Postscript . .
SOMEONE must have gone to enormous trouble be- fore Tuesday's impres- sive Albert Hall rally of the Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. Who would have thought that twelve speakers on one subject could have given their testimony in turn with- out repeating each other's arguments, or would hold the attention, throughout, of an audience of something like 5,000 of the con- verted? But not only were the speakers admir- ably assorted—Lady Violet and Johnny Dank- worth, the band leader, among them; Arnold Wesker and Gerald Gardiner; and along with a Labour MP and three well-known Liberals, even a Tory MP (Mr. Robert Mathew, making his first public appearance for the campaign, and all honour to him)—but care had been taken that each pressed home one point, and each a different one. (The League of Empire Loyalists pressed their point home, too. 'Hang Macmillan' they cried: 'Hang MacLeod.' This, I think, would be a matter merely of amending the Homicide Act: they should have been lobbying in the House.) It was a pretty overwhelmingly middle-class gathering, thus proving that the Sunday Express was right, if only in one respect, in the article it published beforehand, sneering at the 'thousand or more ardent-eyed middle-class people' who would 'jostle into the Albert Hall.' I can't imagine what seems to the Sunday Express to be wrong with the middle classes in this context : haven't most of the social reforms of the past century and a half been instigated and carried through by the middle classes, and would the paper have thought any better of the campaign if it had been a trade-union movement? I think the Sunday Express is more respectful about the middle classes when addressing their advertisers. (Come to that, the chairman of the Committee of Honour is Lord Harewood—not noticeably less aristocratic than Mr. John Gordon, I should have thought.) The importance of rallies such as that at the Albert Hall (and an equally successful overflow meeting, I hear, at Kensington Town Hall) is not that they make converts, but that they show the Government the strength of feeling in the country among people who feel, and the trend of thought among those capable of thinking. Not even this Government will suppose that the sense of values of the articulate public is that of the Times, which gave five inches low down on a middle page to the Albert Hall rally, and a column and a half, across three columns, leading the Home News page, with picture and a paragraph on the centre page, to the foxhunters' great victory at the RSPCA meeting.
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A friend assures me that he overheard this exchange between two women sitting behind him in a Dublin tram the other day: `Poor Eichmann—alone, among all those Jews.' `Yes. Reminds you of Our Lord. doesn't it?'
Many people must find, as I do. that their tastes within a certain type of wine change with the seasons, as well as with personal whims-- `bigger' red wines in the winter than in the sum- mer, and so on. As the warmer weather comes round, I fancy an aperitif sherry rather lighter and drier than those I sometimes enjoy on a cold winter's evening. I was sent a sample the other day of the Montilla that T. A. Layton, of Duke Street, Manchester Square, sells at 16s. 6d. a bottle, and it seemed to fit the bill. It is Spanish-bottled, and Mr. Layton claims for his particular Montilla that, unlike others, it is weaker in alcohol than most sherries, and that it is 'the driest fortified wine in Europe.' Cer- tainly, it is very light, crisp and clean and, well- chilled, makes an admirable appetiser. Montilla is fairly rare in this country (though Harvey's, of Bristol, and Hedges and Butler each li one, too), and is not, in the very strictest sense of the word, really a 'sherry' at all, for it doesn't come from the delimited area around Jerez, but from near Cordoba, a hundred miles or so up the valley of the Guadalquivir. But in every other sense it is what we mean by a sherry--indeed, some scholars say that Amontillado is so-called because it represents the attempt of the growers of Jerez to make something `Montilla-ish.'
CYRIL RAY
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