SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK J. W. M. THOMPSON
Oxford has begun to speculate busily about who will be the new Dean of Christ Church, the richest, largest and arguably the grandest of all the Oxford colleges, in place of Dr C. A. Simpson, who died last week; and I'm told that a strong favourite has already emerged in the person of Professor Henry Chadwick, the Regius Professor of Divinity for the past ten years. The appointment is unlike that of the head of any other Oxford college in that it customarily goes to an Anglican clergyman, since the head of the college is also the dean of the cathedral. The field is thus drastically narrowed. How- ever, Professor Chadwick's distinction as a scholar would qualify him for the headship of any college.
If there were no such strong candidate available, Christ Church might have been in for stirring times. Some people there would probably have tried to separate the ecclesiastical office from the headship, a process which would raise all manner of complexities; or even simply to press for the appointment of a layman as Dean. It may come to that one day but meanwhile Professor Chadwick seems likely to main- tain the clerical tradition. The appointment, like that to any deanery, is made by the Queen (acting, of course, on the Prime Minister's advice); it is usual for informal consultations with the governing body to take place first.
If he becomes Dean, Professor Chadwick will have to resign his chair. Oxford doesn't permit the kind of pluralism which Cam- bridge allows, whereby a man can be both head of a college and a professor—which is precisely the situation, by coincidence, of Professor Chadwick's brother, Owen Chad- wick. who is Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and Regius Professor of Modern History. The question was voted on in Congregation a few years ago and a firm decision was taken against permitting this kind of double appointment at Oxford.
The Chadwicks are an accomplished family; a third brother. Sir John, is the present Ambassador to Rumania. An em- bassy, two regius professorships and (prob- ably) two headships of Oxbridge colleges make a rare score for any three brothers.
The space show
The moon expedition which will set off next week will, in passing. pose certain problems for us armchair spectators. I'm not sure that man has yet adapted fully to the role of intimate but helpless observer at such adventures. The long Marco Polo tradition, of explorers returning from new worlds to amaze stay-at-homes with their tales, has ended too recently; even when Everest was climbed people knew nothing of it until it was over. We now expect to see such things with our own eyes as they happen, on our little screens at home. Un- fortunately the well-known flattening effect of television tends to make all events, great and small, come out of the box'at roughly the same size. The watcher can see men taking their lives in their hands and yet, although he may feel a little heartless about it, find his capacity for interested response soon exhausted. The spectator turns from man's conquest of a new world to some- thing a shade more engrossing, such as a crossword puzzle. How odd for this step into the unknown to be recalled one day like this: 'Do you remember seeing the first man on the moon, Grandfather?"Well, no, I was too busy mowing the lawn.'
The astronauts themselves encourage this mood. The three men, in their long televised press conference at the weekend. generated curiously little excitement. That they're men of courage goes without saying. but they seem also men cast in an un- imaginative, stolidly dependable, conscien- tious mould; technicians par excellence. And their language smothers everything under a pall of lifeless jargon. 'At this time we don't have any recourse in that even- tuality'—meaning if their vehicle won't rise off the moon after landing, they're lost. It was like listening to the words not of three heroes but of a committee of computers.
Nor any drop to drink
One of the less obvious threats to our deteriorating environment comes from the growing demand for water. This increases constantly, not simply because the popula- tion grows but also because people use more, both for industrial and for domestic purposes; hence more and more stretches of countryside have to be drowned to pro- vide reservoirs. I remember that years ago people were saying that this at least was a problem which technology would soon solve, through the treatment of seawater. The removal of salt from water seems a triflingly simple process, after all, when one thinks what complicated tricks scientists get up to. Alas, the report on the subject just issued by the Water Resources Board is a great disappointment. It says, in effect, that although the process can be carried out easily enough no one has yet found a way of making it as cheap as flooding valleys and collecting the rain. What is more, there seems very little prospect of this for many decades. In short, this technological boon is a washout. It joins other fond hopes, such as the silencing of aircraft engines, as some- thing which posterity may enjoy but which we won't.
The report also notes that there would be 'amenity objections' to the building of large distillation plants on beautiful stretches of coast. Well, yes: but why build them there? The answer involves a distinction between 'good quality seawater' and 'poor' seawater. In other words, even the sea off much of our shore is now too polluted. A pretty summer holiday thought.
Why their's?
A small puzzle. A needle-eyed colleague drew my attention to the title of a pamphlet on Anguilla just published by Mr Neil Marten, MP: Theirs Not To Reason Why spelt like that, intrusive apostrophe and all. This seemingly illiterate spelling of 'theirs' appears on almost every page. and three times in the quotation from 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' from which the title is taken. But it would be rash to convict Air Marten or his printers of a blunder; the same spelling appears both in my Oxford edition of Tennyson and also in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Presumably Tennyson (or the newspaper in which the poem first appeared) put in the apostrophe and it has stayed in ever since. Can anyone explain why?
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