A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THERE is something almost legendary about the Prime Minister. That explains the popular feeling about his illness. It caused concern, of course. That a man of sixty-nine, who had been work- ing as Mr. Churchill has been working, should go down with pneumonia for the second time in twelve months was enough to create universal alarm. But the fact is we can no longer believe anything can happen to the Prime Minister. A blind fatalism it may be, but at the same time rather more than that. It is not simply that -because the mind cannot conceive the scheme of things without Mr. Churchill, the mind determines that the scheme of things will not be without Mr. Churchill, but rather that we have acquired a deep conviction that there is something in the man himself that will keep him at his post, fit and able, till (in his own words) he has finished the job. Low told the whole story the other day with half a dozen strokes of his inimitable pencil in his " God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen," cartoon. The single quality which radiated • from that cheery face at the window, chin in dressing-gown, Christmas-cap above, looking out on the uniformed waits, was resilience. Pneumonia? What is pneumonia? Moran and M. & B. 693 see to that. A few days in bed, no doubt ; but one can read despatches, and write them, too, as well there as anywhere else. And now the bulletins have ceased, and one of these days the Prime Minister will be back in Downing Street, with a microphone, I trust, waiting somewhere handy. But the trouble about a microphone is that you cannot cheer back into it.—Thus far I had written the day before the Prime Minister's characteristic personal message was issued. On one or two points I claim credit for some prescience.
* * * * The appointment of Mr. R. G. Casey to be Governor of 'Bengal is, frankly, something of an experiment. Mr. Casey, though he held high office in Australian Cabinets for five years, must be considered to have had a rapid rise when Mr. Churchill brought him from the Australian Legation at Washington in 1942 to be a Member of the War Cabinet and Minister of State in the Middle East. Since Mr. Casey disappeared to Cairo it has been difficult, except for the initiated, to form much impression of the degree of his success in the post of which he was the second occupant (Mr. Lyttelton having been the first), but he would not have been sent to Bengal unless the opinion of the Prime Minister, who has seen him very recently, remained high. There are advantages and disadvantages in sending India a Dominion politician as Provincial Governor. He may be expected to bring a fresh mind to old problems. On the other hand, there appears to be some feeling in India that it is an indignity for a country that aspires not merely to Dominion status but to complete independence to have its present inferiority underlined by the choice of a Governor from a Dominion. However that may be, Mr. Casey will have a great opportunity in a province in which, as recent events have shown, administrative problems bulk as large as political. * * * * The news that Sir Gilbert Campion, the Clerk of the House of Commons, has ready for publication a revised edition of Sir Erskine May's classic work on the procedure and usage of Parliament is very interesting, the more so since the new edition will appear pre- cisely a hundred years after the publication of the original volume in 5844. It would he hard to think of any other work which has established so complete and unchallenged a supremacy in its own particular sphere. I remember that some years ago a Lobby corre- spondent, member incidentally of a famous Parliamentary family, desiring to lend a little' distinction to a paragraph he was writing on some point of procedure, began " Meeting Sir Erskine May this evening in the Lobby, I consulted him . . ". Sir Erskine May had been dead since 1886.
* * * * Is there any other country, I wonder, where in the middle of a war of unprecedented scale the principal daily paper could devote
a leading article to the creator of Peter Rabbit, Pigling Bland and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. But The Times' fourth leader is something sui generis, and it is fully in keeping with its best traditions that it should have so marked the death of Beatrix Potter. For the pleasure Miss Potter's books have given to generation after generation of
English children—and, indeed, to children of other lands equally, for the books have been translated into several languages, is beyond computation. And something more, I think, than mere pleasure, for excursions in the realm of the imagination quicken in childhood those imaginative faculties which can do, so much in later years to w relieve life's drabness. Many of us who were children too long ago to profit by Miss Potter's pen ourselves in that capacity owe her no less a debt as parents.
* * * * One of the many things I shall never fully understand is the passion of so many people for getting themselves photographed with pipes in their mouths. In one of Tuesday morning's papers, for example, I observe on one page a picture of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder with a large pipe monopolising the foreground, on another a portrait of the author of Sunday night's admirable post- script similarly adorned. Aesthetically the habit seems to me regret- table. Few mouths look the better with a pipe projecting from them, and few pipe-smokers are sufficiently inveterate smokers to argue that
they look more themselves with a pipe than without one. After all there are other things than pipes that are habitually inserted in the mouth. I would respectfully suggest to the eminent persons who get
photographed for the Press that if they are not content with their faces as they are they should, if only for variety, substitute for the pipe a dessert spoon, or even a tooth-brush.
* * * *
Some errors to which frail humanity is liable are so egregious as to be almost their own corrective. Last week in a fit of, I trust tem- porary, dementia, I spoke of the Manchester Guardian as deliberately subordinating quality to commercial success. That I meant pre- cisely the opposite was no doubt apparent to everyone who read the paragraph. But when a journalist acquires the habit of writing the opposite of what he means it is time for him to change his pro- fession for something like bottle-washing, which calls for less intellectual effort. However, I am not yet, I hope, exactly an addict. Meanwhile, I offer my apologies to a journal which is far too effectively armoured by its own universally acknowledged virtues to trouble about any assaults by me, even if I were ever capable of assailing it.
* * * * With reference to my paragraph last week on " denization,' someone points out that though that word, or process, may be obsolete there is no reason why " denazition " should be.
JANus.
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