24 SEPTEMBER 1988, Page 24

Winning double for . . .

I THINK The Spectator should put up a plaque to T. S. Eliot. It is his centenary year, as we all now remember (or all except the Times, which absent-mindedly published its excerpts from the poet's letters under a picture of James Joyce) and Eliot is the only great poet to have sung of our editor and staff — in French: `Le directeur/Conservateur/Du Spectateur.' Our plaque might set the example to Lloyds Bank, where Eliot worked in the years when he published Prufrock and wrote The Waste Land. Lloyds is properly proud of its poet, and this week the chairman Sir Jeremy Morse will, together with Mrs Eliot, be host at a celebration at the bank, to mark the centenary and the publication of the first volume of letters. They show him as a capable banker, though he wished (as bankers do) when handling vast sums of money that more of it stuck to him.