A golden rail-pass in the fob is a perk worth having
There are certain words, carrying overtones of money and privilege, which stir up strong emotions. One is ‘private income’. ‘What’s held me back,’ says Uncle Giles in The Music of Time, ‘is that I’ve never had a private income.’ J.B. Priestley used to say, disdainfully, ‘He’s got a private income voice.’ There were various euphemisms used by the squeamish to whom talking about money was indelicate. About 1870, someone noting a list of clergymen at Lambeth Palace inquired what was the significance of the letters ‘W.H.M.’ after the names of some of them. He was told they stood for ‘wife has means’. Another such emotive phrase is ‘expense account’. I remember when I was first given an official expense account, and how proud I felt: I had arrived. Now such things are discredited, regarded as vaguely dishonourable, though doubtless continuing in one form or another. The old accountant at Granada TV in Manchester, very sharp with expenses claims, used to say: ‘There’s no expense accounts in Heaven, tha’ knowst,’ adding: ‘Or in Hell, neither, lad.’ Another fighting word, or rather snarling word, is ‘perks’. It is the abbreviation of perquisite, from the Latin perquerere, and is defined as ‘any casual emolument, fee or profit, attached to an office or position in addition to salary or wages’. Bishop Jewell, defending the breach with Rome, referred angrily to ‘the yearly Preventions, Dispensations, Pluralities, Trialities, Totquol-Tolerations, for his Bulles, his Seals, his Signatures for Eating Flesh, for Egs, for White meat, to Priests, Concubines and other like merchandise’. But the system was much older than that. Dark references in the hieroglyphs suggest that behind the gigantic nobility of the pyramids at Giza, and their mortuary chapels, lay an intricate system of perks, shared from immemorial times by priests, scribes and even works-foremen, not in money but in funerary goods, embalming fluids, mummy bandages and the like saleable items. The feudal system was a mass of perks, exacted by the strong from those immediately below them. If you were a tenant-in-chief, and your daughter married, you had to pay the king his perk. In Queen Elizabeth’s reign, perks were defined as ‘advantages and profits that come to a manor by casualty and not yearly: as Escheats, Hariotes, Relyefs, wayfes, strays, [and] amercements’.
The polite word was ‘fines’, which survived in the modern legal system, as anyone who has a car in London knows only too well. But perks invaded every nook and cranny of the social system, and were particularly common in large private households. A tract of 1869 called The Seven Curses of London refers to the ‘amazing flexibility’ of the word. It applied to ‘such unconsidered trifles as wax candle ends, and may be stretched to cover the larcenous abstraction by our man-servant of forgotten coats and vests’. Chaucer had a perk of a large quantity of vintage wine from Edward III’s cellars. Ralegh was a notorious perk-collector, especially of venison. The duchess who was Mistress of the Queen’s Wardrobe never had to pay for her own garments, if she was sharp enough. Does a system of perks still exist among the servants at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle? You bet it does. Anything old attracts a barnacle layer of perks. So I am amazed that anyone should be surprised at the extravagant system of perks now being revealed among members of both Houses of Parliament.
Perks are especially common in transport. They may be perfectly legal, of course. My most treasured perk is my London public transport pass. Like exemption from the tyrannical BBC licence fee, it is one of the few perks of old age. It not only saves me a lot of money but enables me to avoid all the tedious business of queuing for tickets and fiddling with coins. It is so valuable that I fear it will shortly be abolished, in the way that all good things in life are, sooner or later. Any inquiry into the transport perks politicians grant each other would reveal some surprising deals. One senior Cabinet minister, long since retired, was given by the prime minister of the day the perk of a car and driver for life, the taxpayer of course footing the bill, not less than £30,000 a year. In the United States former presidents get free travel, by Air Force helicopters, at need. That is ‘security’ of course, and behind the façade of security a complete new system of perks has evolved recently.
A splendid old-world perk with a touch of class about it was awarded by the Great Western Railway to its directors. It consisted of a solid gold pass which enabled the director to travel free, first-class, anywhere on the rail network in Britain. This perk was ended by the second world war, but existing recipients kept their beautiful gold tokens, whose potency survived the coming of British Rail, as long as they lived. They are now obsolete because all the GWR directors are dead. The last to use it, so far as I know, was Harold Macmillan, a careful man, as they say, who always travelled by public transport if he could get it free. He loved flourishing his gold pass from his waistcoat pocket to ticket collectors in the 1970s and even the 1980s. If he came across an inquisitive BR official, born in Bombay, say, long after the GWR ceased to exist, he would deliver a short — well, not so short — lecture on the history of the railway system from the formation of the Big Four to the emergence of British Rail, with descants on certain perquisites (the word ‘perk’ was an abomination to him) which emerged in time. Meanwhile the queue behind him at the barrier lengthened, and there was much gawping. Macmillan enjoyed these occasions. I have never known anyone who enjoyed old age more. Or its perks.
John Betjeman, as poet laureate, describes in one of his letters his perks of a certain modest quantity of fine wine from the Queen. He thought so highly of it that he arranged to buy some more from the same supplier. Of course the quantity was tiny compared with what Chaucer got, but then his entitlement of the perk was not the reward for his verse but due to his position as ranger of one of the king’s forests, a job he lost, I think, when there was some shift in power at court.
It is of the nature of perks to be precarious. That is part of their illicit charm. They do make the beneficiaries happy. Parsons were much more content when they collected tithes. Being paid a salary by the Church Commissioners is not at all the same thing. Does the Archbishop of Canterbury still get his annual present of venison from the Queen? Maybe he ought to share it with his mullahs.
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