When the corridors of power echo to the strains of ‘Nil nisi bunkum’
When did the newfangled service for a dead nob first come in — the one that says it is a ‘celebration’ of the life, rather than a lament for the death? I would like to read a learned survey of the subject. When I was a boy in the Thirties, all centred on the funeral, which was a solemn, often grand affair. People counted the number of cars, or carriages, which followed the hearse, and spoke of ‘a forty-carriage do’. Everyone wore mourning black suits, black ankle-length dresses, hats and veils. Sometimes as many as a thousand mourners trudged behind the coffin to the cemetery. As the cortège approached, everyone on the pavements stood still. Men took off their hats (everyone wore hats or caps then), and women bent their heads, or even curtsied. In those times, fashionable TV dons did not preach the scientific-atheist doctrine that a human life has no more significance than a chunk of rock, or a puddle of water. Nearly all of us saw death as a dread, mysterious adventure into the unknown, an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. I saw it as the misty region on the far side of Biddulph Moor, which not even our longest walks allowed us to penetrate, a region of hostile villages whose savage inhabitants came out to stone strangers.
The first of the modern-style commemorations, I think, was in honour of H.G. Wells, who died in 1946, and took place at Golders Green crematorium. It was well attended, not only by friends and followers but by critics and enemies, hoping that some incongruous note would be struck at the obsequies of a man who had preached limitless progress but had died in despair. They were well rewarded, for a clumsy person struggling for a seat in the crowded ‘Chapel of Repose’ — probably J.B.S. Haldane or J.D. Bernal — inadvertently touched the button which started the incineration machinery, and the coffin, with Wells inside it, slid remorselessly into the flames before the encomiums had been pronounced. There were, I was told, a few irreverent guffaws and Baroness Budberg, the last maîtresse en titre, burst into tears.
In 1956 I attended one for that delightful and shadowy figure Colonel Aylmer Vallance, who taught me how to write leaders. This, too, was at Golders Green, and again made notable by a ludicrous incident. The needle on the gramophone which behind the scenes was playing ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ by Bach, got stuck, and it seemed an unconscionable time before someone located the wretched machine, and the endless repetitions ceased. Kingsley Martin, who had got on badly with Aylmer, was most distressed. Being a superstitious atheist, and an egotist, he imagined that the mishap was somehow aimed at him, by Aylmer’s spirit, in revenge for slights and snubs, and in his uneasiness he emitted what we all called his ‘dying camel noise’. Then, in 1960, came Nye Bevan’s cremation, a nondenominational mishmash conducted by a moth-eaten old cleric of uncertain sectarian bias. As the somnolent affair drew to its weary close, he suddenly announced, in a surprisingly loud voice: ‘Let us Pray!’ There was a moment of superb confusion. The atheists remained grimly seated. The Catholics knelt. The Protestants slumped into that half-seated, half-kneeling posture I call ‘the heretic’s crouch’. And the Jews stood up and put their hats on. How Nye would have laughed, as I did. But his relict, Jenny Lee, was not amused.
Since those days I have attended innumerable such occasions, not counting religious ones. In some I have been a participant to the extent of giving the memorial address. This can be a daunting test, not so much of one’s oratory as of one’s morale. When my old friend Hugh Fraser died I had to speak of him from the main pulpit of Westminster Cathedral, an enormous edifice which makes the Abbey, by comparison, seem tiny, and is difficult to heat adequately, the architect, John Francis Bentley, not being much interested in such matters since he was really a designer of church furniture and sacred vessels. The day I spoke, England was in the grip of an intense frost — it was a period when the fashionable climate worry was not Global Warming but the New Ice Age. I was not wearing an overcoat, thinking it would be awkward, just a black three-piece suit; and I trembled with cold. There came into my head a passage in one of the letters of Sydney Smith, Canon of St Paul’s, in which he described how cold it was preaching beneath its dome so that fragments of his homily froze instantly as he uttered them, drifting upwards, ‘only to unfreeze in more genial weather, several weeks later, and surprise the congregation to hear pious exhortations and dogmatic assertions issuing from remote corners of the vaulting’.
In memorial services in those days there were regular participants. A tall nonentity of exceptional distinction, in a faultless tail coat, stood in for the Queen. If the deceased was grand enough, on the left in the middle of the front pew was always Roy Jenkins, especially in his reincarnation as Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. ‘And who is he representing?’ people would ask, to which I replied, ‘Oh, Civilisation, of course.’ In the middle of the back row, if the occasion had political or racing implications, stood the tall, lugubrious figure of Colonel, later Lord, Wigg, often a disturbing presence, since he recognised no right to silence at a memorial ceremony, and if the building belonged to the Church of England, he would point out any irregularities in the rubric or ceremonial with the loud comment: ‘It’s illegal, you know. It’s all illegal.’ Then, for good measure: ‘ILLEGAL!’ Some time ago Angela Huth published a collection of memorial addresses, in which one of mine figures. It is a minor art form. Ideally it should contain 1. no reference at all to the person delivering it; 2. one, but only one, characteristic anecdote; 3. a joke, in sturdy taste, early on to raise a laugh; 4. another joke, a bit rougher, towards the end; 5. a sentence calculated to squeeze a tear out of normally dry eyes; 6. one short but emphatic passage recalling the awesomeness, finality and dignity of Death; and, finally, it should be three or four minutes shorter than people expect.
Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in her reincarnation as Baroness Asquith, was also a familiar figure in the left-hand pews. She used to say: ‘I refused to go to Lloyd George’s, if he had one. Or Baldwin’s. I went to Neville Chamberlain’s because he was not totally devoid of conscience, morality and good nature, though not many would agree with me. I even went to Margot’s. Well, I had to, hadn’t I? A memorial service, whether of faith or fatalistic, is an important event, not just for the dead but for the survivors. You want to see who is there, who is not there, by design, inadvertence, or debility, and who is there maliciously or gloatingly. It is a verdict on the person gone, and those about to go, and fearful of going. In a sense it is a premonitory symptom, a dress rehearsal, an adumbration of the Last Judgment.’ Just so, though I prefer Philip Hope-Wallace’s more charitable saying that memorial services are ‘the cocktail parties of the aged’. I do not want one — forbid it, indeed. What I want is a proper requiem mass, in Latin, with the whole of the Dies Irae, not in the settings by Mozart or Verdi, marvellous though they are, but in plain chant. Words and music forming in conjunction the supreme mediaeval work of art. If this is not done I shall return to haunt those responsible.
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