Obviously there is great deal more to British society than political and economic problems, although a casual visitor might not think so. Visiting pundits find themselves immersed in the profundities of the Foreign Office or following the ideological gymnastics of Socialist intellectuals. Consequently, they depart firmly convinced that the British are a sober, rather solemn people. These islanders, as a matter of fact, are an exceptionally vigorous and boisterous lot and have been for centuries. Their interest in diplomacy, politics, and commerce is exceeded only by their devotion to cricket, beer, and horse racing. Nor should we allow the deadening background to bemuse us about the essential character of the British. The misty mournfulness of the English countryside, the bleak inhospitality of a Midland city, the eternal sameness of suburbia have failed to tame the incorrigible robustness of the national character.

To know the British today one must know not only their government and politics, their industry and commerce, but other aspects of life through which the national character is expressed. The press, the schools, the military services, sports and amusements, pubs and clubs all are part of the changing British world. Each has been affected by changes in the class structure. Each, in its way, is important to Americans and their understanding of Britain. Opinion about the United States in Britain is based largely on what Britons read in their newspapers. And, whether or not Americans admire the class distinctions inherent in the public-school system, perhaps a majority of the leaders with whom the United States will deal in the future will be products of that system.

THE PRESS:

THE THUNDERER AND THE TIN HORNS

A graduate of Smith, home from a stay in London, asked: "How can you read those London newspapers? Nothing but crime and sex—I couldn't find any news." Years ago Webb Miller, the great United Press correspondent, advised me: "Read The Times every day, read all of it, if you want to know what is going on in this country and the world." Both Webb and the young lady from Smith were right: the British press contains some of what is best and a great deal of what is worst in daily journalism.

Most Americans and many Britons, when they speak of the press, mean the London daily and Sunday newspapers. The London papers concern us most because they are national newspapers circulating throughout Britain and influencing and reflecting opinion far beyond the boundaries of greater London. One newspaper published in the provinces, the Manchester Guardian, may be said to have national—indeed, world—standing. One of the most influential, interesting, and well-written newspapers, it can also assume on occasion a highly irritating unctuousness.

There are a large number of provincial newspapers—about a hundred morning and evening dailies and Sunday papers, and about eleven hundred weeklies. Many of them are read far more thoroughly than the London "national" paper that the provincial family also buys.

Not long ago a British cabinet minister who represents a constituency in the western Midlands told me his constituents "got their news from the BBC, their entertainment from the London dailies, and their political guidance from the principal newspaper in a near-by provincial city." Other politicians have referred to the same pattern.

Because most London daily and Sunday newspapers circulate all over the British isles, circulation figures are high by American standards. The News of the World, a Sunday newspaper that built its circulation on straight court reporting of the gamier aspects of British life, had a record circulation of about 8,000,000 copies. Recently its circulation has dropped slightly, a development that puzzles Fleet Street, for there is no lack of sex, crime, or sport—or interest in them—in Britain.

Of the London dailies, the largest in circulation is the Daily Mirror, a tabloid whose circulation average between January and June of 1955 was 4,725,122. The Daily Express, the bellwether of the Beaverbrook newspapers, had a circulation of just over 4,000,000 during the same period, and three other London dailies, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and the News Chronicle, all boasted circulations of better than 1,000,000.

For every 1,000 Britons, 611 copies of the daily newspapers are sold each day. Compare this with the United States figure of 353 per 1,000. Britain is a good newspaper country, and the London press is lusty, uninhibited, and highly competitive.

American newspapermen working in London customarily divide the press between the popular newspapers, such as the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, and the small-circulation papers, such as The Times and the Manchester Guardian. The circulation of The Times for January-June 1955 was 211,972 and for the Guardian 156,154. Similarly, on Sundays there is a division between the Sunday Times (606,346) and the Observer (564,307) and such mass-circulation "Sundays" as the Sunday Express, the Sunday Pictorial, and the People.

The distinction is not based primarily on circulation. The Times and the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph on weekdays and the Sunday Times and the Observer on Sundays print more news about politics, diplomacy, and world events than do the mass-circulation papers. They are responsible and they are well written. The Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation of over 2,000,000, is the only one in this group whose circulation is in the "popular" field. But it has given few hostages to fortune: its news columns contain a considerable number of solid foreign-news items as well as first-class domestic reporting.

