SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

For some reason the historians of the last war don't seem to have gone very deeply into the fact, a remarkable one in view of what happened in the 1914-18 conflict, that none of the belligerents made use of gas as a weapon. A. J. P. Taylor, in his English History /9/4-J94S:speculates briefly on the reasons and concludes: 'Most probably the explanation was the simple calculation that, weight for weight, high explosive was more effective than gas in killing people.' It seems a reasonable assessment of the manner in which such matters are usually decided in wartime. All the same, there was in existence the Geneva Protocol which expressly pro- hibited the use of gas. A large number of countries, including Britain, had ratified this, and although solemn pledges tend to get by- passed in wartime it is reasonable to suppose it played some part in keeping that particular horror off the battlefields.

This makes it all the more distasteful that the British government should now, forty years after the Protocol was ratified, take the lead in repudiating an important part of that humane agreement. It is a dismal episode, and not least because it shows the Labour party wriggling in embarrassed fashion out of a high-minded commitment which it undertook in its younger and more idealistic days. Perhaps this is what Mr Wilson meant the other day when he boasted that he had converted his party into a 'normal govern- ment party', for it is quite easy to imagine the Conservatives taking much the same action.

Forty years on

The essential point is that Mr Michael Stewart (for the Government) now maintains that cs and similar up-to-date forms of tear gas are 'outside the scope' of the Geneva Protocol and therefore not prohibited by it. But if you look up the statements made to the Commons in 1930 by Arthur Henderson (Foreign Secretary) and Hugh Dalton (Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office), it becomes frankly impossible to see how Mr Stewart can square this change of attitude with the promises then given—or, indeed, with his conscience. For it was made absolutely plain that the pledge given by Ramsay MacDonald's government meant a renunciation of all forms of 'tear gas' as well as more poisonous gases._ One Labour backbencher, a Mr Freeman, expressed anx- iety on this very point. 'My hon. Friend is under a misapprehension,' replied Arthur Henderson soothingly. 'Tear gases and shells Producing poisonous fumes are prohibited under the Geneva _Protocol.' As, of course, they were: and no one has subsequently claimed otherwise until Mr Stewart decided to do so.

He chose to make his announcement in a written parliamentary answer, a form which of course allows neither supplementary ques- tions nor debate. And the most baffling thing about it was that he actually quoted a 1930 statement about the prohibition of tear gases, and then added: 'That is still the Government's position'. It was baffling because he at once Went on to explain that it was not still the Government's position, since the latest forms of tear gas were deemed to be somehow different and not prohibited. The value of such verbal gym- nastics escapes me. Perhaps they have become habitual to Mr Stewart.

Of course, the Americans are using vast quantities of cs gas in Vietnam and no doubt this explains Britain's obliging reinter- pretation of a binding treaty. But it is hardly surprising that there should be in- dications of misgivings within the Govern- ment. What, for example, are the feelings of Lord Chalfont, the disarmament specialist? And what of the chemical-biological warfare treaty the Government is piously promoting? Honourable Labour men outside the Government, such as Mr Philip Noel-Baker, have made their disgust plain. By my reckoning, there is only one member of that 1930 government still in the House of Commons. He is Mr Shinwell, who was then a junior minister for mines. I wonder whether he can stomach this partial repudia- tion of a treaty in which he and his col- leagues took such pride in those distant days.

Crowd effect

In all its ups and downs the sac has surely never been in such deep trouble as it is at present, with a large part of its senior sound radio staff in a state of open and public revolt. Whoever could have imagined, in the palmy days of 'the Corporation', seeing those letters in the Times in which sac employees excoriated their superiors for killing off the Third Programme and lowering radio stan- dards generally! If things have reached that stage at Broadcasting House, then anything is possible—even, I suppose, a last-minute climbdown by the management.

The letters to the press were, of course, a major breach of BBC staff rules. They made me think of the civil servant who, as 'Robert Odams', last year published some pretty damning accounts of the frauds being practised upon the Supplementary Benefits branch of the welfare state, for which he worked. He was indignant and felt the public should know the facts. When his pseudonym was penetrated by his superiors he was at once dismissed from the service. Mr Richard Crossman, the Secretary of State, explained 4:that so serious a breach of staff rules as

writing to the press demanded this punish- ment.

The BBC men, who likewise felt that they owed it to the public to break the rules and take the lid off a simmering mess, have been prudent enough to muster a large force of rebels before emerging from cover. There's safety in numbers, and it's the lone mutineer who gets shot at dawn. Stick together, lads, whatever happens.

The clanger as art form

The cartoons of H. M. Bateman were among life's fixtures when I was a boy. They hit the great middle-brow, middle-income section of the community exactly where, in those days, it was vulnerable: namely in its sense of social insecurity. When I read the other day of his death at the age of eighty-two I realised I hadn't seen one of his cartoons about social enormities for years, although I can still remember a whole gallery of Batemans. It's easy enough to see why he faded out. Having made the subject of social solecism his own, he suffered the sad fate of seeing the central theme of his work cease to mean anything to the public. The whole idea of the reverberating social solecism as he depicted it simply died away.

Bateman's special appeal was not only that he seized on the sort of trivial but appalling gaffe which mattered greatly to our fathers' generation. He also depicted it in lurid col- ours and with a tremblingly violent line which caught exactly the mood of quaking nightmare which such gaffes could induce when 'the done thing' had the status of something close to divine revelation. He was, in fact, an illustration of the rule that satire flourishes best in societies where there is a sense of order. I can't think where a present- day Bateman would find his moments of delicious outrage in which some ignoramus breaks the unwritten law. 'The pregnant ac- tress who admitted she was married'? Or: `The teacher who thought it wrong to go on strike'? No, the flavour is lacking. It is the price we pay for a time of social fluidity and free-for-all.

The turn-around has been almost com- plete. In Bateman's heyday the nation laughed at the discomfiture of 'The Guardsman Who Dropped His Rifle'. Today the nation would be more likely to laugh at all the other guardsmen who actually thought that dropping a rifle mattered.

Inflationary note

I hear of a bank manager who consented to address a village Women's Institute on decimal money. The meeting, I am informed, dissolved in ribald disorder. It was not the bank manager, or his sober exposition of decimalisation, that distracted the ladies. It was the illustrative material, apparently supplied by the Supreme Decimal Head- quarters itself, but already hopelessly out-of- date as regards prices. The poor man had to talk of 'twopenny bars of chocolate' and suchlike antiquities against a rising gale of hilarity. `If they're going to mess about with new money,' opined one lady subsequently, `they might at least find out what the old stuff's worth first of all.'

Beware of the metaphor

an Arsenal side as short of goals as a thirsty Eskimo lost in the Sahara Desert', (The Times football correspondent, 14 February.)