Birthday Honours
By STRIX
IRsEN: Charles II: William Penn : the Duke of Nor- folk : and Strix. Which is the odd man out?
To say that I was gratified when my attention was drawn to the entry for May 31 (which I share with the Battle of Jutland) is to put it mildly. It i's not, of course, the first time that recognition has come my way, but there has been a certain lack of reclame about the dis- tinctions that I have earned. I can claim to have seen my name in electric lights while still in my twenties; but I have in honesty to add that, since my name was in Chinese, I could not read it and that it would not have been there at all if I had not been staying, in order to shoot duck, with the outgoing representative in Swatow of the British American Tobacco Company who was being given a farewell dinner by one of his sub-agents in an obscure town in the interior. In later life I was awarded a bronze medal by the Royal Forestry Society for a shelter-belt planted by my grandfather. In the Revised Edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage my name is among those to whom Sir Ernest Gowers made acknowledgments. I once—but modesty forbids more.
Modesty? Or shame? These are hardly the guerdons of a distinguished or even of a meri- torious career; and the first flush of elation at finding myself in Whitaker quickly gave way to a feeling of perplexity, almost of suspicion. Is there perhaps a whimsical tradition in this fine old publication that every annual calendar must include, among the nobs and the swells, the giants and the geniuses that diversify its pages, one individual so dim and therefore so anomalous that regular readers derive a con- noisseur's pleasure from spotting him, as film- goers do from identifying Mr Alfred Hitchcock in one of his own films? I decided that the first thing to do was to try to discover, among the still living anniversarians, someone dimmer than, or at least as dim as, myself. I was unable to do so.
Not counting royalty, who get in ex officio, there are roughly ninety of them, sharing their
rather cramped niches—a whole week occupies only as much space as a cracker motto—with the illustrious dead, historical events, national days, religious festivals and other popular fix- tures. Of these ninety, about twenty are foreigners, but it would be misleading to claim that the remaining seventy Britons represent quite the last word in an elite, because there must be a number of worthy candidates who get excluded on typographical grounds. For in- stance, no one whose birthday falls on August 6 can get a look in this year, the whole of his berth in Valhalla being taken up by lltb SunDag after lIrIntte. llransflguratton ; and the same goes for April 4 (EASTER LAW SITTINGS BEGIN), December 21 $t. bomas. MICHAELMAS LAW
Srrrnics END) and various other dates. • As I scanned the entries I could not help speculating about the procedure used for filling them. Is there a sort of selection board, or is it left to a single, trusted individual—a descendant, • perhaps, of the orginal Joseph Whitaker? I in- cline to the latter theory. He takes, I think, a rather sceptical view of foreigners, possibly be- cause many of them, especially in the newly emergent countries, furnish only imprecise de- tails about their dates of birth; at any rate, he includes no Africans, only one Asian (Chiang Kai-shek) and only one Russian (Gagarin). Room is found for seven Americans, including two former Presidents, but it seems possible that he disapproves of the present administra- tion, for the single entry on August 27 com- memorates, not the birth of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1908, but the death of Le Corbusier in 1965.
For the rest, he appears totally indifferent to the world of television, appreciative of humour (A. P. Herbert, J. B. Morton, Flanders and Swann) and—very surprisingly—capable of in- accuracy; Sir James Gunn died in 1964, not 1944. I wonder if he enjoys his annual task, if his considerable powers of patronage weigh on him or exalt him. I wonder if anyone has ever offered him a bribe. But, above all, I wonder what on earth caused him to find a place for me.
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