ENGLAND’S PARADOX

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 70, 16 December 1937, Page 14

ENGLAND’S PARADOX

Certain Illogicality FOREIGNERS puzzled Foreign observers are often puzzled by what they fancy is a certain illogicality in the British character, says Harold Hobson in an overseas exchange. At great expense, and with considerable interruption of the national life. Britain elects a Government, and then this Government solemnly ami perfectly seriously suggests that n large salary should be paid to the leader of a set of men and women whose chief function is to prevent the Government from governing. For roughly 200 years now Britain has had a most important official known as the Prime Minister; yet until recently she never as much as took the trouble to have the existence of that official recognised by the law. The most powerful political officer in the kingdom was for a century and threequarters little more than a gate-crash-er. This apparent scorn for logic'and order extends far into other spheres than the nationally political. Every June in Cambridge there are great social festivities. These festivities are known as May Week. Some racing crews at Oxford, with a similar air of paradox, are called Torpids. Certain students, of the British character are inclined to dismiss things like these as amiable eccentricities. But in doing so they arc wrong. For they are of fundamental importance. Britain in the last 400 years has never been a nation with only one thought in her head, differing in this from some countries that get hold of an idea and pursue it with indefatigable pertinacity wherever it may lead. At. the very foundation of her strength has lain a capacity for harbouring two or more apparently incompatible ideas at one and the same time. The Coronation is old news now, but one aspect of that superb and magnificent observance which has not yet been adequately noticed deserves examination for the light 'which it throws upon the permanent nature ot the English people. The afternoon before the ceremony itself I spent at a matinee of Mr. A. A. Milne’s coiiiedy “Sarah Simple.” it had rained hard all the morning; the streets were crammed with streaming cars and pedestrians; roads were drenched with mud. But as I came out of the theatre the rain ceased; the sun began to shine fitfully, and I decided to go by a roundabout route to my home near Epping Forest. I chose a road that is little travelled by visitors to London, one that hundreds of thousands of people'who throng every year to the capital city of the Commonwealth rarely or never see, except from the deck of a ship. 1 went through Limehouse, and then turned southward toward the river, passing down Bennyfields, which is London’s Chinatown, and then all the way round the West India Hocks, until I circled up into the Barking- Ito,ad again, by the side of the Blackwall Tunnel. Every yard of this journey, huddled in by thousands of squalid dwellings? was a triumphal progress. Scarcely a street but was an archway of red, white and blue ribbons, fluttering gaily in the now strengthening' sun. Out of windows and doorways hung a multiude of flags; the black, grimed walls were covered with banners bearing the legends: God Save the King, God Bless Our King and Queen, LongMay They Reign.” Outbursts of loyalty in the wealthier suburbs are pleasant but not perhaps particularly noteworthy.

The'Empire is an institution that has done pretty well for the inhabitants of these places, and gratitude to its head is to be taken for granted. The value of an Empire to people who live four, five or six in a room is not so immediately apparent, and the spontaneous, almost riotous, manifestation of good feeling and affection was all the more eloquent and moving. Ur. C. A. Alington, onee headmaster of Eton, now: dean of Hurham, put the matter with a beautiful simplicity in the London “’rimes”: —

The flags are flimsy, the streets are shabby, With mean, low houses of cold, grey stone. But which of the guests that throng the Abbey, Paid for his seat witli a meal fore gone?

Would you choose the Mall with its crowns and gilding, If you were King or if you were Queen, Or a paper flag on a lonely building, In Pelaw, Pity Me, Seldom Seen?

But even this does not give a full picture of the situation. The East End of London is radicitl in its political conviction. It might be thought that in the midst of the splendour aud pageantry of coronation this radicalism was overwhelmed and swept away. But that would be far from the truth. The same walls that were festooned with flags and bunting bore the familiar chalked-up Left Wing slogans: “Hown With Fascism,” “Workers, Unite,” “Smash Franco.” These messages had probably been put up by the same people who had hung out. the streamers and banners; certainly they were there with their full approval.

These things—the flags and the slogans side by side —illustrate the old English paradox, the ability to combine apparently dissimilar things, a fervent loyalty, and even love, for the throne, with all its ancient, conseivative associations, and a lively sympathy for Left Wing politics. Britain beholds both sides of the medal.