The Pursuit of Laughter (55 page)

This autobiography is a dull book about a dull life. It was reviewed in one of the left-wing weeklies under the title ‘A Great Lady.’ Opinions may differ as to what exactly constitutes a great lady, but one thing is clear: Miss Violet Markham has been a considerable
busy-body
. Hardly a day of her long life seems to have passed which did not find her sitting on some committee, interfering more or less with the lives of other people, or presiding as a large frog in some very small puddle. The description of her varied activities does not make exhilarating reading. Sometimes she is sweeping crippled and defective children into a class at Chesterfield Settlement; sometimes at work in the Anti-Suffrage League; between the wars serving on the hated Unemployment Assistance Board; during the last war
running
a canteen which (get ready to laugh) she called Topsy because it just ‘growed.’ She is an almost professional good works enthusiast (almost, because her independent income preserves her amateur status) and others of the breed are her chosen friends. Study the index—hardly one of the dreary crew of self-appointed goody-goodies is missing. No wonder she eyes with misgiving the replacement of well-meaning and more or less
charitable
individuals by the Welfare State. Perhaps if one were a ‘defective,’ or an immoral A.S. girl, or the unemployed father of a family being questioned by her with a view to
application
of the Means Test, one might feel that, sad though it may be to force the Miss Markhams of life into the ranks of the workless, yet it is for the greatest good of the
greatest
number.

She travelled a good deal; and it was obviously agony for her when she saw things of which she disapproved, and which badly needed investigation, not to be able to set to work immediately with a strong committee of maiden ladies. She could hardly, figuratively speaking, keep her hands off the Sultan of Java. ‘I came away thoroughly disgusted by this passing sight of Javanese royalty and all it revealed in idleness, sloth and sensuality.’ He appears, from her account, to have been a singularly harmless old man, who left the
government
of his country in the hands of the Dutch Resident while he lived quietly in his palace, surrounded by his numerous family of wives and children.

Oddly enough, in spite of her addiction to public and near-public life, Miss Markham joined the Anti-Suffrage League, formed to stop women getting the vote. In this matter she certainly shows her less attractive side, for she is insensitive enough to write: ‘I am sure the suffragette movement was huge fun, and that they enjoyed themselves immensely.
Smashing windows, being arrested and bailed out by distracted relatives, slapping
policemen
and heckling Ministers must have been a great change from many a placid life in town or country, varied only by conventional amusements.’ Yes, indeed; and huge fun too, to be held down by six wardresses in Holloway Prison while a tube was thrust up your nose and you were forcibly fed, a rather unconventional amusement indulged in by the Home Office of those days.

Perhaps Miss Markham agrees with those who consider that Parliament is not a place where women shine? Not at all. Strange to say, no sooner had the suffragettes won their victory than Miss M jumps on the band wagon. ‘I was one of the little body of women… who stood for Parliament on the first occasion that women were qualified to vote and to offer themselves as candidates.’ She was not elected, and did not stand again. No great loss, we may feel. From her own point of view, given her odd predilection for busy-bodying, she was much better off sitting on numberless committees and boards. She even found time to be married, but (presumably as an ardent feminist, famous in the committee world) she kept her maiden name.

Miss Markham was born at the right moment, and we can congratulate ourselves that we shall not see her like again. When unemployment returns there will be another UAB, and those serving on it may be gruffer, harder, more unsympathetic than she; but at least what they are doing will be their work, done for a wage, not just for the fun of interfering in the old Now-my-good-man-where-is-your-self-respect way. She and a few like-minded and right-minded female enthusiasts may still be able to form committees to see to the morals of fallen women or study the reasons for the breakdown of family life; or they might get taken on as prison visitors, though here there is a danger that the prisoners might complain that it was not part of their sentence. But, by and large, their day is done. Whenever we feel inclined to abuse the Welfare State we should force ourselves to read a chapter of Miss Markham’s autobiography.

Laying it down with, it must be admitted, a sigh of relief, we feel there is something missing. Of course—Dame Violet! How has she escaped it? We must pin our faith to the New Year Honours, and hope they will make good this curious omission.

Return Passage: The Autobiography of Violet Markham
, Markham, V. (1953)

This small and pretty book is a gift to the givers of gifts. It is guaranteed not to shock or annoy the recipient; no explicit sex, no violence, no sleaze (whatever that may mean, there’s certainly none of it).

The Murrays, generation after generation, have been publishers, ever since their
best-selling
author in Byron’s day. They can be relied upon for decent type and paper, and bindings
that last. In recent years they have produced tiny gems, like John Betjeman’s
A Nip in the Air
, as well as long, well-written biographies such as David Gilmour’s triumph,
Curzon
.

