12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

COMPETITION

COVAS REGAL

12 YEAR OLD SCOTCH WHISKY

With malice to all

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 1715 you were in- vited to suppose that a rancorous auto- biography by a famous dead person of this century has just been discovered, and to provide an extract.

The Goncourt Journal is a great arsenal of the barbed comment. Browsing, I came across this: 'All Leconte de Lisle's rancor- ous, cannibal malice is to be found in this macabre remark of his. After being re- ceived with great kindness by the Duc d'Aumale when he called on him to ask for his vote in the Academy election, he met some acquaintance or other and expatiated on the politeness, graciousness, charm and dignity of the Prince d'Orleans, pausing at the end and adding: "But to know what he is really like, one would have to see him on the scaffold." '

There was more use of the bludgeon

than the barb in most of your entries, but the prizewinners, printed below, emerged clearly and stylishly, and win £16 each. The bonus bottle of Chivas Regal de luxe blended whisky goes to Jonathan Fernside for this Gilbert Murray — a man of such pacific principles that he was said to chloroform his nasturtiums before trans- planting them.

Gilbert Murray It was a penalty of my peculiar high-mindedness that whenever I was obliged to have dealings with persons on an ethical level markedly lower than my own, the strain of stooping was so intense that I suffered from acute moral back- ache. Anyone who sojourns in Academe is inured to the society of charlatans, clowns, toadies, hucksters — and not a few pure lunatics. But at no other time in my long and eminently useful life have I come across such canaille as I encountered when helping to set up the League of Nations: Lloyd George, a cut- price lothario from Llandudno; Curzon, that obscene bladder of bloodshot pomposity; Bal- four, a walking mist of intellectual befuddle- ment; Poincare, the pettifogging French attor- ney incarnate; Orlando, who couldn't have run an ice-cream stall in Soho; and Lord Robert, the weakest and wobbliest of all the Cecils, a title for which there is, I understand, fierce competi- tion in that catastrophic family.

(Jonathan Fernside) Emmeline Pankhurst People have this absurd idea that I wanted to give everybody the vote. Gammon! In fact, I

consider very few people indeed morally or intellectually fit for enfranchisement. Would anyone in their right mind have given the vote to that sodden old groper, Asquith, or his twitter- ing little nitwit of a wife, Margot? To that dwarfish Welsh lecher, Lloyd George, or that truculent baboon, Churchill? Of course not! And the Tories were just as ineligible. Balfour — limp effeteness personified; Bonar Law — so dull even fellow Canadians noticed it; Carson with a brain-weight ratio unseen on earth since the death of the last dinosaur. And these were the men denying us the vote! Not that I'd give all women the vote. No working-class women (too socialistic); no upper-class women (too frivo- lous); no women under thirty (too flighty); none over seventy (too dotty). Indeed, offhand, I can think of only three unequivocally qualified: myself and my daughters, Christabel and Sylvia — and I'm not too sure about the last two.

(Molly Fitton) D. H. Lawrence I arrived to find a typical effete bunch, all obviously looking forward to a pleasant weekend patronising the miner's son. Russell was there, of course, looking, as usual, as though he'd been living on watercress for thirty years and leaving the stalks on his plate, and my heart sank as I saw the Woolf woman heading in my direction. Luckily it was one of her vaguer days, and she just wandered by with a fixed smile on her face, fluttering her arms and

murmuring, 'Waves, waves, waves.' Then Lady Ottoline had to come the grande dame (so much for the progressive aristocracy!), tearing a la-di- da strip off the estate gamekeeper because the pheasants were flying too fast. It made my blood boil to hear a titled hat-stand talk to an honest working man like that, and I vowed there and then to do something about it in a future novel. (Chris Tingley) Sir Jack Hobbs

The next partner their languid long-room lordships sent me was a jumped-up bucket-and- spade man from Yorkshire, Herbert Sutcliffe.

Now I've got nothing against Yorkshiremen — as long as they stay there — but this Sutcliffe was something else. The third time we walked out for England, he said to me, 'Shall I take first knock, old man?'

I rumbled it, of course. The brilliantined bugger was after changing Hobbs and Sutcliffe into Sutcliffe and Hobbs. Coming first on the programme is step one towards getting a knight- hood instead of an MBE. 'No thanks, old chap,' I said.

I sensed his icy little Yorkshire brain clicking away like those shuttles or whatever they have in Pudsey. 'Good luck, then, old man,' he said.

Oh yes, I thought, thank you very much; and made a mental note to watch out for any evil-intentioned short singles. Bloody York- shiremen. 'And to you, old chap,' I said.

(Noel Petty) John Galsworthy

'May I say, Mr Galsworthy, how much the solitary confinement scene in your Justice influ- enced me as Home Secretary in ameliorating prison conditions?' — and so on into one of his interminable monologues. How I'd have loved to sentence him, Churchill, to 'solitary' for life, if only so that the only person he'd bore to death would be himself. And then there was that sentimental old fool, Ramsay MacDonald, tell- ing me, just after the collapse of the General Strike; how moved he'd been by my 'heart- warming depiction of the workers' in Strife. As it happened, my study fire had been still unlit at nine o'clock that morning (my darling Ada might have got a chill!) as a direct result of the miners' criminal refusal to give in. I'd have gladly flogged them back through the pit gates myself.

Scum at the top, dregs at the bottom — that's British society. The only pure liquor is the