Notebook
The twenty-eighth Konigswinter Conference was held at Oxford last week. This is an annual Anglo-German get-together to discuss the problems of the day. The political tone is set by the MPs (fourteen of them) and MdB (German MPs, twelve of them), who might be described as extreme moderates of every party. The programme and the discussions have an air of profound seriousness which is perhaps unfairly associated with the Germans: 'European forecast, cloudy, outlook uncertain'; 'Unemployment: what's to be done?' It is easy to smile (not only at Mr Robin Day apparently listening on his headphones to the German simultaneous translation when Professor Rolf Dahrendorf was speaking in fluent English). But it isn't the seriousness that worries me, it is the hopelessness. Europe faces serious problems, Great Britain acute ones. Is anything, really, likely to be done to remedy them by high-minded seminars on 'the East-West Balance'?
One of the noblest passages in English history, it used to be said, was the story of Lancashire during the American Civil war. The cotton mills traded of course with the southern, plantation states. The blockade by the Union interrupted this trade and brought great hardship to Lancashire. Despite this, the mill workers were devoted to the cause of the Union and liberty. Their sterling altruism has often been admired, by Gladstone, Marx, and later by the young Harold Wilson. Sir Harold often said that it was this story which inspired him in early life and then throughout his political career. It was to him an example of the innate nobility of character of the British working man. He even used the story to justify, in a way which I did not easily follow, his support for the Nigerian campaign of starving the Biafrans to death. A new book, The Hungry Mills by Norman Longmate (Temple Smith £7.00), looks at this version of history and explodes it. In fact Lancashire was enthusiastic for the Confederate cause at least until 1863. In that year cynics will note that the tide of war swung clearly in favour of the North. The story of Lancashire's support for the North was a myth invented for his own purposes by John Bright. It would be interesting to have Sir Harold's views on Longmate's book—and on the wider subject of working-class altruism then and now. But I don't suppose he has much time for reading.
Fashions come and go in journalism as elsewhere. I have not seen for a while 'Department of. . .' in a caption, nor Will the real . . . stand up'. But in the last fortnight, in
four different weeklies, these headlines have been used: 'Whose Israel?', `Whose music?', 'Whose civil liberties?' and `Whose football violence?' One was in the Spectator, possibly written by me — I forget. Whose headline writing? (or who's headline writing?) indeed. In collective defence of the scribblers it should be said that writing headlines is like writing blurbs: only those who have never tried it imagine that it is easy.
There are plans at Broadcasting House to change (yet again) the radio news programmes. The first thing they might look at is the news bulletins. These are now a sort of government information service. Last week, on Radios 3, 4 and 2, on three different days, the news led with 'major new export order for Britain' stories. Even the most important of these was scarcely the main story of the day. One was gross barrel-scraping. What is the BBC up to? Perhaps a more accurate comparison is not with a controlled news agency, but with the old British Movietone News: frivolous, pointless stories as long as they are 'bright' and undemanding. The same goes for BBC TV. I laughed as much as anyone when the Cambridge Boat Race crew sank, but was it really the most important story for the television news to lead with that evening?
The last note breaks a promise. When I last wrote about the BBC I made an absurd slip. I accused Mr Aubrey Singer, the new Controller of BBC Radio, of having been previously Controller of Radio 2 rather than of BBC 2, a significant difference. My apologies to him and to the BBC friends to whom I vowed to lay off their Corporation for a while (but what are promises for if not to be broken?) It should be added that the BBC still broadcasts matchless news on the World Service for insomniacs and for those with short wave receivers. It also provides my favourite programme, 'Your Schubert Song' last thing at night on Radio 3. The range of singers has been remarkable. Recently we have heard Melchior, from 1942, and a 1944 recording of Julius Patzak singing the early 'Abschied': an astonishing performance.
There has never been a time when the range of films on in London was so limited and so depressing. On the one hand Emmanuelle in Entebbe, on the other something called Fear Eats Wolf the Goalkeeper, a very long, very cerebral, very slow German affair ('The camera is held motionless on a blank wall until a point of unbearable tension Is reached' — Guardian). But then there is the Starlight Club. The Starlight, which I have only recently discovered, is a mini-cinema in Mayfair showing movies of the golden age, two every evening. This week we have had Swing Time (Astaire and Rogers singing 'A fine romance' in the same wintry climate as the streets outside were witnessing), The Four Feathers (Ralph Richardson and C. Aubrey Smith, that is), Dark Victory (Bette Davis, Bogart), and Mr and Mrs Smith. The most recent film shown has been Myra Breckinridge, appropriately enough in view of the theory which Mr Gore Vidal celebrates, that the only movies worth watching are those that came from Hollywood from 1930 to 1948.
Sir Clough Williams-Ellis was, as the obituaries put it, the last great eccentric country gentleman. I had some experience of this. Some years ago friends of mine took a cottage on the Williams-Ellis estate, high up a Merionethshire valley. I drove to join them in my motor-car of the moment, of the old banger variety but mine for all that. On the way the big end or some such moving part went into a decline and although I just made it to the cottage the car would go no further. At the end of my visit I took a train from Pendryndeudrath to London, meaning to return and to repair the car. However, SII Clough spied this vulgar mechanical intrusion on his land and did not like what he saw: at his orders, two of his men pushed the car down the nearest disused mine-shaft. At the time I thought that this was taking seigneurial eccentricity too far. Looking back It seems rather a fine gesture. Sir Clough (why was connected to the Spectator through los wife Amabel, the daughter of St Loc Strachey) was a man with a life-long concern for the preservation of.what was left of England. Our unhappy age might have soured him, but he devoted himself to halting change and decay where he could, and palpably did more good than harm. Of how many men can that be said?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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