S tr ix

Dons and the Heliograph .

' WANT some cleft sticks, please.' Thus the hero of Scoop, I a mild, foolish young man, enrolled under a misappre- hension by Lord Copper to act as a war correspondent for The Daily Beast in an Abyssinia-type conflict, stated a basic requirement.

`What the devil for?' asked the retired explorer whose task it was to advise on tropical equipment in the emporium where William Boot was, in perfectly good faith, spending the Beast's money on astrolabes, humidors and Union Jacks.

'Oh, just for my dispatches, you know.' After bridling dangerously at his other gear ('Monsieur, il ne Taut pas se moquer des douanes'), the French Customs saw the point of the cleft sticks almost immediately.

'Bs sons pour porter, les depeches,' Boot told them.

'C'est un sport?'

'Oui, oui, certainement.'

* * * Try as they may, successive Postmasters-General cannot entirely conceal from us the fact that we live in an age of steadily improving communications. When Mr. Evelyn Waugh wrote Scoop in 1933, cleft sticks were already so obsolete as to be a joke—the sort of joke which the solah topee is well on the way to becoming. (What, incidentally, was the point of the cleft stick? It would surely have been difficult to devise a more Precarious and less weather-proof method of conveying a written message across the great open spaces.) I do not know whether in those days the heliograph was still being used by the Indian Army, who could generally rely on the indispens- able—or so I have always understood—co-operation of the slat; but certainly the Army in this country communicated. When in the field, very largely by waving small blue and white flags. These made, when properly handled, a sort of off-crisp noise, like a highly strung man saying shrimp-shrimp with his mouth full. In civilian life there were still plenty of two-piece telephones, and I do not think that it was possible to send a letter to America by air mail or that pulpits had yet been wired for sound.

Among the more important media of intercommunication 1 Can call to mind only two which during the last twenty years have remained impervious to the forces of innovation : they are the hunting horn and the university lecture. The former, although (like, if it comes to that. the latter) much more liable to be drowned by the noise of flying machines than it was in 1933, still performs its functions admirably and would seem to be above criticism. The latter is now under fire in the correspondence columns of The Times. The mild controversy began, as ,far as I can make out, when somebody wrote to suggest that lecturers, instead of subjecting their audiences to the distracting necessity of taking notes, should distribute a Printed précis of what they were going to say, and thus estab- lish in the body of the hall that atmosphere of relaxed, receptive Concentration in which, no doubt, many of its occupants follow the fortunes of the Grove Family.

This proposition has not, so far, been very well received. The general feeling seems to be that the printed hand-out, however appropriate at the performance of (say) a Chinese opera, consorts ill with the mystique of lecturing; even the reading of notes at dictation speed is mal vu by some purists, and the consensus of opinion is that a lecturer ought—not to Put too fine a point upon it—to lecture. I endorse this view. It is true that, when in state I attended very few lectures indeed and can remember nothing whatever about any of them; but now I have a firm if abstract belief in a good lecturer's powers to transmit to his hearers the wisdom and discrimination which I, foolishly, never gave him the chance of transmitting to me. This belief is illogically strengthened by the fact that the lecturer—like, for that matter, the hunting horn—now seems to be part of an older order of things, to be already descending a gentle slope of obsolescence. The middle-aged and the old will, I am sure, always be ready to go, and even to pay for going, to listen to lectures by brave men who have climbed mountains, or clever ladies who have written books. But will the young continue indefinitely to accept as satisfactory a method of communication which other developments in the same field will tend to relegate more and more into the cleft-stick class?

I suppose part of the answer is that they will always flock to a lecturer of (say) Lord David Cecil's calibre: but there cannot, even in the best-regulated universities, be many such. Once a cheap, portable recording machine comes on the market the non-spell-binders may find their audiences reduced to t handful of undergraduates, each representing a syndicate which has invested in one of these devices and whose members prefer to hear his arid though, instructive discourse in their own time, and without a long bicycle ride at either end of it. For all that it is now, I believe, called an epidiascope, the magic lantern must be declining into the cleft-stick category.

My own occasional appearances as a lecturer have generally been supported by this old-fashioned contrivance, the aspidistra, as it were, of the entertainment world. My experi- ences, though always alarming and sometimes risible, pale into insignificance compared with the sufferings of the folk out in front; and my sole, tenuous claim to distinction in this field is that I delivered what I am pretty sure was the only lecture to be interrupted by a member of the audience in Hitler's Berlin. The lecture dealt mainly with a remote part of China. At that time a somewhat romantic interest in Asia and Africa was encouraged among the Nazi avant-garde, and a ridiculous Hollywood film called Lives of a Bengal Lancer was being shown to the SS as part of their training syllabus; my audience included large numbers of enormous young SS officers, wear- ing black overcoats and silly little daggers.

I had been booming resignedly away for some time, while the magic lantern projected endless pictures of tumble-down bridges, lorries stuck in the mud. scrofulous soldiers and emaciated camels, when there was a sudden susurrus in the body of the hall, now of course in darkness. Somebody switched on the lights to reveal a very small Chinese lodging, with great composure, a protest. 'The pictures,' in effect he said, 'show only the more backward parts of my country, ignoring its cultural heritage, its young but vigorous industries, its . . .' and so on. He started a counter-lecture.

All round him the SS sat in a trance of horror and bewilder- ment; the situation, for them, was unprecedented, nightmarish.

Rather reluctantly, I pacified the staunch Chinese with a few ill-chosen words, and then continued—perforce—to show pic- tures, of increasingly derelict and woebegone aspects of his motherland.

He was, it turned out, a student of constitutional law. It seemed an odd thing to be studying in Germany in 1937.