The shortage of newsprint (the paper on which newspapers are printed) has curtailed the size of British papers since 1939. Almost all newsprint is imported, and with the balance of payments under pressure the expenditure of dollars for it has been restricted. But the situation has improved slowly and the London papers are fattening, although they remain thin by New York standards.

Considering this restriction, the responsible newspapers do a splendid job. Day in and day out the foreign news of The Times maintains remarkably high standards of accuracy and insight. The anonymous reporters—articles by Times men are signed "From Our Own Correspondent"—write lucidly and easily. The Times has never accepted the theory that involved and complicated issues can be boiled down into a couple of hundred words with the nuances discarded. News is knowledge, and no one has yet found a way to make it easy to acquire knowledge.

But The Times, often called "The Times newspaper," is a good deal more than a report on Britain and the world. It is an institution reflecting all British life. By reading its front page entirely devoted to classified advertising one can get a complete picture of upper-class and upper-middle-class Britain. In the left-hand columns are births, deaths, marriages, and memorial notices. If an American wants to understand how unstintingly the British upper classes gave their sons and brothers and fathers to the First World War, let him look at the memorial notices on the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. If he wants to see how hard-pushed these same classes are today, let him read the painful, often pathetic admissions in the columns where jewelry, old diplomatic uniforms, and the other impedimenta of the class are offered for sale.

The editorials of The Times—the British call editorials "leaders" or "leading articles"—are, of course, one of the most important features in journalism. The Times is independent politically, but it does its best to explain and expound the policies of the government of the day. Over the years since the war it has supported individual measures laid down by Conservative and Labor governments and it has assailed the policies of both the left and right when this has been conceived of as the duty of The Times. The editorial writing in The Times often attains a peak of brilliance seldom achieved in any other newspaper. For a time, especially in the period before World War II, "The Thunderer," as it was once called, had become a whisperer. Recently The Times has spoken on national and international issues with its old resonance and sharpness.

The influence of The Times among politicians, civil servants, and diplomats is extraordinary. It is, I suppose, the one newspaper read thoroughly by all the foreign diplomats in London. As recently as the spring of 1956 an editorial in The Times discussing a reconsideration of Britain's defense needs sent the German Ambassador scurrying to the Foreign Office to inquire whether the editorial reflected government policy. It did.

This influence is the result of The Times's special position in British journalism. The editorial-writers and some of the reporters of The Times often are told things that are hidden from other reporters. Also, they are members in good standing of that important, amorphous group, the Establishment, which exists at the center of British society; they know and are known by the politicians, the key civil servants, the ministers. Occasionally The Times is used to test foreign or domestic reaction to a measure under consideration by the government. By discussing the measure in an editorial, The Times will provoke in its letter columns a wider discussion into which various sections of public opinion, left, right, and center, will be drawn.

No other newspaper in the free world has a letter column comparable to that of The Times. The first letter may be a sharp analysis of government policy in Persia and the last the report by a Prime Minister that he has seen a rare bird on a walk through St. James's park. Some of the letter column's discussions touch on matters of national interest. Others deal with the Christian names given to children or the last time British troops carried their colors into action.

The Manchester Guardian, with a smaller circulation and a smaller foreign staff, still manages to make its influence felt far beyond Manchester. Its policies are those of the Liberal party and, as the Liberal Party is now in eclipse, the Guardian brings to the discussion of national and international affairs a detached and refreshing sharpness. Where The Times occasionally adopts the tone of a wise and indulgent father in its comments on the world, the Guardian speaks with the accents of a worldly-wise nanny. When the Guardian is aroused, its "leaders" can be corrosive and bitter. It is less likely to support the foreign policy of the government of the day than is The Times. Consequently, the Guardian is liable to be more critical than The Times in dealings with the United States and American foreign policy. (The Suez crisis was a notable exception.) But it is well informed about the United States, and so are its readers. In Alistair Cooke and Max Freedman the Guardian has two of the best correspondents now writing in the United States for the British press. Their reports are long, detailed, and accurate, and Cooke, in particular, never forgets that what a foreign people sees in its theaters, reads in its magazines, and does on its vacations is also news to the readers at home.

