"Spectator" Competitions

RULES AND CONDITIONS Entries must be typed or very clearly written on one side of the paper only. The name and address, or pseudonym, of the competitor must be on each entry and not on a separate sheet. When a word limit is set words must be counted and the number given. No entries can be returned. Prizes may be divided at the discretion of the judge, or withheld if no entry reaches the required standard. The judge reserves the right to print or quote from any entry. The judge's decision is final, and no correspondence can be entered into on the subject of the award. Entries must be addressed to :—The Editor, the Spectator, 99 Gower Street,

London, W.C. 1, and be marked on the envelope Competition No. (—).

Competition No. 8 (Set by " SCADAVAY.") A PRIZE of £3 8s. is offered for the best paragraph of pure nonsense made up of sentences or clauses taken from last week's issue of the Spectator. The paragraph must not exceed 350 words in length. For the purposes of this competition a clause consists of not less than four words enclosed by two stops of any sort, and may not be taken from the advertising matter. Page-references must be appended. Competitors are reminded that the purest nonsense is never wholly meaningless nor wholly inconse- quent. We give below a specimen opening for such a paragraph from our issue of May 16th :

" Sir Edward is a man of wide experience in public affairs, beside whom Dick Turpin was a mere cowardly hooligan. But he has a good deal of pigment buried in cells close to the nerve ends. This knowledge is terrifying. Landing at Hamburg with a cage of eagles as personal luggage, he gave up boxing, cricket, and his ambition to be an actor, but not for fear of icebergs and seldom from want of nourishment . . ." (From pages 783, 791, 765, 786, 793, 779.)

Entries must be received not later than Monday, June 7th, 1931. The result of this competition will appear in our issue of Juno 20th.

Competition No. 9 (Set by "Deem.") A PRIZE of £3 3s. is offered for a new and original poem about the Derby. Poems may be in any form, and may be serious, pathetic, humorous or satirical, but must not exceed twenty-five lines of English verse.

Entries must be received not later than Monday, June 15th, 1931. The result of this competition will be announced in our issue of June 27th.

The result of Competition No. 7 will appear in our next issue.

Report of Competition No. 6

(REPORT AND AWARD By " SCADAVAY.") A PRIZE of £3 3s. was offered for the best list of titles in the modern manner for biographies of four of the following people :—Mr. Philip Snowden, Mrs. Meyrick, Primo Camera, Mr. Somerset Maugham, Miss Nellie Wallace.

In the last century, when the traditions of what Mr. Harold Nicolson calls hagiography prevailed and every biography was, as it were, labelled " This Side Up. With Care," the question of a title presented no difficulty. If you had written the life of that well-known colonial administrator, Sir Bendigo Gosport-Thumb, you said as much. You did not call it " Proconsul," or " Sjambok," or " The Curse of Clubland." You let your readers know what they were in for. But to-day, as we all know, the fashion has changed. A great deal now depends on the title of a biography—much more than on the title of a novel, which, so far as the reading public is concerned, is wisdom before the event. A really apt title for a novel may miss its due of credit as easily, and for the same reasons, as a really accurate weather forecast.

There were a lot of entries for this competition, all of them lively, but most of them a little too obvious. I suppose the easiest of the five personalities involved was Mrs. Meyrick, since she exists—for most of us commoners, at any rate— only in headlines : a pleasantly one-dimensional figure in black and white, with the emphasis on black. I think the right sort of biography of her might have been written under any of the following titles : Grand Slant in Clubs (" Victor Eoves "), The Eternal Cinderella (Guy Innes), The Trials of Hebe (Mrs. W. Medd), and Hecate (Mrs. M. Hargreaves). Several competitors had The Queen of Clubs.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of justice done to Mr. Somerset Maugham. Only one or two entries accepted the popular misconception of this brilliant writer as a kind of second-rate Wycherley without the brawn. Of the better attempts, " Peter Quince's " Fair Plays was hardly com- prehensive enough. Zits Baker's Dotting the Eyes was a play upon words which ended in a pointless draw. Diogenes was a good suggestion from several people. Pearls Before Swine (B. Lindsay Smith) is inapplicable for economic reasons ; we do at least pay through our snouts. Gerald R. Taylor's quotation title—With a Learned Spirit—was ingenious though a publisher would turn it down as too abstruse. It is taken from a tribute to a man's knowledge of human nature ; I don't know if the fact that the man was Iago was intended to be significant.

No one was very good about Camera. Jas. J. Nevin's Paws of Power is the sort of title his biography probably will have. Perhaps the best was J. H:s Primo Inter Impares. Mr. Snowden was called a lot of hard names. Most of the better-known minerals—iron, steel, granite, gold—went to the composition of his titles. I rather liked the Rev. A. H. Storrs' apt, though ponderous, attempt—The Astigmatic Visionary. Nellie Wallace did not get her fair share of attention or of skill. Nobody, to my surprise, tried to hit her off as The Grand Dame. Mrs. J. R. Hinds The Unlovely, One had an authentic smack of the dust-cover.

Nobody's entry was consistently good. " Corio's " is worth quoting in full as a gallant attempt to bring down his birds without using the second barrel :— Philip Snowden

Mrs. Meyrick Camera Miss Nellie Wallace .. .. Bayard .. Nocturne . . Leviathan . . Farce use

" Como."

It was very difficult to award the prize in the absence of any extraordinary merit. I finally decided to split it up and give one guinea to each of the entries printed below. Mr. Callis's first two are very good, and so is Mr. Richards' Philip Snowden ; and there is exactly the 'right rather pretentious note in Mr. Oliver's last.

THE PRIZE-WINNING ENTRIES.

Mr. Philip Snowden .. Mrs. Meyrick Primo Camera Miss Nellie Wallace ..

62 Severn Grove, Cardiff. The Sisyphus of Labour Lady Lucifer Giant the Jack-Killer Behind Her Vulgarity E. J. CALL'S.

Hammerhand : The Romance of Primo Camera The Queen of Clubs : Pages from the Life of Mrs. Meyrick Procrustes : A Biography of Philip Snowden The Olympian, Charlady : The Story of Nellie Wallace Peterhouse, Cambridge. D. E. RICHARDS.

. . Superman to Dives . . Night Shifts of a Queen .. A Titan Resurgent . . Travesty in Furbelow Stormier View, Natal Road, Brighton. T. E. OLLIVER.

Mr. Philip Snowden .. Mrs. Meyrick Primo Camera Miss Nellie Wallace ..