MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN the Evening Standard of last Friday I observed with pleasure the basis I a cartoon by Low depicting the death and burial of Colonel Blimp. I was glad to feel that this stale old man was at last to be laid to rest. But when I examined the cartoon more closely I noticed that, whereas Sir Stafford Cripps was conducting the funeral with stiff decency, Low himself (in the guise of a grave- digger) was evidently determined to exhume the Colonel so soon as Sir Stafford's back was turned. I should be sorry indeed if Colonel Blimp were to be with us throughout the remainder of the war. For although I should be the last to disparage attacks upon the inelastic mind, yet I do not feel that in a very dangerous war it is profitable constantly to suggest to amateurs that all pro- fessionals are fools. I do not blame Low for having invented Colonel Blimp. The cartoons which centred around that grotesque figure were amusing and useful for the first three hundred times. Nor do I question the cartoonist's habit of distorting proportions. It is the misfortune of all caricatures that, in snatching at an eccentricity, they create a type. I am merely appealing to Low to permit this old bore to rest in peace. Colonel Blimp, if the truth be told, is a figment of Low's mind. I am prepared to believe that when he was a lad at the Boys' School, Christchurch, N.Z., David Low really did imagine that Colonel Blimp existed in real life ; I am prepared to believe that at Sydney, or in the boat which brought him from Australia to Fleet Street, he did in fact encounter an old gentleman whose moustaches and opinions suggested to him the elderly grotesque whom he has, year in and year out, rendered so distressingly familiar. I suppose that were I today to comb this island with the finest of combs I might find seven or even eight old gentlemen who really did exclaim, " By gad! Sir! " and who really did hold and express the fantastic views which Low attributes to the late Colonel. Yet I should wager that out of my eight discoveries, six at least would prove on investigation to be, not colonels, but unsuccessful publicans, actors or insurance agents, who in the course of their self- indulgent but frustrated lives had never experienced either the benefits of education or that modesty which comes from ruling other men. Colonel Blimp is as much a freak as the man who tames spiders and' whispers endearments to them in the dark. Yet by constant repetition Low has managed to con- vince many men, women and children that the Colonel is in fact representative, not merely of the unenlightened in life and politics, but of authority itself.
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