Such great provincial newspapers as the Yorkshire Post and the Scotsman follow the conservative approach to news adopted by The Times, the Manchester Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. With the responsible London dailies they serve the upper middle class and are its most outspoken mouthpieces in a period when, as we have seen, that class is being pressed by high taxation, the rising cost of living, and the simultaneous development of a new middle class and a prosperous working class. The Sunday Times, for instance, has devoted many columns to the plight of the professional man and his family, and all of these papers have reported at length on the appearance of associations and groups devoted to, or supposedly devoted to, the interests of the middle class and opposition to the unions that represent the new working class.

The cult of anonymity has persisted longer in Britain's responsible and reliable newspapers than in the United States. Although Fleet Street knows the names of The Times's reporters, the public does not. Richard Scott, the Diplomatic Correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, has no byline, nor has Hugh Massingham, the brilliant Political Correspondent of the Observer. The influence wielded in the United States by columnists still is reserved in Britain almost entirely to the anonymous "leader"-writers of the responsible British newspapers. Working with the editorial-writers are hundreds of industrious, well-educated, experienced reporters. They are good men to talk to and to drink with, and they are tough men to beat on a story.

But they and the newspapers they represent are not a part of the bubbling, uproarious, pyrotechnical world of the popular London dailies. Here is a circus, a daily excitement for anyone who enjoys newspapers. The Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the News Chronicle, the Daily Herald, the Mirror, and the Sketch compete hotly for news and entertainment. Their headlines are brash, their writing varies from wonderfully good to wonderfully bad, and their editorials are written with a slam-bang exuberance that is stimulating and occasionally a little frightening. This is the true, tempestuous world of Fleet Street.

In this world the great names are not confined to the writers and editors. The publishers, called "proprietors" in Britain, tower over all. Of these the most interesting, successful, and stimulating is Lord Beaverbrook, who runs the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, and the Evening Standard with a gusto undiminished by seventy-eight active years.

"The Beaver" occupies a unique place in British journalism and politics. No one has neutral feelings about him. Either you like him or you hate him; there is no middle course. I suppose nothing gives him more satisfaction than knowing that when he arrives in London, men in Fleet Street pubs and West End clubs ask one another: "What do you think the Beaver's up to now?"

Is "what the Beaver is up to" really important? The enmity of the Express, which is the enmity of Lord Beaverbrook, can make a politician squirm. But does it really lower his standing with the voters? I doubt it. Lord Beaverbrook is an incorrigible Don Quixote who has tilted at and been tossed by many windmills. He is, incidentally, a more powerful writer than most of his employees. Early in 1957 he was prodding his newspapers to the attack against the government's plans for closer economic association with Europe. The headlines were bold and black, the indignation terrifying. Will the campaign itself alter government policy? I doubt it.

Lord Beaverbrook once remarked that he ran his papers to conduct propaganda. Just before the retirement of Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook was asked why his newspapers were so critical of Sir Anthony Eden, the heir presumptive to the premiership. He replied that Sir Anthony had never supported the policies of the Beaverbrook newspapers. As no other leading politician had thrown his weight that way, this seemed a rather weak reason for attacking the new leader of the Conservative Party. The political affiliation of the Daily Express is Independent Conservative.

But the Beaverbrook campaigns perform a real public service by fixing public attention upon issues. I do not think the editorials convince—I have yet to meet a Daily Express reader who confused the "leader" column with pronouncements from Sinai—but they encourage that discussion of public issues which is essential in a democracy. Of course the Express newspapers' tactics annoy nice-minded people. But the tradition of a free press includes not only such august journals as The Times but the rip-roaring, fire-eating crusaders as well. There is not much chance that the popular press in Britain will model itself on The Times, but if it did so, the result would be a loss to journalism and to the nation. And as long as the Beaverbrook tradition survives—as long, indeed, as Lord Beaverbrook himself is around to draw on his inexhaustible fund of indignation—one section of the popular press is bound to remain contentious and vigorous.

The Daily Express, the morning paper of the Beaverbrook empire, is technically one of the best newspapers in the world. Its layout is admirable, and its headline-writers often show a touch of genius. In its writing and its presentation of news it has been much affected by such divergent American influences as The New Yorker and Time.

The Express is brightly written (too much so at times), and its tastes in policies and politicians are incalculable. Along with a liberal helping of political, foreign, and crime reporting it offers two of the best features in British journalism: Osbert Lancaster's pocket cartoon on the front page and the humorous column of "Beachcomber" on the editorial page. "Beachcomber" and Lancaster are sharp and penetrating commentators on the daily scene. In many instances their references to the occasional inanities of the British society are more cogent than anything to be found in the editorial columns of the Express.

