Birthday bounties

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33434, 16 January 1974, Page 12

Birthday bounties

Anyone who has tried to find a dentist during a holiday week-end will surely appreciate the birthday gesture announced by Dame Sybil Hathaway, hereditary ruler of Sark. This good lady in the Channel Islands has decided that, instead of accepting presents to mark her ninetieth birthday this week, she will create a fund to allow the children among her 570 subjects to cross to the larger island of Guernsey for dental treatment, which cannot be supplied on Sark. The idea of giving rather than receiving presents on one’s birthday turns up from time to time, and this is a nice example.

The authority of the good Dame Sybil over her handful of subjects is observed with some disfavour in Britain; and Sark’s proximity to the French coast has served for generations as a reminder of old hostility between the two guardians of the shores of the English Channel — and a reminder of the need, felt by each, to maintain means to keep a close eye on the other. But the birthday gesture, which attempts to deal with something as mundane — and as universally detested — as toothache, should do much to dispose of British suspicions about the nature of power in Sark.

The application of this birthday principle should, surely, be extended. The chairman of the Chatham Islands County Council has a stimulating example of the charity to which he might devote his birthday resources; so, too, might the chairman of the Norfolk Island Council find a model here. Perhaps the ruling dignitaries of a host of tiny off-shore communities associated with Australia and New Zealand in the South Pacific happily regard their birthdays as occasions for improving dental health and comfort. Filling teeth, of course, might become a device for stuffing ballot boxes. That would spoil the whole idea .. .“ I promise that, after my next “ birthday, the number of teeth filled will increase by “12 per cent. . . Birthday gifts to the present “ Government have betrayed the electorate ... When •* I am elected, no tooth will remain unfilled when 1 " am 75 . . . ” This kind of thing should be avoided Dame Sybil, of course, does not depend on elections for her prestige or authority, and her thoughtful gesture, apart from drawing attention to a problem on Sark, may be applauded as a first-rate example of putting the money where the painful mouths are.