Notebook

Of all the shrines of the British trade union movement, the most agreeable must be the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset. It was here that in 1833 six farm labourers attempted to form a trade union branch, for which crime they were sent off in manacles and chains to Australia. It Was here, overlooking the valley of the river Piddle, that Mrs Shirley Williams came last Sunday to address the annual rally held to commemorate the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Her audience was the predictable mixture — coachloads of sentimental old party supporters there to enjoy the country air and the music of the Durnovaria Silver Band, and little groups of hysterical Marxist students with wild eyes and high blood pressure who had come to shout her down. (I sometimes wonder how I would deal with hecklers. When you are talking about the size of classrooms and someone screeches 'How about George Ward?', it is hard to think of an intelligent reply.) The most annoying thing about the rally was the attempt to compare the fate of the Tolpuddle Martyrs with that of the workers at Grunwicks. It is an insult to the memory of the Tolpuddle men who were victims of an appalling injustice. Their wages had been reduced from 9/to 8/to 7/a week, and they were threatened with a further cut to 6/a week before they met, both peacefully and legally, to discuss how to protect themselves. But Lord Melbourne, who was Home Secretary in the Whig government, Chose to make an example of them. They were arrested on a trumped-up charge of sedition and given the maximum sentence of seven years' deportation to Australia. And Mr Scargill sees himself as ,a victim of injustice!

There was a lot of socialist literature on sale at Tolpuddle. I felt sorry for a jolly lady with a blue rinse who, telling her friend that she always brought with her 'a little extra' over and above her bus fare, forked out £1.50 for a paperback copy of Harold Wilson's story of his Labour Government. I invested a more modest 20p in a Socialist Song Book wpublished by the Marxist weekly Militant. It d as worth it for a song which, while it is no ou_ bt widely sung in some circles, may be _uhMmiliar to many of our readers and may ..",en evoke some sympathy among those wit°, while not Socialists, support the cam

se Paign for real ale. Here are two of the vers:

Tlham the man, the very fat man, That waters the workers' Beer, , f waters the workers' Beer. ta,ltd what do I care if it makes them ill,

" It makes them terribly queer?

I've a, car and a yacht and an aeroplane

And 1 water the workers' beer!

'Now a drop of beer is good for a man, Who's thirsty and tired and hot And I sometimes has a drop for myself From a very special lot; But a fat and healthy working class Is the thing that I most fear,

So I reaches my hand for the water tap

and I waters the workers' beer.' It is dedicated to Watneys, Courages, Youngers and other brewing monopolies that pay for something equally poisonous for the workers — the Tory Party'.

It is ironic that John Berger should have received the George Orwell prize of £500 for an essay published within the last year. Orwell was one of our finest, clearest and most consistent observers of modern society, literature and life. Orwell was poor, and barely had enough money to die on.

Berger is an inconsistent armchair Marxist who has gone through many tiresome somersaults of intellectual persuasion, emotional rhetoric and political doublethink. It is Berger's basic contempt for artists that makes his career so disagreeable. If you respect artists, then you cannot do what Berger has done, time and again, and trounce them for failing to achieve what they had no intention of doing anyway. Berger has too often failed to describe their real accomplishments because he has used artists as props in meretricious political arguments as if their work had never existed. Orwell must be turning in his grave.

The confused minds of the Left must by now be in still greater confusion over Judge King-Hamilton. For many of the people who, rightly in our view, condemned the Judge for his handling of the Gay News blasphemy trial are the same kind of people who often accuse courts of excessive

leniency in dealing with cases of rape..1 am thinking in particular of organisations like Women Against Rape, who believe that judges tend to treat the crime almost as a joke. Nobody can accuse Judge KingHamilton of this after Tuesday's sentences in the Old Bailey. Perhaps he will acquire new stature as a hero of the feminists.

The National Book League has decided to sell its collection of James Joyceana to an American university, no doubt for a considerable sum. This seems to be a perfectly reasonable commercial transaction — books and manuscripts nowadays only have the status of commodities — but it has caused a disproportionate amount of fuss among the literati. Since the National Book League is an organisation designed to promote the distribution•and reading of books, there is no reason at all why it should not sell its Joyce collection and thereby inspire a few more American graduate students and their teachers. Joyce would no doubt have preferred to see his work sent away from England; he had no great love for this country, and in any case he would certainly have had no time for cultural institutions like the National Book League.

Young Maxwell Aitken, Sir Max's son, would undoubtedly have remained with Beaverbrook Newspapers had Mr Rupert Murdoch's proposals' for participation in the company, but not acquisition, been accepted by the trustees of the Beaverbook Foundation, a majority of whom voted instead for the sale to Trafalgar House. It is believed that Sir Max himself was in favour of the Murdoch alternative, under which the family connection would have been maintained, and voted accordingly. But Lord Robens, whose support he had expected, apparently tilted the vote in favour of Trafalgar House and Mr Victor. Matthews. It is probably wise to confine the membership of what are essentially family, trusts to the family alone. • Now that everything costs such an unbelievable amount, it is very comforting — nostalgic, even — to find something to buy at a' reasonable price. To those in search of such an object I recommend the tortoise. I bought a tortoise last week in a Fulham pet' shop for £2.25. It was a large, lively tortoise in excellent health, and it seemed to me' extremely cheap. I know nothing about the tortoise trade, but I imagine it may somewhat resemble the slave trade. Tortoises tend to come from North Africa, where presumably someone has to catch them and load them aboard ship. I have visions of many dying in the hold during the long sea journey to England. And how long must they remain in the pet shop before they are finally given a home? All in all, there can be very little profit in it for anybody; and for the price of half a bottle of whisky, you can' buy something much nicer that will considerably outlive it.

Spectator