Arms and the Alderman
THE British have a pronounced weakness for public figures who resign the offices or positions which they hold, and I am sure that Alderman Richard Bland will long enjoy a peculiar esteem in the Lancashire town of Nelson, of which he has jusf, and of his own volition, ceased to be Mayor. His motive for resignation was an interesting one. The Queen and Prince Philip are to tour Lancashire next month, and when they visit Nelson the route, or part of it, will be lined by one hundred officers and men of the Royal Air Force. Alderman Bland, who is a pacifist, raised no objection to this until he learned that the men would be armed with rifles (and also, presumably, bayonets); with these lethal weapons he was unwilling to be officially associated.
The sub-committee responsible for the arrangements in- quired of higher authority whether the men could parade unarmed. They were told that this was out of the question; and the Mayor gave up his office, which carries with it a stipend of £600 a year.
The art of resignation is here seen at its most recherche. Alderman .Bland's decision, which was probably a painful one, was taken from none of the usual causes. He had not com- mitted a blunder. There was no violent disagreement with his colleagues on some aspect of municipal policy. He simply could not, as a matter of principle, attend a function at which members of Her Majesty's Armed Services, on ceremonial duty in the presence of their Sovereign, were going to be armed. He had warned the Council, on taking office, that this situation might arise; 'I told them,' he is reported as saying, 'that if there were any events involving military ceremonies I would have to resign.' There was such an event; and he has resigned.
In a way I admire him for doing so. I think I would have admired him even more if he had not strained at the gnat (in the shape of the rifles) and been prepared to swallow the camel in the shape of the hundred airmen. I am glad, on the other hand, that he did not square his conscience by allowing him- self to be persuaded that the rifles, since they would be unr loaded, were really no more lethal than his mace. That would have been casuistry.
But how awkward these particular principles must be to live with ! Alderman Bland suffered for his convictions in the First World War, when he was sent to prison for two years as a conscientious objector. But not all those to whom this sort of thing happened have since found it necessary to give consistent and almost pedantic expression to their beliefs; Time, the Great Healer, adjusted Mr. Shinwell's so efficaciously that he became Secretary of State for War.
The path of the sincere extremist must be narrow and full of pitfalls. Does Alderman Bland, for instance, stumble blindly from the room when a picture of a battleship appears upon the television screen? Could he, while he was Mayor, have attended a production of Julius Ca,sar or Macbeth by the school children of Preston? What was his attitude to the massive display of lethal weapons which must, from his point of view, have marred the Coronation ceremonies? If a citizen of Nelson had received a high decoration for gallantry in action, would he have attended a civic welcome? Where exactly does he draw the line?
The British have never been considered a logical nation, and goodness knows what would have happened if we had aspired to such a reputation. Each generation derives part of its strength from the quirks, prejudices and eccentricities of the preceding one. We respect, if we do not always revere, the crank and the extremist, and our life would be poorer, though sometimes less exasperating, without them. Alderman Bland is a vegetarian as well as a pacifist; but one deduces that in the former capacity he is less of a doctrinaire than he is in the latter, for he must in the course of his public life have attended functions at which meat, often in large quantities, was openly consumed.
I cannot help feeling that this would in many ways have been a better issue to resign on than the one he chose. The Mayor of an English town is in some sense the head of a community, and the community is composed of free human beings. Now the 33,000 inhabitants of Nelson would still be alive, still free, if they and their forebears had done what Alderman Bland thinks is the right thing and lived on nut cutlets and beetroot hash; they might, for all I know, be even larger, wiser and more beautiful than they are. But they' would not be free, and they might not be alive, if they had done the other thing he thinks is right and denied themselves the use of lethal weapons. It seems to me questionable whether one ought to accept a position of honour and responsibility in a community which owes its existence as such to practices which one regards as indefensible. I also think that if one does accept such a position it is rather silly to make a high-falutin' gesture and give it up rather than face a fortuitous reminder of the facts of life. Good luck to those who contrive to have their cake and eat it; but to have your cake, eat half of it and spit the rest out is surely unbecoming..
• The rifle is a weapon of precision, not of mass-destruction; but Alderman Bland's refusal to have anything to do with it epitomises, in a mildly ridiculous pastiche, the dilemma in which many sincere and worthy people regard themselves as being placed by the hydrogen bomb. In a short letter published in The Times on Wednesday, Mr. D. W. Reid, writing from Birling Gap, in Sussex, made a good comment on this well- worn but far from threadbare topic. 'The greatness of English tradition and history,' he wrote, 'has always been based on the conviction that liberty is more precious than (material) life. If this conviction is to go down before a muddled assumption of moral superiority, then we and our civilisation are already conquered, because we have lost our soul. The issue now appears to be between those who believe in the individual soul and immortal life and those who believe in material existence at any price—even dark, mind-destroying slavery.'
Moral superiority is. I am sure, an .!difying and enjoyable luxury; but it could, if promoted fron sphere of nut cutlets to that of national policy, prove an ex,ensive one.
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