A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE relief in a thousand newspaper offices in this country at the breaking of the silence that has been so scrupulously and so loyally observed for months regarding the King will be immense. The tradition that at all ordinary times and in all ordinary cases puts the Royal Family beyond the range of public criticism is wholly sound (though a survey of some of the papers of a hundred years ago casts a startling light on the 'practice prevalent then) but a journalist's conviction that all news that is news should find a place in a respon- sible paper's columns is sound as well, and when every paper in the United States was printing columns daily about the King's friendship for Mrs. Ernest Simpson, and the subject was a staple theme of conversation every- where in London—though by no means to the same extent in the provinces—there was something pro- fessionally gaffing in the reticence that has been uniformly observed, without a shred of authority to enforce it, month after month by every paper in this country, from The Times to the Daily Worker. But their reticence has been infinitely to their credit.
* * * * The political future of Sir Stafford Cripps is a question of some interest, and possibly of some importance, for the fact that the Member for East Bristol's ability is often combined with an astonishing gaucherie cannot hide the fact that his ability is considerable. But he probably lost his party more seats at the last General Election than any other single factor, and if there were another election tomorrow he would beat his previous record. His party may jettison him—after his Stockport speech, in which he declared his belief that it would not be at all a bad thing for the British working-classes if Germany should defeat Britain in a capitalist and international war, the temptation is very strong. And the Socialist League which he founded with the late E. F. Wise has never made itself an effective force. I heard an experi- enced and level-headed Labour man predict a few days ago that in the end Sir Stafford would find himself in Sir Oswald Mosley's camp. But the reasoning was tortuous, and the conclusion to my mind fantastic. Meanwhile, there Sir Stafford is, with the best brain, with perhaps one exception, on the Labour Front Bench. He will never become negligible.
* * * * With the destruction of the giant greenhouse at Sydenham passes not only one of the earliest recollections of every London child, and of tens of thousands from the provinces, but the last relic of the authentic Victorianism. There it stood for eighty years and more, monument to the earnestness and the genuine if limited vision of Albert the Good. All the industry, all the respectability, all the prosperity, all the self-complacency of the middle years of nineteenth-century England were represented by the vast structure that rose before the nation's astonished gaze in Hyde Park on the model of the Chatsworth conservatories. Strange that qualities so solid should be mirrored in a structure in a sense so flimsy. But the Great Exhibition which it housed was an event in history, and with Monday's conflagration a link with the closing phases of the industrial revolution is finally snapped. All that remains now (unless its membeis were calcined unobserved) is the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. That goes on administering funds which the miraculous exhibition miraculously provided. In the process of winding up the exhibition the Commission discovered the secret of perpetual motion—and it is moving still. (You will find it in Whitaker).
* * * An unfamiliar, and yet half-familiar, face among the most distinguished guests at the principal table at the Royal Institute of International Affairs dinner on Tuesday night aroused some interested perplexity. The table-plan showed the name associated with the face to be Mr. H. P. Price. Who, I asked my neighbour, was'Mr. H. P. Price ? He knew no more than I. Then came Lord Halifax's speech, prefaced by the reading of a letter from the King expressing warm satisfaction at the gift by Mr. H. P. Price of £20,000 to endow a chair of international economic research in connexion with the Royal Institute. But still who was Mr. H. P. Price ? Gradually the features recalled old associations. All of us had seen them (before they were replaced by Sir John Squire and other experimenters in habiliments) adorning announcements of those serviceable suitings in which for half a hundred trifling shillings Mr. Price clothes alike the plutocrat and the impecunious. So the public-spirited endowment of research by industry finds one more example. Lord Nuffield, of course, stands alone on his own magnificent eminence. And in Mr. Price's own particular sphere Sir Montague Burton had already led the way by founding the Chair of Indus- trial Relations at Cambridge.
* * * I am impressed by a letter in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph on the effects of the Press censorship in Germany. The writer has travelled 6,000 miles in that country in the last few weeks and found the impression everywhere prevailing that Great Britain was on the point of being overwhelmed by a Communist revolution. It was useless to protest that the idea was fantastic. " The reply was that since the German Press unanimously asserted that Communism was a serious danger in Great Britain, and therefore to Europe, it must be true." Quite so. There are still people who believe that if they see it in print it is so. But why do the papers assiduously disseminate this legend ? Obviously because they are told to. And why are they told to ? If Germany's mission is to fight Communism everywhere there is something a little sinister in this studied attribu- tion to Great Britain of a Communist danger which has never cost a living Briton a wink of sleep.
* * Sir Frederick Keeble entitled his recent autobiography a little unconventionally Freddie and Pollie. I should like to invite the consideration of a distinguished reviewer in a Sunday paper to the cognate theme Freddie and Bertie. Dealing most competently in the last issue of his paper with Dr. Einstein's Short History of Music, he makes happy allusion to Rafael writing his century of sonnets and Dante preparing to paint his angel, and observes that " a book on music by the greatest living scientist is in a quite peculiar sense a tract for the times." It is indeed; and there is more that is peculiar about this business than that. The greatest living scientist's Christian name is Albert; the book on =Biel% by Jul, Einstein whose parents called
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