Softly, Tiny
Snark-scholars and Carroll-cryptograph- ers have been drawn like moths to a lamp, or Bakers to a Boojam, by my assertion (last week) that inquiring into Tiny Rowland is the financial equivalent of hunting the snark. All agree that Carroll's masterpiece has great art's uncanny quality of presaging events, but not all their explanations are mutually consistent. Is the Bellman, captain of the snark-hunting crew, Professor Roland ('What I tell you three times is true') Smith? Then the Barrister brought to arrange their disputes is inquisitor John Griffiths QC, and the Broker ('to value their goods') Cazenove. But that does not square with the plainest identification of all, Lord Duncan-Sandys, Lonrho's less than frenetic chairman, as . . .the beaver who placed on the deck
Or would sit, making lace, in the bow, And had often (the captain said) saved them from the wreck, Though none of the sailors knew how.
Then the wily Billiard-Marker, who might have won more than his share — whoever can he be? His counterweight —
A Banker, engaged at enormous expense, Had the whole of the cash in his care
— is obviously Lord Garymoyle of S. G. Warburg. If his waistcoat turns white, we shall know that his iron nerve is at long last cracking. One or two lives have been threatened with a railway share, the whole of Fleet Street has been charmed with smiles and soap . . . But the real test of scholarship is still to come. It will be to identify any of the actors who, if boojumi- cally forced to vanish away, could be imagined leaving softly and silently.
Christopher Fildes
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