A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK S INCE the Prime Minister defies comment it
is no doubt folly for me to attempt to comment on him. Yet his characteristically dramatic reappearance in this country and in the House of Commons cannot go unsignalised. It did not, I can justly say, surprise me. In the wakeful small hours of Tuesday morning I was reflecting that Parliament was to reopen that day, and that it would be characteristic of the Prime Minister to appear suddenly and nonchalantly from behind the Speaker's chair as Members assembled. The relief at Mr. Churchill's safe return to England fron, abroad is always universal and profound, and this time for obvious reasons more than ever. It is worth remembering that, apart from the interval of his illness, he comes direct from the Teheran Conference, and he is likely therefore to be the more perplexed at Moscow manifestations so dissimilar to the uniformly friendly and co-operative attitude maintained by Marshal Stalin in the Persian capital. The personal relationship established there may have a peculiar value at this juncture. Then there is the invasion. The ship could obviously not clear for action till the captain had come aboard. Now that he is aboard he needs, for the fighting to come, to keep fighting fit. He is no doubt conscious of the universal desire that he should spare himself as far as possible. But I doubt if anyone believes he will do anything of the kind.
* * * * My note of last week on the contribution the B.B.C. makes to familiarity with the Bible has produced some interesting comments. With one—a suggestion that the five minutes between 7.55 and 8 a.m. might be better employed by the reading of a passage from the Bible and a few selected prayers than it is today—I have great sympathy. Some of the " Lift up your hearts " addresses seem to me frankly deplorable. There is no 'room here to say why, and no need. But with five minutes to fill, how many speakers are there today capable of occupying that time to better advantage than by reading a carefully chosen passage from the Bible and two or three of the brief prayers in which men of deep spiritual experience in past ages have expressed that experience in language of unparalleled dignity and beauty? I am thinking chiefly, of course, of the collects in the Book of Common Prayer, but not of them alone. Samuel Johnson would be well worth drawing on ; and so would many others with whom the Religious Director of the B.B.C. is, I am sure, more familiar than I am. At least an experiment on these lines could be tried, say, once a week.
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A new university, about which a little more information might be of interest, has swum into my ken. It appears under the title of University of the Eastern United States of America (Union); British Section, and its domicile St. Peter's Collegiate Church House, Attlebridge, Norwich. In company with the late stillborn University of Sulgrave, it seems to have been incorporated in the State of Delaware. The President of the British Section is a Rev. H. Yorke, M.A., Ph.D., of St. Peter's Church, Attlebridge,—of what denomination I am not clear ; apparently not Anglican. He is at any rate a master of the English language, for in an official letter to the American University Union he informed the governing authorities of that well-known and valuable organisation that they were " a gang of impudent, libelous (though perhaps " humourous ") dirty rascals and cads." This seems good, vigorous English, ecclesiastical or otherwise. The precise sphere of activity of the U.E.U.S.A. (Union), British Section, I have not yet discovered. In publishing in its first issue of this term the University Sermon preached by Canon C. H. K. Boughton on the last Sunday of last term the Cambridge Review has to record the melancholy fact that Canon Boughton has died in the interval. It also adds a rather curious piece of information. Canon Boughton, to the perplexity of many, was announced (and is reported) as Rural Dean of Christianity." The description, it appears, is perfectly accurate. " The terms archpriest," dean of Christianity' and rural dean '," says the Review, " were interchangeable in the Middle Ages. The first of them has survived in England at Haccombe (Devon) only ; the second in the three cities of Exeter, Lincoln and Leicester ; the third everywhere else." (Crockford, by the way, provides confirma- tion of this statement, but writes " Arch Priest " thus.)
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I am not surprised that Lord Woolton, who appointed Mr. J. P. R. Maud, formerly Dean of University College, Oxford; and after that Master of Birkbeck College, Second Secretary of the Ministry of Food, should now have carried Mr. Maud off to help him with reconstruction. There are not too many quite first-class men about, but when they are shifted one Department's gain is, after all, another Department's loss. I suppose it May be taken that the Ministry of Food is pretty much capable now of running by its own momentum, but to lose Lord Woolton and Mr. Maud simultaneously is a severe test of its self-sufficiency. Some difficult decisions regarding rationing' have still to be taken.
* * * * The Army is making the first word in the title of the New English Dictionary look foolish. Its latest contribution to the en- richment of the English language—the latest, that is to say, to reach me,—forms the heading of an official notice, " Spillage of Petrol." The meaning is clear, and the new substantive on the whole euphonious. Indeed, it has inspired me with the ambition to write a novel or a poem (I am not .sure which, but as I shall write neither it matters relatively little) under the title Spillage and Ullage. Ullage, unlike spillage, will be found• in any self-respecting dictionary.
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Not many men have more completely justified the accident of their name as Dr. Luke Wiseman, who, having died within a fortnight of his 86th birthday, was the subject of a funeral address by Dr. Scott Lidgett, who is 89. He was one of the great figures of Methodism. Methodism indeed.was in his blood, for in becoming President of the Wesleyan Conference in 1933 he succeeded to a position his father had held in 1872. He was probably the &it authority in the country on the Wesleys' hymns, a subject on which he wrote in The Spectator a year or two ago.
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Whether world-supremacy at contract bridge makes a man an authority on political contracts and bridge-building between nations I hardly know ; but I look forward with considerable interest to reading the book on World Federation by Ely Culbertson which Messrs. Faber are publishing this week.
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Being rather a believer in a good healthy mixture of metaphors, I welcome the following, from an article by Sir Miles Thomas in the Daily Express: " When the Nazis gambled that by swift, scythe- like strokes of their new-born blitzkrieg they could march hot-foot
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