SPECTATOR COMPETITION No. gy
Report by Barbara Worsley-Gough A prize of £5 was offered for an excerpt from a speech by Disraeli, while leader of the Opposition, attacking the project for turning Carlton House Terrace into the Foreign Office.
A surprisingly large number of competitors brought Disraeli forward into the present day, and made him direct his attack against the Attlee administration, instead of leaving him where he belongs and putting back the Carlton House Terrace proposal three-quarters of a century or so, which was what I intended. The essence of this competition is an excuse for an attack by Disraeli on a Glad- stonian Government—a new stick with which to beat the familiar dog. Benjamin Disraeli simply cannot be fitted into the present-day Parliamentary scene, and I have had no compunction in disqualifying all entries in which this line was taken. References to vermin, free false teeth, and even the happy notion of utility fences for the accommodation of Ministers, served to disqualify. One or two pleasant conceits were found in this batch of entries. I like, for example, the threat (from Pauline Willis) that Carlton House Terrace may become known as Morrison's shelter.
I have the impression that too many of the competitors felt that Disraeli's Parliamentary style is an absolute gift to the parodist. " Too easy," they thought, as they gaily concocted a chunk of poly- syllabic invective. They failed to give enough purpose to their long rounded periods, and picked their adjectives for the sake of allitera- tion or possibilities of baroque decoration. Now Dizzy's style may have been as over-jewelled as his person, but he did choose his words with an eye for their deadly destructive effect, and not for their decorative qualities alone. Some of the entrants seem to have confused Disraeli the novelist with Disraeli the statesman, and put Into his mouth spoken eulogies of Carlton House Terrace and its contents which sound perilously like a catalogue of the Duke of Medina Sidonia's home comforts. The winner of the first prize, D. I. Beaumanoir-Hart, is a sinner in this respect, but I have over- looked this one defect in an otherwise admirable entry. He surely deserves the prize for the superbly authentic ring of his fourth sentence alone. I recommend that he should be awarded a first prize of £3, and that prizes of LI should go to E. Bedwell and Patrick Welch.
FIRST PRIZE (D. I. BEAUMANOIR-HART) This, then, is the atrocious act about to be perpetrated by a party whose proud boast It is to be the Inheritors of the cause for which Hampden died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold ! That long façade of carven stone and fairest stucco, embowered In arcadian foliage and commanding the finest processional route In the metropolis, must perish. Those superb creations, recalling—with how poignant a memory f—the great age of Pitt and Canning, and informed with the effulgent and glowing genius of Nash, must vanish in order that we may perpetuate the architecture of Baker Street ! This is the substance of the argument put before us with a wealth of statistical imposture and with all the artifice of a penetrating ambiguity.
How often, as a young man, have I feasted in those august saloons. with their fluted columns of porphyry and alabaster, their tables loaded with pyramids of gold plate, while festive sculpture—gryphons, eagles, phocnixes—glittered beneath the light of Venetian lustres on the happy scene I Right Hon. gentlemen opposite may with propriety reflect upon the fate of lxion, who, for insolence to Jove, was tied to an ever-revolving wheel in Hell. Would that his fate might befall the members of a Government pledged to erect on the ruins of a gracious Past a monument to their own mediocrity, a Temple haunted by the dire and delirious phantoms of a foreign policy which has made a proud Nation the laughing-stock of the chancelleries of Europe and has levelkd an Empire in the dust.
SECOND PRIZES (E. BEI/WELL) Even to those in whom the Heaven-sent fire of an historical imagination is but a spare and spasmodic glimmer this proposal must have a kind of symbolical propriety, lamentable as it is inescapable. Shall we not find a peculiar rightness in the removal of a department swollen to such monstrous proportions as is the Foreign Office, to the habitation of a Prince whose dimensions became a legend of bloated corpulency ? Nor find a parallel between the subservience which marks that Office's policy and the equivocal position of a Prince Regent ? Nor see a deplorable significance in the fact that this guardian of our international responsi- bilities is now to desert what has been so aptly termed "the High Street of the British Empire" for a gazebo over a pleasaunce, as if its occupa- tion is henceforward to be that of a retired and dilettante pensioner ?
If profligacy were the criterion, the present Administration has a pre- emptory right to the premises of England's most spendthrift Prince Under his auspices, Nash built a facade that rises above the trees of St. James's Park like an incomparable diadem. Lacking the likelihood of any other garland or laurels, it is as if the Government, in its despera- tion, has seized this crown of architecture to adorn its inglorious and ignoble brow: and, with the last and inevitable gesture of the vulgarian, proceeded to despoil even this expropriated glory with its added tier.
(PATRICK Wuxi') We have long known that the right honourable gentlemen opposite were engrossed with the efflorescence of their own mediocrity. Artistically stunted and culturally depressed themselves, they have preached to us all the righteousness of descending the greasy pole of promotion and advancement. They are devaluation personified. I am afraid that they will continue for some time to play down to the electorate on their worn- out fiddles, for they have not yet exhausted their repertoire of the decrescendo. But, Sir, I thought that even they would shrink from permitting the hand of the leveller to touch Carlton House Terrace. It is not only one of the most precious architectural gems of our fair
capital ; it enshrines much of our history. In the spacious days of out sires its mansions housed the sage senator, the prince of commerce, and the flower of rank and fashion. From its windows beauty and nobility beheld so many triumphal processions and enhanced the dazzling
splendour of the cavalcades below. To destroy such memories, as you will do if you tamper with such a monument, is worse than pillage. It is organised desecration.
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