Notebook
Lord Avon is nicely upholding the agreeable tradition that provides us with books of memoirs from retired statesmen. Sixteen Years after the appearance of his first sub- stantial political volume, Full Circle (the first of four), he is about to publish a smaller work of a more personal character. He has called it Another World—the world into which he was born in 1897. What he has written are the recollections of his life up to the age of twenty, when he had already been serving, since he was eighteen, in the ghast- liest of wars. Like the best of his generation, he fought in the Somme; at Ypres; and unlike so many he survived to serve in another sphere of public duty. Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, is to be numbered among the finest of his day.
Churchill, in his memoirs, recorded his own feelings when Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1938 over Chamberlain's policy of appeasement towards the European dictators:
'Late in the night a telephone message reached me as I sat in my old room at Chart- well that Eden had resigned. I must confess that my heart sank, and for a while the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me ... From Midnight till dawn I lay in my bed con- sumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My con- duct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways; but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation . . . Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows and saw before me in Mental gaze the vision of Death.'
There could hardly be a better tribute to a great spirit, now lying ill. Whatever the dif- ferences that may have separated us in the Past, we should all salute him. Lord Avon's is not the only book now due (or expected) from former leading figures in our national life. Mr Harold Macmillan is believed to be contemplating Yet another—a most welcome prospect. Meanwhile Lord Home's memoirs are well In hand, and Lord Selwyn-Lloyd is thinking ,Of bringing something out in advance of the fuller account which he has long had in mind (an account that must surely include a candid explanation of the Suez policy to which he was so heavily committed). 011 another plane, not of reminiscence, 0 ne of our practising parliamentarians, Mr Ian Gilmour, a member of Mrs Thatcher's Shadow Cabinet and Mr Heath's Secretary
of State for Defence, is preparing an annexe or supplement to his splendid book The Body Politic. In an era so marked by the loss of political culture, it is heartening to find at least one or two Privy Councillors (Mr Roy Jenkins is another) capable of writing with authority and style. In this (and much else) they are in the line of an older class of political leader now sadly depleted.
In bulk, however, it is Mr Wilson who can be expected to outdo them all. Judging by the weight, that is to say the amount or quantity, of his treatise (shall we call it ?) on his earlier administrations, the volumes in store are likely to be monumental, and such as to occupy him for the rest of his life, given Lady Falkender's diligent assistance.
The British film industry, so long—and un- necessarily—in the doldrums, has enjoyed a great lift in the past week. The reception accorded to The Slipper and the Rose, the old story of Cinderella in new form, is prob- ably without precedent. From all appear- ances, it is going to be a world-wide success, of no small benefit to the national economy.
For this we can thank Mr Naim Attallah, born a Palestinian Arab, a British subject for many years. He is the one who found the finance—five million dollars—when nobody seemed prepared to invest on anything approaching that scale. It was a demon- stration of faith and confidence in our own actors and directors, who are among the best in the world—though you would never think so from the feeble, weak-kneed pessi- mists who ought to be supporting British enterprise and initiative but are more often shying away, wringing their hands in des- pair, always fearing the worst. No one should be more pleased with Mr Attallah than the outgoing Prime Minister. Long years ago, as the young President of the Board of Trade, Mr Wilson was a good friend to the film industry, in which he has continued to take a sympathetic interest. Now, at the end of his ministerial career, he has proved that yet again, by backing it with an Exchequer grant of £2,370,000. But it is to be hoped that the industry may soon be able to dispense with public subventions. The principle is not to be encouraged, how- ever well-intentioned Mr Wilson's action.
For all the gloom that the Scottish Nation- alists are generating among members of the main parties at Westminster, they are cer- tainly enlivening the atmosphere at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Mrs Winifred Ewing, who is a member of the European Parliament, recently gave two splendid parties for her fellow-Nationalist MPs, George Reid and Douglas Hender- son. According to European Parliament, the whisky flowed in quantity, and in no time nearly all the European parliamentarians were sporting 'It's Scotland's Oil' badges. At another jollification Mrs Ewing is said to have won an Irish pound note from the Fianna Fail member, James Gibbon, in a folk song contest. The irrepressible Mrs Ewing attributed her victory to a repertoire of 2,000 songs handed down to her by her father. What is more, she assured a Stras- bourg press conference that the SNP would wish to keep Scotland in the Common Market.
The popularisation of art through the sales in museums of reproductions, postcards and illustrated books is a commendable policy. In lean times, our public galleries need any income that can be stimulated by the enterprise of their publications depart- ments in meeting the educational needs of a huge public eager for information and in- struction as well as souvenirs. Of late, how- ever, the commercial shopping areas both in the Tate Gallery and in Burlington House have seemed excessively obtrusive. But the real issue, without wishing to be too solemn about it, is whether helpful and sensible objectives are consistently secured. Educationally, there seems little to be said for the sale at the Tate Gallery in recent months of a range of jigsaw puzzles based on works in the national collections. Pic- asso, Beatrix Potter, Tissot, Stubbs, Turner, Dali, Cezanne, van Gogh, Landseer and Millais are among the artists dubiously honoured in this way. Would van Gogh have died a happier man, after all those struggles, if he could have seen his much loved 'Chair and Pipe' fractured into the jigsaw pantheon? Have art lovers really been seething with impatience through long winters, waiting for the jigsaw puzzle of Cezanne's 'Gardener'? The formal struc- ture of the picture itself is hardly yet solved or truly understood on a wide front. Its fate as a jigsaw puzzle smacks of trivialisation rather than popularisation.
Our apologies to Lord Shackleton for sug- gesting on 13 March that he is in something less than the best of health. Not so. He is, he tells us, in bounding health.
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