Viscount Cobham Gives Speech-day Address

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30275, 30 October 1963, Page 2

Viscount Cobham Gives Speech-day Address

(From th* London Correspondent of “The Press”! LONDON, October 13. “Some of us feel that our old country is going through a bad patch just at present. If we are, it may be because we can no longer see further ahead than the Chancellor’s next budget,” said Lord Cobham, former Governor-General of New Zealand, in an address on speech day at the Lillesden Girls’ School in Kent yesterday.

“Perhaps we need a reorientation of aims, a reassessment of what we value, of what we wish to discard, and what we want to re-establish. The factors of decadence are cynicism, luxury, weariness, and superstition,” he said.

The welfare state in itself was a very fine ideal; but it should be the safety-net under the tight-rope of civilisation, and not a hammock in which to go to sleep “When St. Paul adjured us to put off the Old Man. he did not mean that we were to put on the old woman. As Bishop Creighton once remarked: ‘ln dealing with ourselves, after we have let the ape and the tiger die, there remains the donkey,

a much more intractable animal’,” he said. Lord Cobham told the girls he was there as guest speaker because a particularly unscrupulous parent, having treated him to an admirable dinner, had slipped in the suggestion so casually and in such dulcet tones that he had found himself ensnared, before being able to think up one of the five standard excuses which he always kept at his disposal. “I reckon that the job of a speaker at a school prizegiving is to say one thing that will be remembered — while trying to say nothing that will be regretted,” he added. “A Square” "At the age of 54 one settles down to certain welldefined convictions, most of them wrong. That is, I understand, what my elder children mean when (confounding what I believe to be all geometrical and geographical probability) they call me a square. “You see. I am oldfashioned enough to believe that schools like yours are oases—as monasteries once were—the only places where the right standards and values are still upheld. “There are two kinds of fool in the world: one says— This is old, so it must be good.’ The other says ‘This is new, so it must be better.’ “To contend that Beethoven is better than Bartok, or Keats than Dylan Thomas, is meaningless: one might as well say that mustard is better than pepper. “In so far. however, as all wisdom is an accumulation of the thoughts, aspirations, dreams, and actions of those who have gone before us, we

cannot understand the-pres-ent unless we can also understand the past. There are some truths which are eternal—beauty is one of them—and they pop up at the oddest times and places. “From the Heart”

"Not long ago, an American senator gat up to propose a toast to the memory of Abraham Lincoln and said:

“ ‘There is no new thing to be said about Lincoln. There is no new thing to be said of the mountains or of the sea. or of the stars. The years go their way, but the same old mountains lift their granite shoulders above the drifting clouds: the same mysterious sea beats upon the shore, the same silent stars keep holy vigil above a tired world. But to the mountains and sea and stars men turn together in unwearied homage. And thus with Lincoln. For he was a mountain in grandeur of soul, he was a sea in deep undervoice of mystic loneliness. he was a star in steadfast purity of purpose: and he abides.' “Now this is fine stuff because it was from the heart,” Lord Cobham said. “Always remember this—mere cleverness is not enough; nothing has long satisfied the human spirit which has not got its roots in the human heart. A lot of folk pride themselves upon being open-minded . . . but as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it on something solid. “If we do not study the past we cannot learn from others, and we shall make not only our own mistakes but theirs as well,” Lord Cobham said.