A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE psychological value of the Coronation films seems to me enormous. We have grown almost blasé about the marvels of radio, and read without emotion of the perfect reception in America and Australia of the broadcast of the great ceremony itself (though a walker in a lonely Berkshire wood on the 12th was considerably startled when a voice from some invisible loud-speaker near by suddenly announced : " Sirs, I here present unto you King George, your undoubted king "). But the broadcast lasts no longer than the actual ceremony ; people who did not hear it then will never hear it at all. The pictures are there for all time, and since they are talking pictures they include all the radio gave ; thousands of audiences in the Dominions and colonies can see them night after night. And vision gives an intimacy which hearing alone never can. To see the King girt with his sword, to notice him helping to fasten on his own girdle, to watch the actual imposition of the crown by the Archbishop, to study the bearing of King and Queen, Queen Mary and the small princesses, makes on the one hand the splendid pageantry, and on the other the human personalities of the King and his family, real to hundreds of millions of people as no agency hitherto existent in the world could. The films of the scene in the Abbey are astonishingly successful. I have heard the criticism that they exaggerate the King's pallor and lend colour to what I believe to be the completely mythical stories of his ill-health. They do, but that is largely due to a trick of lighting. King George, as the film shows him, is a man obviously conscious of the burden of great responsibilities, but in no sense a man unequal to facing them.
An Englishman who wanted to get some vague idea of what " our Indian Empire," as it used to be called, means without going out of London could have satisfied himself at the reception at the India Office on Tuesday evening. Nothing more superb can have been seen for years. The India Office, with its vast paved hall, and the galleries running round it above, is better equipped than any other building in Whitehall for such a function, and the scene, for those who went upstairs to look down on it, was dazzling. Turbans of every hue, robes of gold and scarlet and azure and sombre brown, shimmering grey silk worn by muscular figures with strong Mongolian faces, small delicate Burmese, Indian Princes brilliantly bejewelled, Malayan rulers looking half Chinese, wove perpetually changing patterns in a throng that opened and closed again as the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, with the Secretary of State, moved to and fro. How flat and drab English evening-dress looks in such a setting ; but at least it forms a background.
* * * * Murders are sordid affairs, but mystery can invest them with a certain fascination, as the flood of detective stories shows. And the murder on the Paris Metro on Sunday is as flawless a specimen in real life as any member of the Crime Club could invent. Here is a woman alone in a first-class carriage (not compartment—a large open carriage, as on our Underground) found at 6.3o on a Sunday evening dying with a knife driven into her neck. The train reaches its terminus at the Porte Charenton and goes on round a loop to the Porte Doric, which it reaches one minute later. The murder did not take place in that minute, for no one but the victim was in the carriage when it got to Porte Dor& and no one could have left it while in motion. She was therefore stabbed during the three minutes the train stood in the Porte Charenton station and the murderer must have left the carriage there ; but it must have been at the last moment, or the dying woman would have been seen ; presumably he slipped out as the train was starting, and quietly left the station. But that is no more than a presump- tion. There can rarely have been a case when the moment, the manner and the place of death was so precise and the mystery of its authorship so impenetrable. No doubt M. Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey would soon have got to the bottom of the business, but the Paris police will not find it quite so simple.
Motorists have rarely been given so complete an acquittal of the various charges brought against them as they receive in Sir Philip Game's report on conditions in London. His statistics show, in brief, that in 83 per cent. of accidents involving collisions between pedestrians and vehicles the pedestrians were to blame, and in 58 per cent. of the cases in which pedal cyclists were injured (including, presumably, collisions between cyclists and pedestrians as well as between cyclists and cars) the pedal cyclists were to blame The Commissioner of Police rightly dwells again on the fact that the streets are unfit for the traffic they have to carry today, but it is hard to see what can be done about that in a city like London—apart from one obvious step, a complete ban on slow-moving horse-lorries. No one who drives in London, particularly near the great termini (for the railways are the chief offenders) can cease to marvel at the admini- strative apathy which tolerates the congestion and delay this particular type of vehicle creates.
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The latest announcement in the daily newspapers' circulation campaign seems to suggest that Lord Beaverbrook has forged to the front. The Daily Express declares an average of 2,247,382 copies daily for April, and, on the strength of it, claims in confident capitals the World's Largest Daily Net Sale. Probably that is so, though the Petit Parisien used not to come far short. And the Daily Herald, which is the Express' only rival in this country where circulation is concerned, may yet have a surprise to spring.
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Having a fortnight ago diffidently deprecated the decision of The Times to refer henceforward to amateur cricketers as "Mr." Blank, I rejoice to observe that the innovation has already been abandoned. R. W. V. Robins, not Mr. Robins, cut Langridge for four, and it is a much better kind of four that way. Should even the initials go as well ? I am not so sure of that. Personally I like to know who is an amateur and who a professional. JANTs.
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