City and Suburban
AST week I was in the sun-filled valley of the Trent, Derby- shire. The occasion was a fete for the restoration of Foremark Church, built in 1662, in a survival of the Gothic style and with untouched interior furnishings. I was standing in the churchyard where the ancestors of the present Archbishop of Canterbury are buried and looking across the magnificent prospect. Oaks and willows clustered round Repton's slender spire, honey-coloured stone churches and farms and dark red cottages dotted the pastoral landscape of the silver Trent. But rising out of it, higher than Repton spire and mercilessly destroying the gentle skyline and the country character of the valley for miles around, I saw the new power station being built at Willington. There are sentimentalists who say that because a power station fulfils its function it is bound to fit in anywhere. Such people use their heads rather than their eyes. Whatever may be said about its 'clean modern lines' the power station at Willington, being where it is, is an affront to a delicate landscape. The Minister of Fuel and Power is responsible for setting down these things which are bigger than our biggest cathedrals. He never consults the Council for the Preservation of Rural England nor the Royal. FineArt Commission about the siting of his monsters. Some hangover from the spy mania of the war years makes him think that power stations are a deadly secret. Even now a gaggle of government engineers and some hush-hush committee of local government may be planning to put a power station by the River Windrush or Flatford Mill or the Warwickshire Avon. It is time the Minister of Fuel and Power fell into line with his colleagues and paid some regard to the remaining beautY of our landscape.
PEERLESS
I am distressed about Lord Salisbury's motion to refortn the House of Lords by excluding some of those delightful Peers who never put in an appearance. The less known 3 Peer is, the more he interests me : Lord Gardner, for instance, who may or may not exist somewhere in India : Lord Aylmer who rarely leaves British Columbia, that home of quiet baronets : Lord Carberry who changed his name by deed poll to Mr. Carberry and lives in Kenya : Lord Egmont happy in Alberta : all the retiring Peers who live in country places doing their local duty on farm and bench or working for their livings in smoky cities. And how pleasant it would be if the Irish Peers formed themselves into an Irish House of Lords and governed that country. Some of the ablest Irishmen are Peers. I suppose all this is hopelessly romantic and snobbish. All the same it Is true to say that hereditary Peers are more likely to be agreeable people than commoners as they have had less occasion to feel inferior. Some of them may be gloriously eccentric, but what is wrong with that endearing characteristic?
BISHOP FURSE
Bishop Furse who died last Saturday at Wantage was MY friend and neighbour. There are some people who are so good that they do not seem to have any enemies nor ever to have done anything really wrong in their lives. Mike Furse was such a man. As Bishop, first of Pretoria, then of St. Albans, he was what all bishops ought to be and some are not, that Is to say a father-in-God to his clergy first, and administrator and committee-man second. He was the friend of all his clergY, looked after them and knew about their troubles. To the end of his life he kept up correspondence with many of them. Fle belonged to a great Anglican family with connections in tbe Services, the arts and literature. Charles Furse the artist was his brother, another was a sculptor, another a general. Dante Katherine Furse was his sister. Sir Henry Newbolt and Lawrence Whistler were connections by marriage. Reynolds Stone, Jill Furse, Roger Furse and Faith Compton Mackenzie were relations. He was symbolic of the traditional rectitude and generosity of the best type of country squire and parson.
JOHN'S OTHER NAME
It is becoming increasingly difficult to know anyone's surname. 'What's Tony's other name'?' I heard one student say to another in a railway carriage lately. 'I don't knoW. Something short.' And what's Frank's name?' No one knevv. Though not, alas, a Peer, I am asking the Editor to let 03C subscribe these notes this week with my surname only-
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