politician was responsible for this error ofjudgment so that I could revile him in Public, blacken his reputation and hound lurn, if possible, into an early grave, I discovered that the Post Office is now free (:),1 all political control. Since the Post Office Pict of 1969, the former department has been a public corporation with no political control beyond the appointment of the board. The villain was somebody called RYland whom nobody I asked had ever met and who was famous only for the grotesquely high salary he received as Chairman of of the Post Office Board. He it is who has presided over the increase in a first elass letter from 5d to 8ip since then—an I,9erease of over four times—while effectively destroying the service for three days 91 the week, so that a first class letter put Lilt° most post boxes at ten o'clock on aturday morning will still be there at nine
clock on Monday.
For days and weeks I have been brooding about how I can make this fiendish man sUtter. Like Major-General Stanley, I am a, n nrPhan boy and have always been given di° understand that an orphan's curse will rag to hell a spirit from on high, but it TdoM seems to work. Has he, perhaps, a uanetter he is fond of, whom I can seduce and betray? Well, he has a daughter ...
What galls me most is the way this incompetent oaf has been able to destroy a great national institution and wipe out one of the few services.which actually worked in this country with scarcely a squeak of protest in the national press and none at all, so far as I have been able to see, in Parliament. Plainly, the lesson has not escaped him, either. What other horrors has this repulsive man in store for us?
Some inkling of his next plans came to me last week when I went to buy my weekly six-pounds-worth of postage stamps. Instead of the usual tiny sheet of quite inoffensive portraits showing the Queen in green plaster-of-Paris, I was given a much larger sheet of hideous black and white smudges. They show a disembodied pair of hands holding a toy pick in circumstances which are too cramped to allow the pick any manoeuvre. One of the hands appears to be deformed. The legend, at a curiously rakish angle, reads: Social Reformers Thomas Hepburn.
Now, I received an expensive education and have a peculiarly retentive memory for names. I also possess one of the finest biographical reference libraries in West Somerset, thanks to the good opinion of Books and Booknzen. Who, in the name of God, is Thomas Hepburn? He doesn't appear in Chambers's Biographical Dictionary,.nor in the DNB, nor in the new (and excellent) 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, nor in any Who's Who from 1897 to the present day, nor in the Times necrology 1961-70 nor in Kelly's Handbook nor in the 1911 (Cambridge) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica nor in any of the innumerable literary biographical reference books in my possession nor even in the universal catch-all, the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Nor in Melrose Press's Men of Achievement nor in Times Newspapers' worthless '1000 Makers of the Twentieth Century' nor in any of the various Crockford's Clerical Directories in my possession ...
Perhaps he is some friend or relation of the Ryland family. I can't discover Ryland's mother's maiden name, but he spent his childhood in Northumberland which suggests the possibility of a Scottish connection. Or perhaps this dim and forgotten social reformer with a deformed hand is merely part of a larger conspiracy.
Hepburn comes at 81p in a series of four social reformers. For 10p you get Robert Owen—an even more spectral pair of deformed hands looking rather like an advertisement to Save the Unborn Baby. For lip you get a single disembodied hand, this time holding a brush, which represents Lord Shaftesbury. Presumably it refers to the seventh earl, better remembered as Lord Ashley of the Factory Acts, rather than the present holder of the title or his murderous progenitor, the first earl. But there is nothing to suggest this, nor any explanation of why he is waving a brush around. The fourth in the series, at 13p, shows another hideously deformed pair of hands, attached to a chain, representing Elizabeth Fry.
1 can honestly say they are the ugliest and most fatuous postage stamps I have ever seen. They might easily be prize-winning pictures in a Soviet nursery school for mental deficients. Obviously they are all part and parcel of this fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families, but 1 wonder if they need, at this stage, be quite so cretinously ugly. When the working class is really in control, of course—I was intrigued to learn that 30 per cent of school leavers in Liverpool now have difficulty in comprehending a simple written sentence—then our postage stamps will probably be plain red with simple legends like Carl Marks £.15; Fred Engles Rools OK £17.50. Letters posted then will lie for a minimum of three years where they are posted before being collected, puzzled over by a doctor of philosophy and put in a train for the wrong destination which will still be standing there when the Last Trump sounds. By then, of course, people will have stopped writing letters, which is all the Post Office really wants to achieve.
Quite apart from the mystery of Thomas Hepburn—is he a relation of James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell (1537-78) described by Throckmorton to Elizabeth as a 'glorious rash and hazardous young man' ? —there remains the question of who on earth decided that we wish to be reminded of social reform at this particular moment in our history. I may be wrong, but it is my judgment that the country is heartily sick of social reform. If Mrs Thatcher was in any way equal to the opportunities before her, she would be making secret plans not only to put 'Bill' Ryland to the garrotte but also to take advantage of the vast areas of public apathy discovered by Ryland to plan whole new series of postage stamps, commemorating famous political moderates like Lords Strafford and Bolingbroke, great social thinkers like Colonel Sibthorpe, internationalists like Barry Goldwater and Cardinal Ottaviani. Instead of which she promises to rescind none of Mr Foot's legislation on industrial relations, and to 'cooperate' with the unions in finding a solution to our problems. I have been told that quite amusing results can be obtained by posting lighted fireworks into letter boxes.
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