A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK I T is announced that the Birmingham
Post has been sold to Lord Iliffe for L2,250,000. This seems a remarkable figure. The Post may very broadly be compared in character with the Manchester Guardian. Both are daily papers published in large cities, both have valuable evening papers associated with them, and I should imagine that their circulations, surprisingly small by comparison with London daily papers, were much about the same. Nor can there be any very great difference in advertisement revenue. Now, to earn 5 per cent. on a purchase price of two and a quarter millions the Post must show net profits of at least £Ir2,000 a 'year. What it earns today I do not know. But the Manchester Guardian (plus Manchester Evening News) accounts are public property, and they show that that great paper, in which quality is deliberately subordinated to commercial success, has in recent years earned an average profit of well under £20,000 a year. As a financial investment Lord Iliffe's expenditure may seem surprising, but no doubt he has plans for expansion-and for the association of the paper with some of his other enterprises. It had been expected that the Post would be acquired by a syndicate of Birmingham business men headed by Mr. Dudley Docker, and on general grounds that would have been the most desirable arrangement. The raison d'itre of pro- vincial papers is that they should belong in every way to the localities they serve. Their acquisition by London newspaper magnates puts them in a different category altogether.
* * * *
Nothing could be more opportune than the appeal Dr. J. J. Mallon and others are making for funds to enable a Theatre for Children to be established at Toynbee Hall, where, it may be hoped, it will serve as a pattern to be widely copied. Here is a field in which we have immensely much to learn from Russia, which today supports well over a hundred Children's Theatres, giving perform- ances in at least twenty of the many languages spoken in different parts of the Soviet Union. Plays are written with a special eye to children of different ages—under ten, from ten to fourteen and an older group—and the spirit in which the actors meet the claims of this new audience is shown by a remark of one, of the greatest of them, K. S. Stanislaysky,: " One must play for children in the same way as for adults, only better." When I say that Russia " supports " over a hundred Children's Theatres, I use the verb advisedly, for the Soviet Government. supports them to the extent of some 30,000,000 roubles a year. Since it is improbable that the British Government will support anything similar in this country to the extent of a shilling a year, the public—that part of it which cares for children or cares for the theatre, or both—must be appealed to direct, as Dr. Mallon is doing. His address is Toynbee Hall, Commercial Street, London, E. r.
* * * * The announcement of the 'death of Robert Blatchford sends the mind back, for it is nearly a generation now since Blatchford and the Clarion were household words in England—and for that matter Scotland. It is quite true that Blatchford's Socialism was emotional rather than intellectual ; but emotion makes good selling journalism, and the Clarion was a real force in its day, particularly in that thickly-populated Lancashire area within forty or fifty miles of Manchester, where the Clarion was published. It was, moreover, more than a weekly paper : the Clarion Fellowship, the Clarion ;:ycling clubs, Clarion Scouts (which some people claim antedated B-P.'s organisation), the Clarion café in Manchester, all drew together in a pleasant and on the whole valuable companionship a large number of people of both sexes who shared, emotionally, at any rate, Blatchford's views. The paper, with its corps of regular con- tributors—Blatchford himself, A. M. Thompson, " Dangle," " The Bounder " and others—had a distinct character of its own, and Blatchford knew how to draw attention to it, by, for example, securing articles from a number of Church leaders in reply to his own criticisms of Christianity in the articles that ultimately made up his book, God and My Neighbours. A lively interchange between him and G. K. Chesterton formed part of this. * * * * Apropos of the reference to the German secret weapon in this column last week, I am reminded 'that in an article which appeared in The Spectator as long ago as May, 1935, Captain W. A. Powell wrote : " It is an indisputable fact that batteries of large-calibre guns could be constructed today by either Germany or France capable of shelling, with comparative immunity to themselves, both London and other strategic positions on our coasts from the mainland of France or even of Belgium." After referring to the long-range gun which shelled Paris in the last war from. a distance of seventy-five miles, Captain Powell added that Krupps were making railway-truck It is 'astonishing that with this early experiment as starting-point the Germans have not long before this attempted offensive action of the same kind. If they did—or do—a rocket-gun of some sort has several advantages over field artillery of familiar patterns. * * * *
On the same page of one of last Sunday's papers were two of the most arresting stories of the war—in their different ways. One told of the incredible achievement of Flying Officer Morgan. co-pilot of a Flying Fortress in a raid on Hanover, who with his aeroplane half shot to pieces, half the crew unconscious through failure of the oxygen supply, the intercommunication system gone, steered the machine for two hours with one hand, while with the other he fended off his fellow-pilot whos crazed with a split skull, - was struggling desperately to get back to the controls. A product of war. The other story was of 'the extermination-van into which, as defiantly related at the Kharkov trial, men, women, invalids and children by the thousand were driven with every form of con- ceivable brutality, to be gassed by the exhaust fumes laid on to the lethal chamber. A product of war. I simply set the facts down badly. But what a theme for a poet—War's Progeny.
* * * *
Unfamiliar words tend to stir my curiosity. Such a one is denization," which occurred in a report, in last Saturday's Times, of a libel action brought by the Prince of Pless against Lord Castlereagh, M.P. He had, he said, applied for letters of denization, but found that the process was obsolete. Research throws an interesting light on this procedure, which is obsolete only in the sense that it has fallen into desuetude, not that it has ever • been legally abrogated. It consists in the right of the Sovereign to confer on an alien by letters patent certain 'limited rights of British citizenship—to make him technically a " denizen." Such a denizen may not sit in Parliament, or receive "a grant of land, or hold " any civil or military office of trust." Since denization has not been granted to anyone for half a century or more it seems
Previous page
