Postscript . .
If this is the popular papers' idea of showing their sympathy for the young and innocent vic- tim of a truly shocking tragedy, they might have considered how Miss Herbert might feel, years hence, when her worst grief is over, about the calculated killing of young men. if it is meant to forestall popular feeling against sending a lad of eighteen to the gallows, it might be asked whether the victim's fiancée is the best judge of the moral value of capital punishment. And if (as I suspect) it is nothing more than a cruel and vulgar device with which to titillate the taste for cheap and easy tears, they could have done as well with the `dumpy woman, weeping' that only a couple of the papers mentioned, far down in the remoter recesses of their stories— the mother of the eighteen-year-old boy whom we, who call him a hoodlum and a murderer, are going to put to death in cold blood. Except that dumpy mums haven't much chance when there's a nubile nineteen-year-old to gush over.
It took me some time to put my finger on what it was that Mr. Cronin's revelations from below-stairs in the People were half-reminding me of. Somewhere, I knew, I had once read a phrase that summed up this emetic mixture of the lickspittle ('I was both humbled and grateful when Her Royal Highness pointed this out to me . . .') and the pompous ass ('Never before had I served a master in such garb, and perhaps I wrongly indicated my displeasure . . ?). And then I remembered: it was in Max Beerbohm's epistolary guide—the `Letter from a Young Man Refusing to pay his Tailor's Bill': • Mr. Eustace Davenant has received the half- servile, half-insolent screed which Mr. Yardley has addressed to him. Let Mr. Yardley cease from crawling on his knees and shaking his fist
*
The Daily Express picks out and displays in heavy type, among the letters to its editor, one from a reader in Tunbridge Wells:
The other evening six of us got to talking of crime and punishment. I was interested to find that those who believed in retribution, in imprisonment and, if need be, corporal punish- ment were all church-goers. Those who believed in 'treatment' and namby-pamby pandering to the thugs confessed to having no faith and were politically 'Left.'
Of course; like that namby-pamby Leftist, Jesus Christ.
* I spent the weekend in Chartipagne, watching the end of what has been a plentiful, but not a distinguished, vintage—The Lord added water to the wine before any of us could,' said my host, Count Robert de Vogue, head of the firm of. Moat and Chandon, going on to explain that 1960 will not make a vintage champagne, but will be blended with the `bigger' 1959 to make a well-balanced non-vintage wine. Meanwhile, this firm is the first to get its 1955 vintage cham- pagne on to the market—all the other great houses are still selling their 1953s. Mindful, as always, of my duty to my readers, I drank a fair amount of it each day, beginning at mid- mprning, and can report that it is a firm, well- rounded wine, perhaps a shade more full in flavour than the same firm's 1953, yet just as dry. I don't usually recommend putting cham- pagne down, but I have it from the man who makes it that this is a wine that will be good for four or five years yet, so those who can afford it might do worse than put down a dozen or so—there won't be much 1957 champagne, if it is declared a vintage at all, and nothing then till the 1959s.
Demand continues to outstrip supply, and any day now the price of champagne is to go up on the French market—by something like a shilling a bottle retail. A vintage champagne from one of the great houses is already eighteen new francs in Epernay, where it is made; non-vintage is fourteen. In England, the relative prices are 33s. and 25s. 6d.: as 4s. 3d. of this is duty, and about Is. 6d. is carriage, the Englishman already pays less than the Frenchman does for the wine: the producer certainly makes less profit from us than from his fellow-countrymen. This I consider very decent of him; and as drink his champagne, 1 am able to tell myself that it is a saving in the long run.
CYRIL RAY
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