Almanack pudding
CENTENARY ' STRIX
By comparing it to a plum pudding I mean no disrespect to Whitaker's Almanack: on the contrary. One does not—one cannot—compare plum puddings with other puddings; and I do not see hoW one can compare Whitaker, which has just published its one hundredth edition, with any other work of reference.
All these tomes take-Aike plum puddings—
a long time to prepare, and it is typical of the Cheeryble streak in Whitaker's character (a thirty-six-page appendix is devoted almost en- tirely to advertisements for more than fifty charities) that he gives us a list of his poten- tial rivals, the other Annual Reference Books, with addresses and subscription rates. Some, like the Do-lt-Yourself Annual and the Clean Air Year Book, both published at 3s, are much cheaper as well as much younger than the centenarian, whose complete edition costs 45s; but you will have to pay 45s for Who's Who in the Motor and Commercial Vehicle Indus- try, more than twice as much for the Pumping Manual, and only 3s less for the Waste Trade Manual and Directory, while the Numismatic Chronicle costs £4. Top of the charts is Debrett's Peerage, at 15 gns; comfortably bottom is Old Moore's Almanac, at 6d.
Whether applied to a plum pudding or a 1,222-page book 'containing an account of the Astronomical Phenomena and a vast Amount of Information respecting the Government, Finances, Population, Commerce and General Statistics of the various Nations of the World,' stodgy is hardly a pejorative epithet; neither artefact would be true to itself if it failed to earn it. But just as every decent plum pudding contains—or used to contain—a number of irrelevant and delightful objets trouvis in the shape of- small coins, buttons for bachelors,
thimbles for spinsters and so on, Whitaker keeps us continually on the alert for the un- expected. Browsing through the statistics deal- ing with the capital cities of the world, we accept without question that the Vatican City (area 109 acres) has 1,000 inhabitants; the capital of Andorra (180 square miles) has only two and a half times more. But on the next Page, among the now very numerous African capitals, we find that Villa Cisneros, the prin- cipal city of the Spanish Sahara (125,000 square miles), has only 250 inhabitants. It is a tribute to Whitaker's standing that we assume instinc- tively that it is not he, but the Spanish authorities, who must, surely, be in error.
It is not the function of a work of reference to be a cliff-hanger, but Whitaker's innumer- able pages are seldom lacking in suspense; this is partly due to a pleasing element of incon- sequence in editorial policy. Who, for instance, wishing to confirm his impression that the usual gestation period of a zebra was eleven weeks longer than a camel's, would have expected to find the information immediately below a short description of the duties of the London Court of Arbitration (Chairman: B. G. Arthur, CBE. Telephone: City 4444)? What light is shed on the devious ways of the Establishment by the fact that, in a list of the Principal London Clubs, Boodle's and Buck's are both described as 'Social: non-political,' while Brooks's, sand- wiched between them, appears only as 'Social'? In the section entitled Science, Discovery and Inirention in 1967 a paragraph dealing with China's H-Bomb is slightly shorter than an account on the same page of the discovery in South-Eastern Iran of a mousetrap, con- structed in the third millennium sc from pottery.
Apart from these incidental attractions, there is always the possibility—which, though allur- ing, is roughly comparable to one's chance of finding, truffles under the Horse Guards Parade—of faulting the infallible, of spotting an error in the Almanack: of discovering, as it were, a shot in the plum pudding. One cannot, in this context, include the conse- quences of unforeseeable events which occurred after the last pages had gone to the printers; in the section devoted to 'Currencies of the World,' devaluation must have played havoc with the column headed 'Value of Unit in British Currency,' and I am sure that Whitaker's editors would admit that their centenary edition is no sure guide to the rate at which the British traveller can hope to exchange his pittance for Albanian leks, Bulgarian levs, Cambodian rids.
Hungarian forints, Haitian gourdes or Pana- manian balboas. It will, on the other hand, remind him that none of this tender, however legal, can be worth all that much.
In *fact Whitaker does occasionally nod. Unless Mr George Brown's luckless underlings include two officers called D. J. Cheke, each of whom has been awarded the CMG, I fail to see how a diplomatist of that ilk can be simul- taneously Minister at HM Embassy in Tokyo
and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipo- tentiary to the Republic of the Ivory Coast; and it was surprising, in view of Whitaker's marked aptitude for keeping up with news- worthy developments, to find that both the Chinese Charg6 d'Affaires in London and his. British opposite number in Peking are wrongly identified.
Our planet, to which for a hundred years Whitaker has so steadfastly held up a mirror, has scarcely altered its dimensions during the last thirty of them; but if you consult the 1937 edition you will see that the numbers of its inhabitants, estimated then at just under 2,000 million, has increased so grossly that the Cen- tenary Edition baulks (as I have) at adding up its country-by-country totals. A reliable source suggests that there are today roughly 3,500 million specimens of homo sapiens at large.
Not only are there more people (to say nothing of more noise), but the number of nations into which they are divided has in- creased : so have the currencies they use, so have the extent of their knowledge and the scope of their discoveries, so have the variety and the complexity of their trades, skills and activities. All the more credit, then, to Whitaker for standing firm against the Parkin- sonian tide; today the Almanack comprises only fifty-eight more pages than it did thirty- one years ago. I doubt if any standard work of reference, with the possible exception of Old Moore, can claim over the same period to have so fractionally increased its bulk.
There can'be no doubt that the dissolution of the British Empire facilitated the formidable task of compression which Whitaker has faced during the last three decades. In 1937, the British Dominions, 'extending over 14,000,000 square miles,' were the world's largest land- owners; Russia (8,250,000) came second, and France a bad third with just over half Russia's acreage. In the Centenary Edition Her Majesty's 'Colonies, Protectorates, etc' occupy fewer than twenty pages, and the laborious work of recording the number of guns by which 'the Principal Indian Ruling Chiefs and Princes' were entitled to be saluted—a touchy matter, as the footnotes testify—no longer de- volves upon the editorial staff.
If you have a weakness for faits divers, if you want to ascertain the identity of the Seneschal of Sark, if you are not sure where the Republic of Mali is and how many billions make a trillion, Whitaker is recommended reading. It is still more strongly recommended if you are one of those who fear that the world is set on a path of self-destruction; for after a period of immersion in these pages you will, I feel confident, reject all ideas of the world coming to an end. For if it did there would be no Almanack, a contingency in which, after Whitakel's gentle brainwashing, it be- comes impossible to place any credence at all.
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