E.S. Turner

If the Knight of Glin, the MacKinnon of MacKinnon and the McGillicuddy of the Reeks did not exist, there might be less need of books of etiquette. These veterans of Debrett’s Correct Form (where they rubbed shoulders with Midshipman the Duke of Loamshire, a difficult guest to place at table, especially with admirals present) are back trailing their dignities in Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners. However, the degree of overlap between the two works, both prefaced by Sir lain Moncreiffe of That Ilk, Chairman of Debrett, is not excessive. Correct Form was about how to address people; the new book concentrates on how not to offend them.

In a storeroom at Sussex University lie the records of Mass-Observation, an organisation of anonymous people-watchers which in its heyday ran into much criticism. Some of its supporters made large claims for its methods and findings; respectable journals hailed a new form of social research, while others jeered; Evelyn Waugh complained of ‘pseudoscientific showmanship’. During World War Two a minute by an official in the Ministry of Home Security described Mass-Observation reports on blitz morale as ‘a most extraordinary mixture of fact, fiction and dangerous mischief’ emanating apparently from ‘the intelligentsia’ (see Living through the Blitz by Tom Harrisson, co-founder of the organisation).

Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald … flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’ (1911). Innumerable speakers, writers and politicians have helped themselves to this very serviceable joke; Leacock himself, writing in old age, used it without acknowledgment to illustrate a scientific disquisition. Perhaps he had forgotten that he was the originator of it.

Under a plum tree on the quad at Balliol a solemn Scots undergraduate was entertaining his parents to tea when another undergraduate who had been hiding in the branches ‘fell’ with a clatter among the tea-cups, explaining that he had dropped because he was ripe. As Belloc said: ‘God be with you, Balliol men!’ Was Aubrey Herbert, this human plum, ever ripe enough to be king of Albania, a country which twice offered him the throne? After finishing Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent book the reader may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than Lord Rothermere on the throne of Hungary. Herbert was the son of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon. His half-brother, the fifth Earl, was the co-finder of Tutankhamen’s tomb. His nephew, the sixth Earl, once kept him under observation of a sort, in Constantinople, for British Intelligence. Of Herbert’s generation Margaret FitzHerbert says that their inheritance from the Empire-builders was ‘an ease around the world, and an infinite self-confidence. Following their knightly imaginations, wandering across the face of the earth, they had no axe to grind. Theirs was, briefly, an age of chivalry, soon to be laid at rest in the trenches …’

The William stories – of which the first four are now reissued – came out over a span of fifty years. When they started, in 1919, women were still sniffing sal volatile and when they ended boys had begun sniffing glue. William, of course, could fantasise without the aid of glue. He was not the sort to pull up saplings wantonly; he merely overturned caravans accidentally. His crimes were the venial ones of truancy, trespass, gaining money by false pretences, unlawful picketing, kidnapping (of babies, which enjoy being kidnapped) and petty theft, as from the missionary-box in his home. Theft from a missionary-box? Isn’t that a bit like stealing from blind men? Ah, but the missionary-box contains only three-halfpence, enabling William to inveigh powerfully, and with the reader’s full sympathy, against his family, who lavish large sums on their own pleasures but can spare only this paltry sum for the poor heathen. He does not, however, put the three-halfpence back.–