The Express successfully caters to the new middle class that has arisen since the war, especially that part of it which is involved in the communications industry. The young advertising manager from the provinces who has "arrived" in London may find The Times too verbose and the Telegraph too stodgy. The Express, with its bright features on the theater or London night life, attracts him. But, oddly, three principal features of the Express cater to very different tastes. Osbert Lancaster's subject matter is drawn usually from the upper middle class—his Maudie Littlehampton, after all, is a Lady. The humor of "Beachcomber" appeals to tastes that reject the average in British humor, and Sefton Delmer, the peripatetic foreign correspondent of the Express, often writes stories on international issues which are much more involved and adult than would seem suitable for the majority of the newspaper's four million readers.

This divided approach is not so obvious in the Daily Mirror, which has the largest circulation of any of the London dailies. This is an important newspaper in that it is the most accurate reflection I know of the tastes and mores of the new working class in Britain. There are many indications elsewhere that Cecil King, its proprietor, and his chief lieutenants have pondered long and earnestly about Britain's problems. The Mirror's pamphlet on trade unions and an earlier pamphlet on Anglo-American relations are solid contributions to the literature on these subjects. But the Daily Mirror's customary approach to policies and issues is as robust and sharp as that of a policeman to a drunk. It is belligerent rather than persuasive; it loves big type.

But the Daily Mirror's handling of certain types of stories, particularly those involving industrial disputes and crime, is excellent. (British crime reporting in general, although circumscribed by the libel laws, is of high caliber.) The Mirror's editorials, with their GET OUT or PASS THIS BILL approach to politicians and measures, may alienate as many as they win, but the editorials are alive, dealing often with problems—such as automation and wage differentials—that are of the keenest interest to the industrial working class.

The Mirror is much closer to the thinking of this class than is the Daily Herald, usually considered the official Labor newspaper. The Trades Union Congress owns 49 per cent of the stock in the Daily Herald, and Odhams Press Ltd. owns the remainder. Once powerful and well informed on industrial and labor-movement happenings, the Herald no longer seems to represent either the movement or the industrial working class that supports the movement. Its approach is stodgier than that of the Mirror, less in keeping with the tastes of the new working class.

The Mirror's most renowned features are "Cassandra" and "Jane." The former, written by William Connor, is one of the hardest-hitting and most provocative features in British journalism. Connor has evoked the wrath of statesmen of both major parties. The Communists hate him. He is a deflator of stuffed shirts, a pungent critic, and a stout defender of the British worker.

The Mirror's other salient feature is a comic strip called "Jane." Jane is a well-proportioned young lady whose adventures nearly always end in near nudity. She is a favorite of British troops abroad and their families at home. The information value of this daily striptease is nonexistent, but a Mirror employee once defended the strip on the grounds that "the bloke that buys the paper to look at Jane may read Bill Connor or the leader."

The London press enjoys an advantage that does not exist in the United States. This is the presence of a remarkably well-informed critical opinion in the weekly reviews that are also printed in London. The Spectator, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, and, occasionally, the Economist are careful, if sometimes pecksniffian, critics of the national newspapers. Fleet Street is one big family (it would be stretching things to call so tumultuous a community "happy"), and the inner workings of the great dailies are laid bare to the weeklies often through the agency of disgruntled reporters. Consequently, "Pharos" in the Spectator and Francis Williams in the New Statesman are authoritative and knowledgeable critics of the newspapers and their proprietors.

The weeklies themselves are a valuable supplement to the newspapers. They have time to reflect and space to discuss. In many cases they are often slightly ahead of public opinion, more so than the daily papers, and they are not afraid to criticize tartly such sacred cows of British journalism as the Crown.

Since the end of the war the tendency among the popular newspapers has been to entertain rather than to inform. This recognizes what I believe to be one of the fundamental truths of the communications business in Britain: the majority of the people get their news from the British Broadcasting Corporation's radio and television services and from the news services of the Independent Television Authority.

Readers of the more responsible London and provincial newspapers listen to the news on the BBC and then turn to their papers for expanded stories and ample interpretative material. But the average reader does not read The Times or the Manchester Guardian or the Observer. When he turns off the radio in the morning and picks up his "popular" newspaper, he is confronted with gossip columns, comic strips, newsless but beguiling stories about the royal family, sports stories, and, in some papers, a dash of pornography.

