BOOK NOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIV, Issue 289, 3 November 1934, Page 12

BOOK NOTES

“BARNHAM RECTORY.” The irruption into Barnliam Rectory of a Socialistic daughter fresh from Oxford gave pleasure to the Rector and to Jerry the gardener, hope to the budding curate, Alan Wilmslow, and a large amount of irritation to Margaret the cook and to many other people in the village. * Audrey meant well and was convinced that she could effect improvements all round. She began with the kitchen flues and went on with the rustic minds, offering them lectures on “The Ideals of Democracy,” which proved unpopular. Her disappointment was sharp when she encountered failure, but the reader’s sympathy is scarcely with this hard and thrusting young person, who has bewitched Jerry, the superior garden lad, for the best part ot his life. She is not worth his tragedy. Miss Doreen Wallace, the authoress, has handled her theme with her usual competence and knowledge, and presents her Suffolk village very definitely to us, not merely as somewhere vague in the country.

CRICKET MEMORIES. William Pollock is well known in England as “Googly” of the Daily Express, and “The Cream of Cricket” contains his reminiscences of some forty years of cricket. He writes with all the fluency of the sporting journalist, as he chats pleasantly about great cricketers, tlio fascination of the great game, the Long Room at Lord’s, the view from the Oval, the Ashes, and body-line bowling. On the latter point he grows a little inconsistent. “You Australians,” he says patronisingly to Woodfull and Bradman, “do take the whole business of Test cricket a bit too seriously.” Australians, of eoursej lack the merry, light-hearted gaiety ot Jardine, who is praised by Mr Pollock as “an out-and-out Cromwell of cricket.” And on the final afternoon of the 1926 Test match at the Oval, when Wilfrid Rhodes saved the day for England, “most people at the Oval that day went a little mad when it was all over. Everyone on the ground jumped to his feet when the last wicket fell and England had won, thousands racing across the field in a shouting, cheering charge, and upstairs in the English dressingroom, a usually dignified and sober member of the M.C.C. committee was rushing about and calling, ‘Champagne ! We must have champagne! Go and get champagne at once-’ ” In Yorkshire they card-index their boy cricketers. And Mr Pollock wrote “some pretty frank comments” on the bowling of Bowes in the Surrey v. Yorkshire match, and “remarkably unpleasant, not to say dangerous, it looked.” The famous “beard-line” story of W.G. and Ernest Jones is retold with a fresh variation. New, however, is an excellent anecdote about Max Beerbohm’s contribution of a “bob” to a testimonial fund for the grand old man of cricket. As the inimitable Max took not the least interest in the game, one of his astonished friends asked, why he did it. “You don’t like cricket or cricketers, do you?” “I do not,” said Max. “But I dislike golfers more” —-a. reason worthy of Charles Lamb. It is interesting to see “Googly’s” choice of the eleven best batsmen of the last two generations—W. G. Grace. “Ranji,” Trumper, Hobbs, Jessop, Macartney, Woolley, Bradman, Hammond, Gunn, and Tyldesley.

THE MYSTERY OF THE MAYA

“The Conquest of the Maya,” by J. Leslie Mitchell, has a rather misleading title, for it immediately suggests comparison to Prescott’s famous “Conquest of Mexico” and “Conquest of Peru,” but only one chapter is strictly historical. This tells of the discovery of YUcatan by two shipwrecked Spaniards in 1511, the expeditions of Cordoba, Grijalva, Cortes, and the two Montejos, with the fall of the new .Maya Empire in 1542 “as the Spaniards marched bloodily from conquest to conquest.” Actually, Mr Mitchell, an authority on ancient America, is concerned with a description of “the most remarkable culture discovered in the New World.” Ho is especially interested in the explanation of the origin of this primitive civilisation, with its gigantic monolithic stelae carved with picturettes recording Maya dates, stepped pyramids, spectacular architecture, artistic sculpture, highly developed .religion which included human sacufices in its complicated ceremonial rites, and its codices written in pebble-shaped glyps, the only instance of a hieroglyphic script in America. The old Maya civilisation flourished in parts of what are now southern Mexico, the Republics of Guatemala and Honduras, and the Colpny of- British Honduras The new Maya Empire moved northward into Yucatan. Mr Mitchell here gives in a readable and moderately, compact form the history of both Empires, with a discussion of their culture, based on the latest archael.ogical researches. An interesting chapter essays an. imaginative recreation of life m a city ot the anicent Maya, and the book is excellently illustrated with striking examples of Maya art.

LORD SNOWDEN

An Autobiography by Philip Viscount Snowden. \ olume 1., 186419 19. —This first volume of Lord Snowden’s autobiography tells the story of his life, up to the election of 1918. It describes his early days in the little village on the verge of the Bronte country, in a two-roomed cottage, and the life of the small community, Radical and Nonconformist, with simplicity but with a vagrant, humorous eye for the foibles of his fellows. The figures move and live The village character Gerdy and the local preacher who warned his hearers: “You’re genii’ to get it waim off t’• bake-stone,” linger in the memory. Hand-loom weaving had not long passed. His father, who never earned more than 15s a week, still kept one and used it to weave cloth for family use. The staple diet is porridge. The education very elementary. It is a grim picture. Fiom such unpromising beginnings Mr Snowden rose steadily, but none the less wonderfully. He became a pupil teacher, a clerk in an insurance office, a “gauger and surveyor of Inland Revenue” ; and so came to apparent disaster and, in fact, his life’s work. An accident led to acute inflammation of the spinal cord which turned the young man into a cripple and, incidentally, a politician. He proclaimed his belief in Socialism, and was scought after wherever the Independent Labour Party had a hold. In 1900, at Blackburn, he secured the highest vote ever given to a Socialist candidate for Parliament in Great Britain. Lord Snowden’s description of the growth of the Labour Party is vivid and pointed. He is scornful of conferences, and notes that “Of the hundreds of resolutions I have seen passed by Labour Conferences outlining a drastic programme of reform, I can hardly call to mind one which lias had any practical result.” He is also critical of the trade unions. Ho distrusts the strike weapon, holding that it can never he effective, “as a general policy for raising the condition of labour.”