The Press Saturday, March 19, 1932. The Budget and the Boat-Race.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20500, 19 March 1932, Page 14

The Press Saturday, March 19, 1932. The Budget and the Boat-Race.

Many people will feel that Mr Neville Chamberlain's announcement that he can balance Britain's Budget was untimely, since it was not reasonable to expect the English people to give more than cursory attention to the national finances with the boat race only a day or two away. Oxford men, it is true, may consider the balancing of the Budget an omen; it would, in their eyes, be appropriate, not to say significant, if Britain's long-delayed emergence from the depression were to coincide with an even longer-delayed win for Oxford on the water. There is much to be said for this view, since in the past few yeai-s England and Oxford have suffered together; the failure of the one to balance her Budget, and of the other to win the boat race, have been accepted as a sign of some inward decay. The frequency with which the Continental Press asks what is wrong with England is paralleled only by the frequency with which the English Press asks what is wrong with Oxford. There is, perhaps, some excuse for thinking that a country which does not balance its Budget is on the road to ruin, though, as the economists have pointed out, the balancing of this year's British Budget has a psychological rather than an economic importance. But why the boat race should be considered so profoundly significant is difficult to understand. Oxford may win at Rugby and at cricket, her candidates may scoop the honours in the Indian and Home " Civils," yet every time Cambridge wins the boat race Fleet Street begins anew its lament over the decay of Oxford. The explanation most favoured is that the virility of Oxford undergraduates has been undermined by the admission of women students. "After each boat race has been lost," complains the author of The Future of Oxford, graduates of the old school, from their vicarages in Berkshire or their tombs in the Athenaeum, flood out the newspapers with their lamentations of the" effeminacy and decadence that tlie admission of women to their alma mater has caused. Yet, from the point of view of intellectual or social life, the woman student is no more a part of Oxford than the Morris motorworkers. '' The other theory is that Oxford undergraduates are for the most part longhaired aesthetes who live on cocktails and caviare and have bizarre theories (to quote Isis) about "punctuation in " poetry, symbolism in silk-hats, realism "in rhetoric, and vorticism in verse." It is of no avail to point out that the aesthete is a familiar phenomenon in Cambridge as well as in Oxford, and that his general influence is negligible. Eleven lost boat races in the last twelve years have invested Oxford with an alluring atmosphere of decadence that nothing but a series of victories will dispel. Eight Oxford men may have helped to balance the Budget, but unless another eight can be first to Mortlake, the reputation of Oxford will still be tinder a cloud.