SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
The past week's reshuffle at the very top of the civil service is of much significance. On the heels of devaluation, events have now brought about a completely new Treasury team : new Chancellor, new (from 1 May) permanent economic head of the department. Mr Jenkins we know well and will doubtless soon know better whether we like it or not. Sir Douglas Allen, however, isn't even a known name outside Whitehall. I can't claim his acquaintance, but I've been hearing a lot about him in recent days from those who can, and a rather interesting picture emerges. He is evidently a man of notable scepticism. He is coolly sceptical about many' things that might in a general way be called sacred cows: about party slogans and promises, about Britain's ability to sustain a 'world role' East of Suez, about the possi- bility of governments engineering major trans- formations in society by dashing strokes of policy. He is renowned for his awareness of the unknowable nature of side-effects in gov- ernment action: if you do X you may correctly predict that y will follow but most probably you won't foresee A, B and C at all. Since the priceless quality of sane scepticism has been miserably scarce of late, it seems. a stroke of luck that one of its mosttough-minded ex- ponents has opportunely arrived at the Treasury summit just now. There is also the convenient fact that Allen's particular speciality is public spending: he's said to have been sounding dire warnings for years. about the manner in which this particular snowball has been gathering size and pace. In short, White- hall expects he will do rather well. Whitehall is also speculating about who will take his place at the head of the DEA. I'm told that if Mr Wilson's, and not the official machine's, is the decisive voice, then Mr William Nield. who years ago worked in Transport House and is at present in the Cabinet Office, must be considered a strong runner.
School report
I can easily guess what prompted the Head- masters' Conference to burst into print this week urging that the raising of the school- leaving age should not be deferred. Such a cut wouldn't affect the public schools at all, of course: but what the headmasters are very much preoccupied with is attracting a little unaccustomed progressive favour to their insti- tutions. Hence this kind of public relations ven- ture. The point is that some time this year the Public Schools Commission will make its report. It may be months away yet, but already informed opinion has reached pretty definite conclusions about the main recommendations to be expected. The zealots who hope for some draconian act of abolition will, of course, be disappointed, but what at present seems likely to emerge is (1) a recommendation to abolish all fiscal privileges enjoyed by public schools; and (2) a recommendation 'hat a larger number of places at public schools, perhaps even half of them, should be taker by pupils paid for by the state.
The second of these lc as seems unlikely to make any progress at 01 in the foreseeable future: with the state eee-alon system crying out for money, it would h 'unacy to spend-large sums in paying fees at i-riependent schools in the name of integratio- However, the first recommendation, if it rroves to be correctly forecast, would no doute ',peal to the Govern- ment. It would mean the -nd of rating advan- tages for public schools the end of favour- able tax treatment of the- endowment incomes; and according to one in horitative calculation the schools altogether weir(' have to find another £5,000,000 a year. Fees t uld go up, of course. A few of the sr-7-01-r. le-. ;ecure schools rrig1q be knocked out; the rest would no doubt survive. however much parents groaned at the extra cost. The main result of this bit of aptaied egalitarian- ism, in fact, would be to make public schools even more exclusively the preserve of the rich than they are now: a nice little example of the side-effect problem 1 referred to earlier.
Dead language
When 1 contemplate the disappearance of the English countryside over the next few decades
I wonder what the process will do to litera- ture. What, to take a small example, will that marvellous book, Gilbert White's Natural History of Se/borne, mean to people whose
only notion of a wood is -a crowded patch of afforested amenity land, equipped with car
parks, lavatories and ice-cream stalls, wedged between eight-lane highways and unending suburbia, and patrolled incessantly overhead by Jumbo Jets from the Peter Masefield Memorial Airport? A fully urbanised environment im- plies, as a sort of fringe unbenefit, an enormous
devitalising of the literature of the past : picture baffled future .generations reading Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy without any direct experience at all of the natural world which fed those writers' imaginations. The texts will abound in .obscure or meaningless allu- sions, and scholars will be called upon more and more for explanatory notes to illuminate difficult words like 'meadow' or 'skylark.' And in the case of someone like Gilbert White, the whole motivation and content of his life will be beyond the range of ordinary understanding.
White is in my mind just now because of a visit to this month's small display in his honour at the British Museum. By means of books and manuscripts it powerfully evokes the life and world of the great parson-naturalist. It's a distant world, of course. White combined his genius as a naturalist with his lifelong love of his Hampshire parish. (And that's another loss literature will have to bear—that profound attachment to place which has been such a fruitful spring.) But though remote, White's world is still recognisable: reading Se/borne one knows the England he describes, even if it survives only in besieged fragments. When the fragments have been obliterated, a Gilbert White exhibition will have to take its place in the museum beside the relics from the Egypt of the Pharaohs.
Sargent's life
My colleague Charles Reid surfaced from his
immersion in half a million words of notes about the late Sir Malcolm Sargent long enough this week to tell me that he's getting on briskly with his biography of that extraordinary musi- cal figure. He hopes to have it finished (and thus to be able to return to regular music criticism) in the spring. Sargent's career was of exceptional length and complexity. He went to a penny-a-week church school at Stamford, his father was a coal-merchant's clerk, he made his first public appearance at the age of nine as a pianist. From this unpromising start his career prospered in all sorts of directions: he was as much at home conducting huge choirs of unemployed Welsh miners in the 'thirties as he was benignly ruling the Proms or sparkling at fashionable London dinner-tables. Yet not long before he died he told Charles Reid that he had never sought a job in his life: he had always been asked to take on work which he wanted to do. It is, I suppose, a lucky man's recipe for a happy life.
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