20 MAY 1955, Page 18

Umbrage in Kent

AMAN who occasionally detects symptoms of pomposity in his own behaviour can be fairly certain that others detect them less occasionally; and he develops—if I may speak from personal experience—a keen and probably morbid interest in the finished• article, in full-blown, unbridled pomposity. 'At least,' he says to himself (with the Olympian objectivity of a not-yet-quite-tipsy undergraduate focussing, as he passes the decanter, an already seriously befuddled don) `at least I shall never sink as low as that.' Very often, of course, he is mistaken in this view; but even if he is, even if he becomes tremendously pompous himself, he will still remain interested in pomposity, will still criticise the Deputy Lieutenant for refusing to kiss Miss National Savings (Loam- shire), 1955, on the dais in the Corn Exchange. For dignity is a thing with which we are all born, and we cannot help being interested in its usage. AMAN who occasionally detects symptoms of pomposity in his own behaviour can be fairly certain that others detect them less occasionally; and he develops—if I may speak from personal experience—a keen and probably morbid interest in the finished• article, in full-blown, unbridled pomposity. 'At least,' he says to himself (with the Olympian objectivity of a not-yet-quite-tipsy undergraduate focussing, as he passes the decanter, an already seriously befuddled don) `at least I shall never sink as low as that.' Very often, of course, he is mistaken in this view; but even if he is, even if he becomes tremendously pompous himself, he will still remain interested in pomposity, will still criticise the Deputy Lieutenant for refusing to kiss Miss National Savings (Loam- shire), 1955, on the dais in the Corn Exchange. For dignity is a thing with which we are all born, and we cannot help being interested in its usage.

These generalisations are inspired by last week's news from, Kent, where nine Mayors (those of Sandwich, Deal, Dover, Ramsgate, Margate, Folkestone, Tenterden, Faversham and New Romney) made in unison a protest. They made it to the Mayor of Canterbury, and it concerned their treatment as official guests at the ceremony at which the King of Denmark presented new colours to the Buffs (the Royal East Kent Regiment) on Canterbury cricket ground. The nine mayors claimed that—in the words of the newspaper report—Alley had not been accorded proper civic dignity.'

They arrived wearing their robes and accompanied by their mace-bearers. But they were not given seats on the dais, they were not given luncheon by the Buffs and they were not pre- sented to the King of Denmark. Instead they were escorted in procession, by a field officer of the regiment whose guests they were, to the block of seats reserved for them; and there, it seems, they were left to witness the ceremony which they had been invited to witness. They complained that they had been treated like wayward schoolboys.

• I am prepared to believe that the arrangements made for welcoming these dignitaries may not have worked with clock- work precision. There were some 10,000 humbler spectators present. The nine mayors presumably arrived in nine different motor cars at nine different moments in time; and by the time they all came under starter's orders and set off majestically (but, to their disgust, through a side entrance) towards their seats, it may well be that some of them were out of humour. At military ceremonies which are not—as for instance Troop- ing the Colour is—annual events, the front of the house presents much the same problems as it does at weddings; how- ever carefully the protagonists have rehearsed their parts, there is always the danger that a wealthy godmother of the bride's may be inadvertently sequestered by one of the bridegroom's ushers and sited, hull-down behind the font, on the wrong side of the church.

Nothing like this seems to have happened at Canterbury. The mayors did not complain that they were frog-marched, or hectored, or anything like that; what they minded about was being treated with less than the respect which they felt was due to holders of their office. Perhaps they were; I do not know. But it was surely over-exigent to suggest that they should all have been given places on the dais. In public a mayor is as inseparable from his mace as a crooner is from his microphone (though of course for totally different reasons); and it was a bit much to expect their hosts to pack eighteen more people on to a structure already loaded with notabilities. Nor do I see why they should expect the Buffs either, to regale them (and presumably their mace-bearers) with a meal or to present them to the King of Denmark. I find it, in short, difficult to acquit them of pomposity.

It is one of the more disarming human weaknesses, and I fancy it is rarer than it used to be. People who hold, or aspire to hold, positions of authority have learnt that it does not pay and do their best to shun it. Schoolmasters, generals, above all politicians are surely less pompoug than they were. It is not merely that our diction has become less orotund and our protocols less absolute; and it is certainly not that there has been any over-all decline in our sense of self-importance. It is rather, perhaps, that we are more selfconscious than we were, more alive to the dangers of making ourselves look ridiculous. We shrink from striking attitudes, from making a fuss, from the cruder forms of self-assertion.

But this is true mainly of the centre of the stage of public affairs, where the actors are performing before a relatively sophisticated audience. Around the parish pump pomposity still flourishes, umbrage is freely taken. Only the other day the Town Clerk of Scarborough, in a pleasing phrase, described as 'absurd and Gestapo-like,' a decision, announced by the Deputy Chief Constable of Southend-on-Sea, not to allow representatives of the press to hear the Mayor of Scarborough pronounce his address of welcome to the annual conference of the Police Superintendents' Association; and although I am not sure who was being pompous on this occasion, I am pretty sure that somebody was.

* • When all is said and done, however, pomposity is perhaps the only human failing whose disappearance would leave the world a poorer place. It hardly ever does any serious harm to anyone, even to those who are afflicted by it. It is not, like other weaknesses, something that we feel we ought to forgive when we see it displayed. It is often a sort of bonus, which turns a dull occasion into a memorable one; a boring speech is less painful to listen to if it is delivered in a pompous way, because the speaker's pomposity is something we can savour and marvel at, and gives us the feeling of being martyrs instead of mere victims. This is good for our ego and helps to keep us awake.

So it would be wrong to think uncharitably of the nine Kentish mayors who felt that their dignity had been affronted and were not afraid to say so. They created a storm in a tea cup which must have given a lot of people in Kent a new and absorbing4topic of conversation; and it seems unlikely that they have caused serious perturbation in the ranks of the Buffs, an almost proverbially steady regiment.