George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 7 January 1944 Looking
through the photographs in the New Years Honours List, I am struck (as usual) by the
quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be
almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de
Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a
tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a
good hand with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers,
and consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea
first occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some stills of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and
looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not
doing it on purpose.
When you had got together your collection of fuehrers, actual and
would-be, you would notice that several qualities recur throughout the list. To begin
with, they are all old. In spite of the lip-service that is paid everywhere to youth,
there is no such thing as a person in a truly commanding position who is less than fifty
years old. Secondly, they are nearly all under-sized. A dictator taller than five feet six
inches is a very great rarity. And, thirdly, there is this almost general and sometimes
quite fantastic ugliness. The collection would contain photographs of Streicher bursting a blood vessel,
Japanese war-lords impersonating baboons, Mussolini with his scrubby dewlap,
the chinless de Gaulle, the
stumpy short-armed Churchill, Gandhi with his long sly nose and
huge bats ears, Tojo displaying thirty-two teeth with gold in every one of them. And
opposite each, to make a contrast, there would be a photograph of an ordinary human being
from the country concerned. Opposite Hitler
a young sailor from a German submarine, opposite Tojo a Japanese peasant of the old type
and so on.
But to come back to the Honours List. When you remember that
nearly the whole of the rest of the world has dropped it, it does seem strange to see this
flummery still continuing in England, a country in which the very notion of aristocracy
perished hundreds of years ago. The race-difference on which aristocratic rule is usually
founded had disappeared from England by the end of the Middle Ages, and the concept of
blue blood as something valuable in itself, and independent of money, was
vanishing in the age of Elizabeth.
Since then we have been a plutocracy plain and simple. Yet we still make spasmodic efforts
to dress ourselves in the colours of medieval feudalism.
Think of the Heralds Office solemnly faking pedigrees and
inventing coats of arms with mermaids and unicorns couchant, regardant and what-not, for
company directors in bowler hats and striped trousers! What I like best is the careful
grading by which the honours are always dished out in direct proportion to the amount of
mischief done baronies for Big Business, baronetcies for fashionable surgeons,
knighthoods for tame professors. But do these people imagine that by calling themselves
lords, knights and so forth they somehow come to have something in common with the
medieval aristocracy? Does Sir Walter
Citrine, say, feel himself to be rather the same kind of person as Childe Roland
(Childe Citrine to the dark tower came!), or is Lord Nuffield under the impression that we
shall mistake him for a crusader in chain-armour?
However, this honours-list business has one severely practical
aspect, and that is that a title is a first-class alias. Mr X can practically cancel his
past by turning himself into Lord Y. Some of the ministerial appointments that have been
made during this war would hardly have been possible without some such disguise. As Tom Paine put it: These
people change their names so often that it is as hard to know them as it is to know
thieves.
I write this to the tune of an electric drill. They are drilling holes
in the walls of a surface shelter, removing bricks at regular intervals. Why? Because the
shelter is in danger of falling down and it is necessary to give it a cement facing.
It seems doubtful whether these surface shelters were ever of
much use. They would give protection against splinters and blast, but not more than the
walls of an ordinary house, and the only time I saw a bomb drop anywhere near one it
sliced it off the ground as neatly as if it had been done with a knife. The real point is,
however, that at the time when these shelters were built it was known that they would fall
down in a year or two. Innumerable people pointed this out. But nothing happened; the
slovenly building continued, and somebody scooped the contract. Sure enough, a year or two
later, the prophets were justified. The mortar began to fall out of the walls, and it
became necessary to case the shelters in cement. Once again somebody perhaps it was
the same somebody scooped the contract. I do not know whether, in any part of the
country, these shelters are actually used in air raids. In my part of London there has
never been any question of using them; in fact, they are kept permanently locked lest they
should be used for improper purposes. There is one thing, however, that they
might conceivably be useful for and that is as block-houses in street fighting. And on the
whole they have been built in the poorer streets. It would amuse me if when the time came
the higher-ups were unable to crush the populace because they had thoughtlessly provided
them with thousands of machine-gun nests beforehand. |