Notebook
Kamla, the Indian girl bought by a Delhi journalist to expose the evils of what is rather disgustingly known in India as the 'flesh trade', may have cost only half the price of a buffalo. But at £130 she still seems to me rather expensive. There are few criteria by which to judge the right price for this sort of purchase. But in 1885 W. T. Stead, the famous editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, paid only £3 for a 13-year-old London girl in order to 'raise hell' against the scandal of juvenile prostitution. This was Stead's greatest exploit. His series of articles under the heading The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon caused Parliament, after years of obstruction and opposition, finally to raise the age of consent from 13 to 16 years. It was a great achievement, but its consequences for Stead and his newspaper were sad. Stead was unexpectedly prosecuted and sent to prison, and although Stead looked back on his conviction 'with pride and exultation' and indeed wore his arrow-marked prisoner's uniform on its anniversary every year for the rest of his life, he admitted that his imprisonment had caused him to lose some of 'the nerve and dash that used to belong to me'. He was never again quite the man he had been. Furthermore, in part because W. H. Smith was reluctant then as now to distribute sensational material, the Pall Mall's fortunes entered a decline. There is a poignant correspondence between Stead and the paper's proprietor, Henry Yates Thompson, who, as it so happens, was my great-great-uncle. Both circulation and advertising revenue declined — the latter by £2,500 in six months. Thompson, who was no journalist and basically resented the scandal which Stead had unleashed, urged him to show greater prudence and caution, and even reduced his salary. Stead, inhibited by the discovery that society is 'preponderatingly hostile to those that meddle with its vices', promised Mr Thompson: 'The Pall Mall is to be what the Pall Mall was before. . . we are not going Maiden Tributing any more'. According to the BBC, Mr Ashwani Sarin on the Indian Express is to be prosecuted too. I wish him better luck.
Tt is a time-honoured Fleet Street tradition,' writes Mr Richard Huggett, the actor, 'that the subject of an unprovoked and gratuitous attack should be allowed equal space and prominence to reply.' It jolly well isn't any such thing. If it was, Fleet Street might be held in rather higher repute. Furthermore, there was nothing 'unprovoked and gratuitous' about my remarks in last week's Notebook on Mr Huggett's dreadful impersonation of Evelyn Waugh and his even more dreadful article in The Times. If I hadn't felt sorely provoked, I wouldn't have made them. But no matter. The beast has done it again, wringing more publicity for himself out of this gullible journalist. His 'Open Letter' to me, which I resolutely refuse to publish, is very similar to his reply to Auberon Waugh in The Times, except 'that it indulges in unprovoked and gratuitous flattery. My paragraph, so he says, was 'beautifully written and very witty'. It has even been 'blown up six foot high and displayed outside the theatre'. By every foot it is blown up, I feel proportionally diminished. He even claims, as he claimed about Auberon Waugh's article in The Times, that I have contributed to the success of his show — an appalling calumny. His 'upstairs neighbour' in Soho, he writes, is 'a young lady whose profession is even older than mine and who works under the name of Sexy Carol'. 'Both she and her customer read your little piece and the net result was that they both came to see the play that night.' Poor Sexy Carol! Or more to the point, poor customer, who must have had different plans. However, Mr Huggett has a defender. I have received the following letter from a reader: 'Your diatribe against Richard Huggett is a disgraceful slur on a man who devotes his life to keeping Soho clean and decent. I have often seen Mr Huggett in Rupert Street, as the market is closing, feverishly scooping up discarded vegetables, determined to have the street spick and span before the refuse collectors arrive. Whenever the bins in Old Compton Street are crammed, as they occasionally are, with unsold copies of the London Review of Books, Mr Huggett will ease the congestion by removing the topmost copy and cycling home with it. How dare you call this man "profoundly stupid?" So sorry.
