NORWICH FOR EVER!

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22249, 13 November 1937, Page 18

NORWICH FOR EVER!

*- CENTURIES OF CITY GOVERNMENT Success to the Mayor. By R. H. Mottram. Robert Hale. 280 pp. (12/6 net.) Mr Mottram's history of a municipality is distinguished. By its subject, by the thoroughness with which the material was collected, and by Mr Mottram's easy, pleasant style, it is a good study of English social history. The city of Norwich was chosen for this history of local selfgovernment, because of its long, continuous, and representative records. Administrators have for 530 years met in one room, its records are long and comparatively perfect, and it displays the typical human institution always, century after century, being adjusted to man. The history extends from the "agglomeration of Roman days to the Lord Mayor of 1936, through the changes from the "hundred" to the "leet courts, through the excitements of the Tudors to the government by political party, and- it includes, at all stages, information about the occupations and ways of life of the townsfolk, burgesses or citizens. Changes have been quicker these last 80 years. The railway, passing a hundred miles west, increased isolation, and this isolation, with the influences of a foreign racial mixture and Nonconformity, has maintained the independence of the townspeople. By the loyalty of the well-to-do and the establishment of two or three industries, Norwich, after the failure of weaving, escaped the complete sluggishness of a small cathedral town. On the other hand, it has escaped, by means of the patriotism and wisdom of its merchants and rulers, the fate of a makeshift manufacturing community. The one great change defined by Mr Mottram between the first Provost of 1194 and the Lord Mayor of to-day is "self-consciousness," "the degree of calculated and deliberate intention." The Lord Mayor is the father of his citizenry, and deserves Mr Mottram's parody of the Mayor of Eatanswill, "Success to the Mayor. And may he never desert the Corporation business, which we govern ourselves by." The book is illustrated with point and interest.