The present John Murray’s father, known as Jock, kept a commonplace book. It
contains
the usual Chinese proverbs; he who eats his towel gets a dry mouth. Confucius, or some other sage; no matter. All sorts of little jokes and oddities are here, illustrated by Osbert Lancaster and others. Hardly any Goethe, probably too deep, and perhaps too
anti-clerical
; no La Rochefoucauld, too bitterly cynical and worldly no doubt. The French
quoted
are, on the whole, bitter. Balzac says every great fortune is founded on great crime, and Voltaire, about biography: ‘We must respect the living but the truth is good enough for the dead.’ What is truth, the victim might ask.

Dr Johnson figures, and Byron of course, and there are reminders of the best-sellers of our own times: Betjeman, James Lees-Milne, Patrick Leigh Fermor. When a book by the latter was published a queue to 50 Albemarle Street stretched halfway down Piccadilly.

We were invited to comment on attributions. ‘How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?’—Lord Hugh Cecil, I have been told.

A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book
, Murray, J.G.,
Evening Standard
(1996)

Not quite the moment, perhaps, to publish a book which is simply a résumé of all the newspaper stories of the last decades concerning the tragedy in Northern Ireland, just when it is possible to hope for better times. Anyone interested knows it by heart already, it has been television fare night after night for so many years.

Kevin Toulis lives in Edinburgh, but his ancestors were Irish and from childhood he has been familiar with ‘the old sod’. As a journalist he went over to see for himself.

It is so readily imagined that we hardly need him to describe the agony of sorrow
suffered
by the parents of an only son, an innocent bystander, blown to bits by a bomb at Harrods. (Those not politically involved are called ‘innocent’.)

In Ireland Toulis found, among nationalists and among Loyalists, heroes and saints and murderers and martyrs. ‘Great hatred, Little Room,’ as Yeats wrote of Ireland. But now that Britain and the Irish Republic are members of the European Community there is in fact plenty of room for hatred and dislike to be contained without violence.

Sometimes it seemed as if the IRA was the Loyalists’ secret weapon. The sight of a hooded gunman was a boon to extremists. In the Republic it is noteworthy how few vote for Sinn Féin. Most people prefer to live and let live.

The numbers of dead are not to be compared with those suffered in natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, or even with road accidents. But the killing is deliberate. There may be a target, often it is haphazard, sometimes all the victims are ‘innocent’.

Kevin Toulis talked to everyone and saw both sides and prudently went back to Edinburgh. He may have been a wiser man, except that he must have known it all long since. Perhaps he will go to the Balkans now, for a glimpse of something worse still.

Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s Soul
, Toulis, K.
Evening Standard
(1995)

However many histories, biographies and autobiographies one reads about the first
quarter
of the twentieth century, it is a period which never fails to interest and amuse; and as escapist literature for those whose minds are darkened by the thought that this third
quarter
of the century may be mankind’s last, and that Conservatives and Liberals alike may be blown up into infinitesimal particles of the final giant mushroom, they have a special value, even though reading about the politicians of the past is not particularly reassuring. Hypnotised by events of small importance, like Home Rule or Tariff Reform, they
floundered
almost without noticing what was happening into the Great War, not one of them having the faintest notion of what the results would be.

Although Bonar Law was only Prime Minister for a few months, he was at the heart of affairs from 1911. Mr Blake says he was an ambitious man in those days; he also seems to have been a modest man, with plenty to be modest about. Lord Derby’s description of him in a letter to the King when he became Leader summed up his character perfectly:

‘He has all the qualities of a great leader except one—and that is he has no personal magnetism and can inspire no man to real enthusiasm.’

He was honest and people trusted him. ‘The difference between Bonar Law and me,’ Lloyd George told Baldwin, was that ‘poor Bonar can’t bear being called a liar. Now I don’t mind.’

Lloyd George relied on him throughout the years when they were in coalition; he was a loyal and hardworking colleague. But he was an extremely limited man; art, literature (except for Gibbon and Carlyle) and music bored him to death; food he did not care about, he drank milk and ginger beer; he hated society and yet was miserable in the
country
. His amusements were bridge, chess and golf. ‘He was an adding-machine’, said a man I spoke with who had sat in Parliament with him; ‘but he was, also, the finest speaker to wind up a debate I ever heard.’

That this Scotch Canadian Nonconformist teetotaller should have led the Conservative Party is just as strange, in its way, as that Disraeli should have done so a
generation
earlier.

He only allowed himself to indulge in his quiet pleasures when he had plenty of time to spare, and he was deeply shocked when, visiting Asquith on a Monday morning in the middle of a political crisis during the war, he found him playing bridge with three ladies.
‘Fond of bridge as he was himself,’ says Mr Blake, ‘he regarded it as wrong that the leader of a nation engaged in a struggle for its existence should be playing cards on a Monday morning, and should oblige one of his principal colleagues to put off all arrangements in order to visit him at his country house fifty miles away from London.’