The "popular" papers do print hard news. Correspondents like Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express and William Forrest of the News Chronicle send interesting, factual, and frequently important stories from Germany or Russia. But such stories are increasingly rare. The trend even in this sort of writing is toward entertainment.

For example, not long ago a London popular daily, once renowned for its foreign staff, sent a reporter to Communist China. This was an opportunity for objective reporting. Instead the readers got a rehash of the reporter's own political outlook plus a few flashes of description of life in modern China.

This tendency toward entertainment rather than information is deplored by those who believe that a democracy can operate successfully only on the foundation of well-informed public opinion. In Britain, however, newspapers are customarily considered not as public trusts but as business, big business. If entertainment pays, the newspapers, with a few exceptions noted above, will entertain. Unfortunately, the BBC cannot provide the time necessary to give the news that the newspapers fail to print. Obviously the great mass of the British people will become less well informed about the great issues at home and abroad if the present trend continues.

During the thirties the critics of the British press liked to repeat a cruel little rhyme that ran:

You cannot hope to bribe nor twist,
Thank God, the British journalist,
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Yet, from a knowledge of the type of man who writes for the popular press and a thorough acquaintance with his product, I would say that the blame rests not with the reporter but with the management.

It is certainly within the power of the proprietors of the popular newspapers to change the character of the papers. Some editors in Fleet Street habitually sneer at American newspapers and their practices, although these men are not above adopting some American techniques of news presentation which they think will sell newspapers. But the amount of factual information about national and foreign affairs in many small-town American papers is far greater, proportionately, than that provided by some great "national" newspapers in London.

Those who are interested in the improvement of relations between the United States and the United Kingdom must be concerned about the reporting of American news in the popular press. More space is devoted to news from the United States than formerly, and correspondents for the London dailies travel more widely than they did in the past. Men like the late Robert Waithman of the News Chronicle did their best to get out of Washington and New York and see the country. But too often the correspondents devote time and space to the more frivolous aspects of American life. From the standpoint of international relations, the space devoted to the stream of stories about the royal family might be better spent on a frank discussion of why the mass of Americans feel as they do about the Communist government in Peiping.

Some good judges of the national character believe that the great mass of the British working class would not read such information even if the newspapers provided it. They see this group as complacent and politically lethargic, no longer willing to be stirred, as it was a generation ago, by great events in the outside world. If this is true, the future is dark indeed. For more than at any time since the summer of 1940 the British people must take a realistic view of their position in the world. They cannot do this if, beyond a few perfunctory headlines, their newspapers provide only the details of the latest murder or the bust measurements of Hollywood stars. To an observer from abroad, it is only too evident that the great problems of our times are not being brought to the people of Britain by their popular newspapers in a serious manner.

THE OLD SCHOOL TIE

Few institutions in Britain are more difficult for Americans to understand than the public schools. Yet a knowledge of the system, how it works, its influence upon British society, its traditions and customs, even its sports is essential to a knowledge of modern Britain. We are going to hear a great deal about the public schools in the coming years, for one of the great battles between the egalitarian, socialist Britain and the traditional, conservative Britain will be waged over the future of these schools.

The "public school" is in fact a private one. The public-school system includes all the schools of this type in Britain. As an influence on the national character it has been and still is extraordinarily potent. This influence is social and political as well as educational. It is, I think, fair to say that to hundreds of thousands in the upper and middle classes, attendance at Eton is regarded as more important than attendance at Oxford.

There are about two hundred public schools in Britain. They range from old established institutions like Eton, Harrow, Charter-house, Winchester, Rugby, Haileybury, and Wellington to smaller schools whose fame is local and whose plant, equipment, and teaching staff are little better, and in some cases inferior, to those of the state schools.

What keeps the public-school system alive in an era that has seen the fall of so many bastions of class and privilege? To begin with, the public schools represent a well-established, wealthy, and acute force within British society. Such a force fights to maintain its position against the public criticism and political maneuverings of its enemies. The fight is led by men who are sincerely convinced that the continuation of the public-school system is necessary to the maintenance of Britain's position in the world, and they will devote time, money, and effort to win the fight. One of the mistakes made by the Socialist groups that attack the public-school system is to underestimate the wit and energy of those who defend it.

