Dignity and Impudence

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 20 · 3 November 1983

From Kate Graham

SIR: Oliver Whitley, so he says in his review of Michael Tracey’s biography of Hugh Greene, doesn’t like references to ‘the establishment’, he finds the term ‘vague and portentous’, and suspects that ‘if it had to be defined it would fall out of use’ (LRB, 6 October). I learn from the biographical details you publish on page two that Mr Whitley used to work at the BBC, that he was once Managing Director of its External Services and before that Chief Assistant to Hugh Greene. This would explain how he came to make (or to receive) the mysterious phone call he sort of describes at the end of his review:

Incidentally, my phone went dead too, not long after Hugh Greene’s, when I felt bound to tell the other one that my colours were nailed to Greene’s mast and that this meant that I, too, thought there were human qualities more important than dignity. ‘Then there’s nothing more to be said,’ and the phone in the flat in Lambeth Palace banged down, ending a friendship of more than thirty years – or at any rate its outward manifestations.

To whom is he telling this story? Not to me – I can’t make head or tail of it. Would it be portentous – or merely vague – to suggest that it will only be intelligible to members of ‘the establishment’? I will concede to those who think I am being wrongheaded that ‘the other one’ refers to ‘the other BBC giant’ to whom Mr Whitley alluded in the preceding sentence. But who was he? Lord Reith perhaps? If so, why not mention his name? And how does the Archbishop of Canterbury come into it? Or did someone else live in Lambeth Palace? It could be said by those who are inclined to say that kind of thing that this is a vague and portentous mode of speech – and not uncharacteristic of the way members of the establishment talk to each other when they don’t want the rest of the world to know what’s going on. Or simply can’t be bothered to tell them.

Kate Graham
Southampton