City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEMAN THIS is the first week, for many, of the shortest, but nevertheless the nastiest, term at school. Think, dear readers, those of you who have passed your schooldays. of the dreary pictures in classrooms which you have looked at for hour after hour—faded views in sepia of the Acropolis. over-bright posters with the 'advertisements cut off, mingy reproductions of old masters, soulless portraits of old alumni and departed headmasters. A friend of mine who is a master at Bryanston tried last week to borrow large canvases to hang in that magnificent Norman Shaw house which the school uses. He was not asking for great art, but representa- tional work such as even the most sophisticated of us liked at one time in our lives, probably in schooldays, and which first inflamed us with the love of pictures. I refer to paintings like 'The Hopeless Dawn,' When did you last see your father?' The Boyhood of Raleigh,' which are probably rolled up in the cellars of public galleries, waiting the return of fashion or the arrival of an 'art-historian' with a research fellowship. But my friend was told at all galleries that they could not lend pictures to schools under their loan conditions, which make it essential that all their pictures should either be on public exhibition or easily available near the gallery. I wonder whether directors of art galleries could somehow get over this rule, for I feel sure that schools deserve a few pictures just as much as 'art-historians.'
Sporting Speeches I have often noticed that 'art-historians' hate each other :i... much as archaologists and critics. Perhaps this is because they are all people who batten on the creative activity of others. I think sport must be a creative activity, because I have always found professional sportsmen, particularly cricketers and golfers, the most generous-minded people as a whole, kind to each other and full of humour. Last week I went to a cricket dinner in Wantage and heard the two funniest speeches I have ever listened to, made by Frank Lee. the famous umpire, and Jack Young, the Middlesex bowler. The art of making a speech is like that of the variety artist: a question of timing and feeling the mood of your audience. I suppose that playing professional cricket must be the same sort of thing, and that is why these two men made such excellent, well-timed speeches.
Post Hoc and Propter Hoc I heard of a Harley Street doctor's wife last week wh, ordered some cultivated mushrooms for her dinner party. The) looked suspicious, so she tried some of them out on the dog. which ate them with delight. She therefore had mushrooms on toast as the savoury at her dinner party. When the butler brought in the coffee he said to the hostess : 'The little dog's dead, madam.' Her husband rose to the occasion, made a clean breast of it to the guests, and took them all to his surgery downstairs and stomach-pumped the lot. When the guests had gone home his wife grew tearful about her dog and said to the butler that she would like to see it before he buried it. 'I don't think you'd like to see it,' said the butler, 'it's a nasty sight. Both wheels ran right over it.'
A Call to Arms This week the Planning Committee of Bristol is considering whether to allow the erection of multi-storey flats on Brandon Hill. Bristol, with Newcastle second, is I think the most beautiful indugirial city in England. Though parts of it were badly bombed, it still Ntains its magnificent skyline of towers and steeples mixed with the masts of shipping on the Avon. There is still the atmosphere of Spanish trade and wine bars and wine merchants, and there arc masterpieces of architecture like St. Mary Redcliffe and Christ Church and the too-little- known Cathedral and the eighteenth-century theatre. Up in Clifton are spacious Georgian crescents and terraces and Brunel's mighty suspension bridge flung lightly over the wooded steeps of Avon Gorge, scenery whidh is like a Salvator Rosa come to life. Multi-storey flats in the Georgian calm of Brandon Hill will ruin a famous tkyline and alter the character of a part of this ancient city which, in the Bristol Development Plan, was scheduled for strict control and for public buildings. There has been loud local protest. Revolu- tions have often started in Bristol. Let's hope the fight to save Brandon Hill will be won and flame a trail for the rest of England.
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