A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE Prime Minister dealt rather airily with the case of General Gough in the House of Commons on Tuesday. It is all very well to say that it should be ample reward for Sir Hubert Gough that he has been vindicated by the verdict of his fellow-countrymen. Sir Hubert was com- mander of the Fifth Army. The commanders of the other armies got peerages and £30,000 apiece ; Sir Hubert got half-pay and obloquy. Now the Prime Minister under whom the General was " unstuck," and who did as much as anyone to create the impression of his failure, has handsomely admitted that he was, quite mistaken. If Mr. Lloyd George is not in a position to make restitution, his successor, the present Prime Minister, is. But all the present Prime Minister has to say is " What a happy man General Gough must be." He may be a happy man, but he is also, if not a poor man, at any rate poorer by £30,000 than if he had what now appears to be his deserts. Justice is something the people of this country prize highly, and it looks very much as if justice was being denied to General Gough, Who—it is a largish question—has been the greatest benefactor to medicine in any age ? According to Sir Farquhar Buzzard (who said so at the dinner of the Council of the British Medical Association on Tuesday) it is Lord Nuffield. Certainly a strong case can be made for that, but after all Lord Nuffield has indirectly given doctors more work to do than most men. It is a pity the dinner was not better reported, for there were some neat hits in the speeches. Sir Farquhar Buzzard, proposing the guests, spoke of his embarrassment in coupling the name of the largest motor-car manufacturer in the country with that of the President of the Anti:. Noise Society (Lord Horder), and Mr. H. L. Eason, the Vice-Chancellor of London University, referring appositely to the correspondence in The Times on " Buzzards in the Home Counties," mentioned that he had observed to Lord Nuffield that buzzards were birds of prey, to which the donor of a million and a quarter pounds to enable Sir Farquhar's dreams to be realised had replied feelingly that he was fully conscious of that. Altogether Lord Nuffield, who was present, was well in the picture. I was glad to be a fellow-guest myself.
* The Madrid radio is singularly interesting these days, as anyone who knows a little Spanish and has a good enough receiving-set can discover for himself. At the week-end, when the papers were full of rumours that the city had fallen, the radio, with its tumult of Com- munist harangues and exhortations, was proof enough of what the situation was. On Monday things were normal enough for a musical programme (with, among other things, the barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann) to be included.' On Tuesday there was a new note of exhilaration ; the city was holding out ; the insurgents were being thrown back ; the population was commended for its courage ; orders regarding the surrender of arms by private persons were interspersed, and I liked especially one announcement, sufficiently arresting at such a moment, that " Comrade Blank has lost his wallet con- taining 45 pesetas. Will anyone finding it return it [to such and such an address] as this amount represents the whole of this brave comrade's capital." Apart from this the whole thing is a little like listening in to a murder.
* * Colonel R. H. Elliot will be greatly missed by members of that most interesting body, the Magic Circle, of whose Occult Committee he had been chairman for seventeen years. He knew as much about the Indian rope trick as any man living—so far as it is possible to have knowledge about something that never happened. For Colonel Elliot was firmly convinced that the trick never did happen, and he got as near to proving a negative as a negative ever can be proved. At a meeting of the Magic Circle which I attended as his guest two or three years ago, it was demonstrated (a) that not one of the many alleged eye-witnesses of the trick who had submitted themselves to examination by the Circle had been able to establish a convincing case, and (b) that some of the most influential men in India, both British and Indian, who had expressed an eager desire to see the trick had failed to find anyone to perform it. There was also the evidence of photographs of the trick, which showed everything they should show except the rope and the climbing boy. After all that I should need to see the trick more than once myself before I believed it.
* * • Strangely enough I had never been in the streets for the two-minutes silence till this year. Do those, I wonder, who have done it a dozen times get the thrill still ? For a thrill there unquestionably is in the com- pleteness of the cessation of all noise. I stood on Wednesday at the junction of two great Central London thoroughfares. Thousands of people were massed there, and there was less sound than you would hear on Dartmoor at midnight. A dog's bark, a child's cry— apart from that not so much as a cough. The traffic lights that persisted in futile changes and a winking sign that kept on winking seemed to be doing something sacrilegious. But I should have liked an odd hundred of the crowd to jot down on paper what they were thinking about—and give it to me for this column.
* * * * Habits and hygiene go ill together. And habits are more often than not unaccountable. Else why should young women with open necks be matched by young men swathed in mufflers—unless it be (as it well may) that young women are more sensible than young men. A tweed jacket and flannel trousers, it seems, must be crowned, by some inexorabh law, with several yards of woollen scarf which a bronchitis-patient would gird at as an intolerable curse. Surely Sir Kingsley Wood's Fitter Britain will be a "searfless Britain—even if it is
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