Yet the existence of a powerful institution is no guarantee of its future life in a country that has changed and is changing so rapidly as Britain. The public schools survive and even flourish because of the conviction widely held throughout the upper and middle classes that such schools provide the best type of education for their boys. Indeed, the conviction goes even deeper in the class structure: it is noteworthy that as new groups move up the economic scale into the middle class, these too seek to send their boys to a public school.

Elsewhere I have mentioned the sacrifices that the old middle class makes to preserve its position in British society. Nowhere are these sacrifices more evident than in the struggle to raise the money to send the son or sons of the family to a public school. The Continental holiday may be given up in favor of two weeks at an English seaside resort. The car must be patched up and run for another year. Father will go without a new overcoat, and mother will abandon her monthly trip to "town" to see a play. But John will go to his father's old school. Why?

At the best public schools the formal education is excellent. But when the middle-class Briton speaks of the education his son gets at a public school he is referring only partially to what the boy learns from books. Principally, he is thinking about the development of the boy's character at the school, about the friends he will make there, and about how these friends and attendance at this old school will help the boy later in life.

Critics of the Foreign Office have often charged that British diplomacy is filled with the products of the public schools and that the representatives of the great mass of the nation are excluded from the Foreign Service because they have not attended public schools. Lord Strang, a former Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and thus head of the Foreign Office, answered this criticism in his book The Foreign Office.

"The Foreign Office," he wrote, "can move no faster towards fully democratic methods of selection than the State as a whole is moving in its educational policies, though it has already moved far at the pace set for it by these wider policies of political evolution. The fact is that the Foreign Service always must and will recruit from the best, in brains and character, that the prevailing educational system can produce."

Note that "character" is coupled with "brains" in this indirect reference to the public schools.

What does the middle-class Briton mean when he says that Eton or some obscure public school in the Midlands will develop his son's character? There is no complete answer. But I would say that he includes in character such traits as willingness to take responsibility, loyalty to the class conception of the nation's interests, readiness to lead (which implies, of course, a belief that he is fit to lead and that there are people willing to be led), truthfulness, self-discipline, a love for vigorous outdoor sports. I have heard all these cited as reasons why boys should go to public schools and why fathers will give up smoking or limit their drinking to a small sherry before dinner to provide the money for such schooling.

In considering the development of character in the public schools it should be remembered that these schools often represent the third phase in the education of a British boy. The boy's first preceptor will be a nanny or nursemaid, often chosen from the rural working class. At eight or nine he goes away to a preparatory school. At twelve or thirteen he is ready for his public school. Because of economic pressure only a wealthy minority can follow this system today, but it was the system that produced the majority of the leaders of the Conservative Party and not a few prominent Labor Party leaders.

Direct paternal influence is much less evident in the education of Britons of the middle class than it is in the United States. One argument for the system maintains that the boy learns self-reliance; when in his twenties he is commanding a platoon or acting as Third Secretary of Embassy in a foreign country he is not likely to be wishing that Mom were there to advise him. This argument implies acceptance of the proposition that people will consent to be led by the public-school boy or that his education and character will fit him for a diplomatic post abroad.

Critics of the public schools charge that the concept of public-school leadership was exploded by World War II. This does not jibe with my own experiences with the British forces from 1939 to 1945. I found that most of the young officers in all three services were products of the public schools and that, on the whole, they provided a high standard of leadership in the lower echelons. Their earlier training had enforced upon them the idea that they were responsible for their men, not only in battle but elsewhere. So they would tramp through the Icelandic sleet to obscure posts to organize amateur theatricals or sweat through an African afternoon playing soccer with their men because this was part of the responsibility. They were told that they had to lead in battle, and they accepted the obligation without doubts.

A great many of them were killed all over the world while sociologists and reformers were planning how to eliminate the public schools. Those who were killed were no more intelligent, no more attractive in person, no more energetic than those they led. But when the time came to lead, they led. These remarks, no doubt, will annoy critics of the public schools and public-school leadership. When I am informed how wars are to be won or nations to be governed without leaders I will be properly contrite.

The public school's place in British society rests basically upon this conviction that a public-school education provides character-training that will equip a boy for leadership in business, in politics, in the military services, and in society. But the system as it appears in British society is composed of much more than formal education and character-building. The public schools also mean a body of traditions and customs often as involved and as unrelated to the modern world as the taboos of primitive man.

