A SPECTATOR' S NOTEBOOK
BEFORE this month is out Mr. Brendan Bracken will have held the post of Minister of Information for a year. If I anticipate matters a little by referring to his anniversary now it is because I hope to surrender this column to other hands for a couple of weeks. When he was appointed I predicted that he would either succeed notably or fail badly. He has quite certainly not failed badly, or failed at all. He is, I should say, much the most successful of the Ministers under whom we have prospered or suffered, and he has retained his office longer than Lord Macmillan or Lord Reith, though not quite as long yet as Mr. Duff Cooper, who stayed in Malet Street fourteen months. Mr. Bracken knows his own mind and can make quick decisions and stick to them, while his defence of his depart- ment in Parliament, and his refusal to interfere in the administration of the B.B.C., have made a uniformly good impression. Incidentally, he would, I am sure, be the first .to acknowledge what he and the Ministry owe to its present Director-General, Mr. C. J. Radcliffe. The M.o.I. will always by the nature of things be the target of criticism, but I think it would be true to say, and therefore only fair to say, that it deserves it less today than at any other period in its history. It may not equal Dr. Goebbels' concern in efficiency —but then it has more scruples and less money.
The dive-bomber mystery and the refusal of Ministers to solve it is becoming intolerable. The Air Minister says dive-bombers were ordered in July, 1940, exactly two years ago. The late Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Brabazon, says he was never asked to provide any, which may quite well be, seeing that the order which Sir Archibald Sinclair mentioned went to his predecessor. Now Sir James Grigg, in the House of Commons on Tuesday, practises evasive tactics till only his heels show. He is asked what is being done to secure dive-bombers for the Army ; he replies that he cannot give information that might help the enemy. He is asked whether the Army and Air Force are now agreed about dive-bombers ; he begs that that question be put on the paper. He is asked whether the Government fully appreciate the need for dive-bombers ; he answers that discussions on the subject have been going on between Air Ministry and War Office, and he hopes they will soon be concluded satisfactorily. This when British forces in three continents have been getting strafed by dive-bombers for years. I know, of course, that many good authorities think money is better spent on, say, Hurricanes than on dive-bombers—but the Germans are not usually fools in such matters. And now Mr. Lyttelton says we have got a few dive-bombers, in one theatre.
The appointmeht of Dr. Mervyn Haigh, the Bishop of Coventry, to the see of Winchester, vacated by Dr. Garbett, is, I think, generally approved. He has been in the Midland diocese, very largely industrial, for over ten years, and for many reasons the change is likely to be congenial. I do not include among these the financial, though the stipend is in the one case, Winchester, £4,500, and in the other £3,000. In neither case can there be a penny to spare when essential expenditure has been covered. Some time before the last war a pamphlet on The Fatal Opulence of Bishops made a considerable stir. There is not much fatality about it today. Taxation, to say nothing of rates and other dues, accounts for nearly £3,000 out of £5,0oo, and without hospitality extensive, if not elaborate, a bishop cannot preserve the contacts he needs. There is, moreover, today the problem of domestic help to complicate life further. A diocesan bishop, who occupies four or five rooms o of the thirty-odd in his palace, told me this week that he makes h own bed and cleans his own shoes, and that his wife spends ha her time in domestic work. He may be a better bishop for it some ways, but his time is a good deal too valuable to be spent so. * * *
I am delighted to see that a London restaurant-proprietor h been fined fairly substantially on each of two separate charges, o of charging Is. 6d. for coffee and one of the exaction of a simil amount as cloakroom fee, the " cloakroom " consisting of a row pegs in the restaurant itself. There is no doubt that, in Lond at any rate, the meals restriction order has resulted in some of a ramp. Fantastic prices are being charged for food. In o restaurant, where a house charge of 7s. 6d. is permitted, the b for dinner for two—including some wine, presumably a bottle came to £2 9s. 6d. And I have heard of many cases of the kin The maximum charge, moreovet, tends to become the standa charge, and many restaurants which used to provide a fixed-char meal at less have put their price up to 5s. It is not easy to s what the Ministry of Food can do about it. But it is quite ea to see what the public can do about it. It can, and should, avo going near places where exorbitant prices are charged for f There is a moral as well as an economic side to the question at time like this. It is indecent for people to be pouring down th
own- throats money which the State needs so urgently to borrow. * * * *
Various statements have been made, in the course of rece correspondence in The Spectator, about the proportion of population that can be claimed as "church-going," and they ha not all beon left unchallenged. The latest figure suggested, ro p cent., seems definitely too low. For Scotland it is quite cc too low. in England and Wales nothing like complete statistics available. To measure the effective membership of the Church England by the number of Easter communicants is clearly not sad factory. Still, they form at least a rough guide. The number 1941 was 2,391,730. The Roman Catholic " population " is put least as high, and the Free Churches also account for well ov 2,000,000. The total therefore cannot be far short of 7,000,000. the figures refer to England and Wales, and the estimated popula of that area is round about 40,000,000. That would give the church roughly 17.5 per cent. I have no desire to stress such statisti They are rough and ready, and at the best they are purely quanti tive. Moreover, they do not imply anything like regular art at a place of worship, and not even all regular attenders shed lus
on the church or chapel they honour. But they mean something. * * * * In writing last week of the impending change in the Headship the Civil Service I touched on the implications of the fact th while Sir Richard Hopkins succeeds to that position at 62, present holder of the office takes leave of it at "the retiring of 6o." I might have added that the new appointment has hailed with almost universal satisfaction in Whitehall. I unconvinced of the wisdom of making the Secretary of the Treasu ex-officio Head of the Civil Service, but if the latter post is continue in its present form it is clear that Sir Richard Hopkins the man for it, and though his term of office can hardly last mo than three years, he will embark on it supported by a volume goodwill that will go far to make his path smooth. JAbitm.
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