Postscript . .
THE governors of great schools tend to appoint their headmasters alter- nately rather more and rather less convention- ally. Let it not be thought that I consider Lord James of Rusbolme a rebel and Mr. Peter Mason a reactionary if I suggest that the gover- nors of Manchester Grammar School seem to have followed the pattern in making their new appointment. Lord James was appointed at thirty-six, a chemist (the first non-classic High Master, I think, in the school's more than 400 years of history), and with no experience of high command; whereas Mr. Mason is forty- seven, a classical scholar, and already a head- master. Lord James's appointment was an ad- mirable one, obviously (he followed Douglas Miller, conventionally a classic and an inter- national rugby footballer), and Mr. Mason's is no doubt as well judged and well timed.
Not that Lord James has been all that un-
'Just a flip from its wing is enough to lay a tnan out.'
conventional: he takes at least as much pride in the school's prowess at games as in its scholarships (I wouldn't believe him when he told me that MGS would beat Eton at cricket on its southern tour some years ago: sure enough, it had all the better of a drawn game), and he pokes fun at the small public schools with tough games-playing traditions that have become so storm-tossed by the wind of change that all they think about these days is the school orchestra and how to raise the money for a pottery kiln.
The First World War revealed unsuspected depths of jingoism in the conventional Douglas Miller's otherwise supposedly 'unconventional' predecessor, John Lewis Paton. When I first went to MGS in 1919 (at the age of ten : the school had its own internal preparatory department in those days) he was still in a state to brand as `un-British' the behaviour of an ill-conditioned boy who had twisted the handle of a pudding- spoon out of shape in the school refectory. I couldn't have put it into words, but I think I had a feeling even then that it might also pos- sibly be 'un-German.' But then, I never fell under the Paton spell that so many found so potent: I could never take very seriously the man whose boast it was that he knew the name and Christian name of every one of his 1,400 boys—and who, every time he saw me, would clap me on the shoulder and say, 'Well, Charles?'
I hope that both burgundy-lovers and collectors of the more recherché sorts of non- sense will cherish, as I do, this extract from a letter addressed to me (at a paper I left more than five years ago) by an Englishwoman de- scribing herself as a public relations officer for Czechoslovakia: `Did you know that very near Prague is a vineyard region called Melnik where wonderful Burgundy wine is produced? The original vines came from Burgundy and French people who want the real stuff go to Melnik to drink it.'
The letter goes on to refer to this, not un- fairly, as a little-known fact,' but fails to give statistics of the number of applications for visas reaching the Czech Foreign Office (Czech em- bassies are not permitted to grant visas without reference to Prague) from French citizens giving as their reason for wishing to visit Czechoslo- vakia that they are fair chokker with the Grands Echezeaux, Domaine de la Romande-Conti, 1949,
and are pining for a drop of the real (Melnik) stuff.
* The Eichmann trial is being thoroughly and objectively reported in Western Germany, and editorial comment has, on the whole, been as sensible and as dignified as I suppose is possible in the circumstances. So exhaustively covered, though, that one of the stories current in Bonn, when I was there briefly last week, is of the well-to-do German businessman—well-to-do businessmen being the symbol of the new Ger- many—who switched off his radio set with an impatient, 'Eichmann, Eichmann, Eichmann- nothing but Eichmann : Um Gottes Willem that was all long before the currency reform!'
( That story may be more typical than precisely true, but I can vouch for two other remarks, made in Germany. but by Englishmen. One by an English town councillor—and a Labour one at that, I regret to say—who, being shown one of Germany's new synagogues, in the course of a conducted tour, said to the guide-interpreter. 'Oh, so they're coming back, are they? Well, you can have ours, I can tell you.' That I had at second-hand, though on the best possible authority; the other was made to me personally by a young British officer showing me the battle- field of Minden (so enthusiastically, indeed, that he drove me, in his smart sports car, into the middle of the French cavalry positions, and we got stuck in the mud: only a couple of hundred years earlier and we'd have had it). A keen type, the young man told me how impatient he was with peace-time soldiering, and how much he feared that the Tories were getting as pacifist in practice as those mealy-mouthed Socialists. Nobody was ever going to get us into a war or, having got us in, to see it through. Why, look at Suez: if only we'd kept our heads cool, and our hearts high, we'd have been through those gyppoes like a dose of salts, and into the middle of Africa—'we and the good old Israelis.'
I've never been much of a Zionist. but here. I fancy, in two unthinking remarks, is the %%hole of the Zionist argument.
I had to visit a Greek-owned cafe-bar, in a German city, with a party of English people, to make my first acquaintance with a Swiss liqueur that is currently all the rage among German connoisseurs. Williamine' is a colourless eau-de- vie of William pears, as framboise is of rasp- berries and mirabelle and slivovitz of plums. There are other brands of this strong, dry, flavoury pear brandy, for it is made in Southern Germany (and called, generically, birnengeist or birnenschnaps or birnenbrand) and, I think, in parts of France. But the Swiss brands are the most highly thought of, and I discovered, when I got back to London, that Peter Dominic lists one under the name of `Le Bon Pere William,' at £3 a bottle, though I haven't got round to trying it yet. What I can never understand is why we don't make fruit brandies of this sort in England—we have the cherries and apples and phims and pears, and a big enough market, surely, among those who enjoy their glass of calvados or slivovitz when they go abroad.
CYRIL RAY
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