The Old School Tie is one. Almost all middle-class and some working-class institutions in Britain have a tie striped with the colors of the institution or ornamented with its crest. There are ties for cricket clubs and associations of football fans, there are ties for regiments and clubs. But the tie that generally means most is the tie that stands for attendance at a public school. It is at once a certificate of education and a badge of recognition.

The phrase "Old School Tie" stands not only for the public schools but for their place in middle-class society. The tie is not merely a strip of silk but all the strange, sometimes incomprehensible customs and traditions that surround the public schools. Slang phrases used at one school for generations. Rugby football rather than soccer because there is more bodily contact in rugby and hence it is a more "manly" game and better suited to character-building. School courses which have very little to do with the problems of the modern world but which supposedly "discipline" the mind.

British public schools, like American universities, have been criticized for developing a type rather than individuals. There is a resemblance among their graduates, and the old Etonian and the old Wykehamist (Winchester) and even the graduate of some small school in Yorkshire have a great deal in common. The public-school graduate will be enthusiastic about sports, rather contemptuous and sometimes shockingly ill-informed about the world outside Britain, well-mannered, truthful, and amenable to discipline. In a crowd, whether it be an officers' training unit in war or an industrial training school in peace, he will seek out other members of the fraternity announced by the tie. He is ready to serve and sometimes idealize the State. He believes in, although he does not invariably personally support, church attendance, The Times, the monarchy.

Naturally, there are mavericks. Some of the greatest individualists in recent British history—the influence of the public schools on the nation really became apparent in the middle of the last century when the new mercantile and industrial leaders began to send their sons to them—have been public-school products. By a pleasing coincidence, Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Nehru of India, and Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis are old Harrovians.

Politically, the public schools are conservative in thought, and usually their graduates adhere to the Conservative Party. But there are many exceptions. Hugh Gaitskell, the present leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party, is an old Wykehamist. His predecessor, Earl Attlee, went to Haileybury. Scattered through the ranks of the modern Labor Party are dozens of Old Boys of the public schools. If the Labor movement gradually sheds much of its old extremism, it is certain to attract an increasing number of public-school graduates.

The principal criticism of the public schools voiced by reformers at home and critics abroad is that it perpetuates in Britain a class system that divides society during a period when unity is essential to survival. There is truth in this, so much that it cannot be answered, as supporters of the system do answer it, with the assertion that there were no class differences in Britain until the Labor Party created them. Nor is the argument valid that the masses in Britain like class distinction, like to live their lives within a precise social classification. British society is changing today just as it has changed in the past. It would not have changed without popular pressure. The newly rich manufacturer of cheap cotton who decided to send his boy to a public school a hundred years ago was just as much a part of this change as the Labor Party politician who wants to abolish the public schools even though he himself is a graduate of one.

Another disadvantage of the perpetuation of the public-school system in its present form is that it is unsuited in many ways to modern conditions. It was admirable training for young men who were to rule thousands of untutored natives or maintain the might, majesty, and dominion of the British Empire with a handful of police or administer without deviation the justice of the Crown in smelly courtrooms half a world away. But today the young men are going out to sell Austins or electronic products or to represent a weaker Britain among peoples tipsy with the heady wine of nationalism. At home the old stratifications are breaking up, new groups of technicians and managers are shouldering the once unchallenged leaders of the professional middle class, new industries requiring a high degree of technical training are ousting the old.

In these circumstances the road will be difficult for a man who has been trained to regard himself as a leader, either born or educated to leadership, who has been taught that his caste is automatically superior to the industrialists of Pittsburgh or the scientist at Harlow or the excitable politicians of New Delhi and Athens. Certain traits encouraged by the public schools will always be important. But self-discipline, truthfulness, physical courage must be accompanied in the modern world by a broader outlook on that world and a more acute realization of Britain's place in it.

There is a strong movement in Britain for the expansion of technical education. The public schools are not technical schools; their object is the well-rounded product of a general education. While the public schools maintain their social prestige, the new middle class as well as the old will send its sons to them. But the leaders of tomorrow's Britain will be the leaders of the new technology taught in the technical schools. As these schools develop, they may offer a real challenge to the public school's position as the trainer of the governing or leading class.