T am enjoying the speculation on why Ian Botham proved so unsuccessful as captain of England's cricket team but such a heroic figure under the captaincy of Mike Brearley. The simplest explanation is that Botham was too young to be captain in the West Indies; that his own play suffered urder the strain; that he was worried about the pending court case after a brawl outside a Scunthorpe night club. The new captain, Brearley, who has a double first in philosophy, offered his own explanation after the victory this week: 'He's good for me and I think I'm good for him. Go back to my specialised subject, psycho-analysis, and it means he needs a father, and I need a younger brother'. Another possible explanation is so reactionary and 'elitist' I scarcely dare put it in print. It is simply that England's cricket has benefited from a reversion to the old system of Gentlemen and Players. In the old days you had a captain who was ex-public school, officer class and preferably titled ,to place the field, choose the bowlers and tell the batsmen whether to stay put or go for runs. The gentleman captain was not expected to make many runs or take any wickets himself but he did have to field in the dangerous places like silly point — the cricket equivalent of going over the top holding a walking stick. Brearley fills all these qualifications. Quite apart from leading the players, the gentleman captain also performs a special function against the Australians. He maddens them. During the body-line controversy before the last war, the wrath of the Aussies was turned not on the bowlers themselves but on Jardine, the skipper. They traditionally hate the stuck-up, la-dida gentleman, cricketer.
So Lothian Regional Council sacks 944 teachers (Daily Telegraph, Guardian), 1,100 people 'in the educational field' (The Times),`480 teachers by mistake' ( The Financial Times) — a lot of people, anyway, by mistake or not. The Greater London Council, meanwhile, has been advertising for 40 new jobs, several at more than £20,000 a year. It wants a race relations adviser on £22,071 a year, an economic adviser on £24,000 a year, and a 'head of the support staff for the police committee' on £20,000 a year, not to mention various 'research assistants' (i.e. under-cover poll tical advisers). For the Government, it must be like trying to cure cancer: you cut it out in one place, only for it to burst out again in another. But Mr Ken Livingstone of the GLC has an impressive sense of humour. On the eve of attending a Private Eye lunch this week he announced that the GLC was going to 'come out' and provide financial support for 'gay' liberationists. He must already have known that the lunch was taking place on the 44th birthday of Private Eye's editor Richard Ingrams, whose Ariews on 'gay' liberation will be familiar to readers of his television column in the Spectator. 'Everyone is bisexual,' added the reckless Mr Livingstone. 'Almost anyone has the sexual potential for anything. It is only the pressure of society which makes us conform in one direction or another'. I hope he repeated all that in Greek Street.
It was while I was away on holiday that Lady Simey became something of a celebrity. Lady Simey, the widow of Lord Simey of Toxteth, a Labour peer, is chairman of Merseyside County Council's police committee and, according to the Guardian, which adores her, 'an unreconstructed Beveridge socialist'. In an interview in that paper on 1 August, she spelled out — much to the annoyance of Peter Simple in the Daily Telegraph — her proposals for the maintenance of law and order in Liverpool. These involved leaving people to their own devices. As an example of this, she said how the IRA had reportedly taken over a Catholic ghetto in Belfast and run 'local welfare arrangements' better than the state. 'It is a lesson for us and the police,' she said. 'Why don't they use our local leaders? If they were to keep out, we would keep order.' That, as she said, is just what the IRA does in Belfast. The Irish Times, in a report on the kneecappings of seven youths there last weekend, described how those 'local welfare arrangements' work in practice. 'Kneecappings are not the most common type of punishment being carried out in Catholic areas,' it said. 'Beating with hurley sticks is said to be the most frequent type of punishment, and covering people with paint and feathers is also likely to make a comeback.' Kneecapping was on the whole saved for persistent offenders. 'The form the kneecapping takes usually depends on the crimes the person is suspected of . . . A victim suspected of something such as mugging an old-age pensioner and believed to be a habitual criminal will be shot in both legs and both arms', said the Irish Times. 'The victim can be crippled for life. All are scarred permanently'. However, the IRA does not lack unreconstructed Beveridge socialist humanity. 'An exception to this is said to be if the youth suspected of involvement in repeated crimes has an obviously low IQ and is seen to be acting like a child . . . On occasions like this the Provisionals try to avoid carrying out kneecappings.' How sweet!
Alexander Chancellor
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