Club Crawling And Pub Crawling

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 80, 5 April 1943, Page 2

Club Crawling And Pub Crawling

We read some novels first for the story and afterwards for the style. Mr. Churchill's speeches are like that. In his speech of a fortnight ago there was again revealed the f artist as well as the man of action. , One observed the familiar order in 1 arrangement, the easily followed logical processes, the clarity and i force of argument, and the happi- ! By Cyrano ness in the choice of words. The 1 ancient Greek, the Italian of Renai- ; sance, and the Tudor EnglishP man saw nothing strange in the combination of man of action and artist; it was quite natural to them I that a poet or painter should be a soldier or man of affairs. Modern Britons, influenced by the Puritan : tradition (though Milton's career should have taught them the contrary), and by their absorption in trade and commerce, have been inclined to think that the two types are like East and West—never the twain shall meet. Mr. Churchill has shown them that a man can be a great national leader and an artist as well. The Prime Minster is fundamentally both, and the combination accounts in large measure for his unique hold on the nation and the Empire. He can act and explain. Kitchener could act, but he couldn't explain. He couldn t hold his own in argument against his much more facile colleagues in the Cabinet, and his appeal to the public lay, not in his words, but m his character. Mr. Churchill is a superb expositor, and radio . gives him a vehicle that was denied to all his predecessors who can be compared to him. Plain English To one passage in his speech I would particularly direct your attention, for what he said .and the way ' he said it. This was his declaration that there must be no more idlers m Britain. One phrase shows as • clearly as anything he ever said, his skill with words. "There could be no - band of drones in the people s midst whether they came from the ancient < aristocracy, the modern plutocracy, £ or were the ordinary type of pub I crawler." This was what he actually i ' said. It may be, I suggest, significant 1 that-in the British Official Wireless version of the speech (at any rate in J the one I have before me) the phrase "pub crawler" is not used. "The ordinary public" are the words. What a difference! "Pub crawler" is alive; the other is dead. "Pub crawler" describes a certain type most vividly. But even to-day there is bound to be shaking of heads over it, and one of those heads may belong to the compiler of the 8.0. W. message. Such undignified language from a Prime Minister! To talk slang on so grave an occasion! No other Prime Minister would have stooped to such language—except Mr. Lloyd George, and well, we know what he's like. But Mr. Churchill doesn't talk to purists and pedants; he talks to the people. "Pub' 'is going to be good English, if it isn't so already. Didn't Chesterton ask in a poem, "Will someone take me to a pub?" However, as Mr. Churchill well knows, and indeed has indicated, pub is not the only variety of crawl. There is club crawling as well. You may remember Bertie Wooster, despite. what has happened to his creator. No More Idlers Never before, I suppose, unless one brings ,in Mr. Lloyd George again, has a British Prime Minister pronounced so emphatically against loafing. We have long known how 'many unemployed wage-earners there are in Britain (most of them unemployed against their will), but the number of idle men and women of means can hardly be calculated accurately. Much depends on the definition of "idle." To be without a definite calling that carries wages or salary is not necessarily to be idle. Public life, the arts, scholarship, scientific research, and philanthropy,. have been greatly enriched by the labours of men and women with private means. I should say that 'before the war the number of completely idle- men and women was decreasing in proportion to population, and the total was a good deal smaller than was generally believed. In the future taxation will severely reduce the incomes of people who live on investments, and it is hard to see how, by incidence of taxation, the Government can differentiate between men's methods of spending their days. Take two men with private incomes of £2000 a year. One fishes from placebo place and toddles round golf courses; the other specialises in some branch of literary or scientific research, and gives a good deal of his time to local government. WilJ there be different rates of taxation for these two? There is no doubt, however, that a good many people did lead idle or semi-idle lives, and a lot of them were surrounded with a domestic service that will seem incredible to a later generation, if it does not seem so to this one. The days have gone when to have only two or three servants was to be "quite poor." Indeed, a new problem is arising, closely connected with the low birthrate (the gravity of which Mr. Churchill mentioned)—to provide domestic service for those who really need it. A state service of help for mothers is a probable development in the not distant future.

The idle woman of means is in a rather different position from the man, for a woman has had, and to some extent always will have, fewer opportunities in the world. Here again we must distinguish between the leisure that private means provides and complete idleness, but there were in Britain a good-sized-class of women who did little or nothing in the way of work. Some of them had never so much as made a cup of tea for themselves, and there was a deep-rooted conviction, which their servants shared, that this was part of the mark of a lady. Two wars, however, have helped to swing opinion back to the radical sentiment of the Middle Ages, When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? The World Moves The truth is that in social service we are moving as fast as the science of war. Many of my readers will remember the scorn with which New, Zealanders used to speak of the "dole" in Britain. There was widespread ignorance of the fact that the "dole" was based on a system of contributory insurance. It was the same in the United States. Americans thought things had come to a pretty pass in Britain. Then they were hit by a slump and they had no machinery for dealing with unemployement. . The attitude is different to-day. Mr. Raymond Gram Swing, the well-known American commentator, says that a few years ago the Beveridge Report would have been denounced from one end of the country to the other, but now it is accepted as "an ideological development for a democracy." The world moves and Britain is not in the rear.