Beer v. Bordeaux.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19862, 25 February 1930, Page 10

Beer v. Bordeaux.

The short cablegram yesterday which described the English Rugby victory over France as a " triumph of beer " over Bordeaux" was in one respect tantalisingly incomplete. Every Frenchman had brought his little winecask, "gaily painted red, white, and " blue, with a Gallic cock at one end but the beer was left to the imagination. Something Ought to have been said about a row of tankards with ribboned handles, or a squad of bottles with little flags stiy:k in the corks, or a barrel on a pedestal, with a lion carved out of cheese surmounting all. But nothing was' said, and perhaps nothing was done. Indeed, we may be quite' sure that nothing was done. The tankards and bottles, unribboned and flagless, waited in humdrum publichouses and homes; their ceremonial possibilities never occurred to the English footballers. The Englishman's genius runs to pageantry like the Lord Mayor's Show and the opening of Parliament; but it runs away from the horrid risk of his making a show of himself. The Englishman will rise to a moment magnificent with gold coaches and scarlet; but he will shrink from becoming noticeable with a handful of others,' each with a garland of hops round his neck and a model hogshead in Ms hand.' In the one case, of course, he has a million to give him courage and approval, nor does he wear kneebreeches or powdered hair himself, but only marvels at them and enjoys them; and he is doing what his grandfather and his grandfather's grandfather have told him he may do and yet remain respeo- j

table. In tho other, he would have to become an oddity, conspicuous anion? the sober and critical many, and they might—they would—laugh at him. He will be a typical Englishman, so far as he can be without consciously trying to typify anything. The last thing that he will think of or permit himself, of course, is to appear as the typical Englishman, to make himsclt a visible and assertive symbol. What Englishman ever looked like John Bull or dressed like him? This is not to say, of course, that the win at .Twickenham was not a victory of beer over Bordeaux. It is pleasant to tnink that it may have been. But the touch of br.ue imagination that might have paraded and flourished the signs of it was wanting; even the cable-writer had not enough imagination to invent it.