ANOTHER VOICE
A sacrifice to the lares and penates would cheer us all up
CHARLES MOORE
Anyone who wants to know what is right or wrong about the proposed reorga- nisation of the British army should read no further, but turn instead to anything writ- ten on the subject by the great John Keegan. My own solution to the emotional problem, identified by Dr Johnson when he said that every man thinks the worse of himself for not having been a soldier, is to try to avoid thinking about the matter at all. But I am conscious that in doing so I am guilty of as great a philistinism as the military booby who says he can't see the point of books.
For the army, like so many institutions in this country, is a creation of great aesthetic intricacy, the more beautiful for not having been designed by aesthetes or, indeed, designed at all. At its heart is the regimen- tal system, although system is hardly the right word for something so disparate and random, But heart is the right word. No matter how numb and vague you are about which are the Cherrypickers or the Skins or who are known as Pontius Pilate's Body- guard, you cannot fail to notice that a regiment commands a loyalty as hard to break as any tie devised by man.
Just as education is a dull subject, but most people are intensely interested in their own school, so defence is the dry territory of experts, but the regiment in- spires devotion. And it was the genius of 19th-century reform in both these areas to introduce the spirit of modern efficiency without crushing institutional identity and independence. Indeed, Cardwell's aboli- tion in 1870 of the right to purchase a commission actually deepened regimental loyalty. Until then, men who wanted to get on often moved from regiment to regim- ent, buying themselves the rank they sought. After the reform, they had to stick in the same regiment for life: their entire military career depended on it, and so they gave it their love. In a similar way, the great public schools, investigated at about the same time, were forced to abandon their worst brutalities but not their auton- omy, and new schools, coming along in response to the demands of a rising middle class were able to invent instant traditions of 'godliness and good learning' backed up by coats of arms and mottoes and house cups and all the other lares and penates which humanise the world and give people a sense of purpose, place and order.
As I say, I am in no position to know whether, for instance, the Gordon High- landers will make the best bedfellows for the Queen's Own Highlanders, but it is obvious that any 'rationalisation', though sometimes necessary, is always dangerous, because it certainly damages something precious and only uncertainly creates something valuable. One day, probably, an Education Secretary will look at the Uni- versity of Cambridge or Oxford and observe that it consists of colleges, that some of them are very small, and that their costs could be cut if they all went to a, central feeding complex and only had to pay for one Master between them. He would be right, possibly, in the terms of his own calculation, but in every important sense, he would be wrong.
What happened to the British genius for conservative reform? Take the National Health Service. The phrase itself betrays the original mistake. Only a rationalist bureaucrat could imagine that health, which depends so much on the relationship between doctor and patient and the way each individual hospital is run, should be organised as a national service. The self- sacrifice which people think is characteris- tic of a service free at the point of use actually derives from something quite different — the ancient Christian injunc- tion to heal the sick, embodied and de- veloped over a thousand years through the teaching hospitals and in the pride of the medical profession.
Take the comprehensive school. By what defiance of human nature did anyone come to think that existing schools with which parents and children were happy should be destroyed in favour of a univer- sal model? Take reform of measurements or county boundaries or EEC directives about what is a fruit and what a vegetable and you see the same restless spirit of innovation. Take anything introduced by government which talks about national plans and national needs and streamlining and administrative convenience. Take it and throw it away.
It is this failure to propitiate our house- hold gods which is the main reason why so little in Britain works and why people go round looking so miserable. Which brings me to the tenth anniversary of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which falls next week.
The wedding was the last occasion on which I saw a large English crowd look really happy. I went to watch the fireworks in Hyde Park the night before, and got stuck in a suffocatingly packed Tube for the best part of an hour. Nobody panicked or hit anyone or swore or minded much that they were missing half of the show. The atmosphere was like that of an Ealing comedy. This was only a few weeks after the first really big riots in London since the war.
The next day, so many people were watching the wedding on television that the national electricity supply, I later heard, almost failed: when Dr Runcie got up to preach his sermon, viewers hurried from the room to put on the kettle or go to the lavatory, both of which activities produced an additional surge in the demand for power. For a brief moment, the nation was united.
Even when one has admitted that there was a great deal of sentimental piffle written about the occasion (I made my own modest contribution to the pile through the anonymity of the Daily Telegraph leader column), one should not forget that people were happy. The feeling was that the right hearts were in the right place. It is such a feeling that more than anything else makes the organisation of society seem tolerable and comprehensible, and it is a feeling which nothing invented in modern political discourse can induce.
So I hope, for everyone's sake as well as their own, that the Prince and Princess can, if not grin, at least bear it. If they cannot, as some are alleging, people will be as unhappy now as they were happy then. It is not only that they will feel sorry for the couple; they will feel a sense of national failure.
One would like to take the jaunty, pre-Victorian view that the royal family can do whatever it likes so long as the succession is assured. The last English king to get divorced was made Supreme Gov- ernor of the Church of England for his pains; but unfortunately our delicate mod- ern sensibilities will not stand for it. Rebecca West, of all people, wrote ten years ago, that 'the royal scene is simply the presentation of ourselves, behaving well'. That is what our poor, neglected household gods require of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
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