The indictment of the public schools is that they are educating boys to meet conditions that no longer exist. Yet the public schools are trying to change with the times even while maintaining that what is needed to meet the challenge of modern conditions is not narrow technical education but precisely the comprehensive schooling backed by sound character-training that public schools are supposed to provide.

We should not overlook the role the public schools are playing and will play in the absorption into the middle class of the new groups that have entered it from industry, science, communications, and management in the last decade. Many men in these groups had no public-school education. In fact, a decade ago many of them were among the severest critics of the system. But a surprisingly large number today are sending their sons to public schools. The desire to keep up with the Joneses—the Joneses in this case being the old middle class that sent its sons to public schools as a matter of course—is one reason for this. Another is the recognition that the public schools endow their graduates with certain social advantages.

When change occurs in Britain it often takes place behind a faÇade that appears unchanged. The battle over the public schools is certain to take place, and, whichever group wins, the schools themselves will be altered by it. It is inconceivable that they will be eliminated from the British scene. It is equally inconceivable that they will not change under the pressure of the times.

In the spring of 1956 I lunched with a wartime friend who said he had given up smoking in order to save money to send young Nigel through Winchester. Someone else at the table muttered that "this public-school business" was a lot of damned nonsense. My friend smiled. "Damn it," he said, "you [the mutterer] are always talking about how well the Russians do things. Well, I read in The Times this morning that Khrushchev says they're going to start schools to train leaders. What's good enough for old Khrush ought to be good enough for you pinks down at the London School of Economics!"

THE ARMY, THE NAVY, THE AIR FORCE

"The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, they always play the game." So sang the girls and boys of careless, complacent Britain in the thirties. The verse symbolizes the middle-class public-school atmosphere of the services' place in British society. Prior to World War II the three services enjoyed a more honored place in British society than did the Army and the Navy in American society.

The commanding officer of a battalion on home service thought himself socially superior to the leading industrialist of the neighborhood, and, in most cases, the industrialist agreed. The retired Navy commander or Army major was a recognized figure in the life of the village or town in which he lived—a figure of fun, perhaps, to the bright young people down from Oxford or Cambridge, and an easy mark for social caricaturists and cartoonists, but also a man of importance in the affairs of the community.

He was also, in many cases, a man of means. Pay in the pre-war Army was ridiculously small, and an officer in a "good" regiment needed a private income if he were to live comfortably. Again, the retired officer and the serving officer knew a good deal about the world, a circumstance forced upon him (for he was never especially cordial to foreigners) by the necessity of garrisoning the Empire. He had lived in India or China or Egypt and fought in South Africa or France or Mesopotamia, and he had formed firm conclusions about these countries and their people. These conclusions, often delivered with the certainty of an order on the parade ground, raised the hackles of his juniors and were derided as the reactionary ideas of relics from Poona, the citadel of conservatism in India. There is an old service verse about the "Poona attitude":

There's a regiment from Poona
That would infinitely sooner
Play single-handed polo,
A sort of solo polo,
Than play a single chukker
With a chap who isn't pukka.

After the Second World War had burst on Britain in all its fury and in its aftermath, it occurred to many who had fumed while the ex-officers talked that the Blimps had known what they were talking about. Earlier I noted that the retired officers were right in their predictions about what would happen in India once the British withdrew, and that the politicians and publicists of the left were wrong. I do not suggest that the British should or could have remained. But several hundred thousand lives might have been saved if the withdrawal had been slower.

The services and their officers thus had established themselves as a much more important part of society in Britain than had their counterparts in the United States. They were always in the public eye. The Army and the Air Force fought campaigns on the north-west frontier of India. The Navy chased gun-runners and showed the flag.

Socially, the Army was the more important. The sons of the very best families—which means the oldest and most respectable, not the richest—went into the five regiments of the Brigade of Foot Guards or into the Household Cavalry or into the old, fashionable, expensive cavalry regiments like the 16th/5th Lancers or the Queen's Own Fourth Hussars (which once, long ago, attracted a young subaltern named Churchill). It was the fashion among the intellectuals of pre-war England to laugh at the solemn ceremonials of the Foot Guards and to snicker at the languid young men who protested when their horses were taken away and replaced by armored cars and tanks. (It might be remarked that when the time came there was nothing to laugh at and a good deal to be proud of. The account for the parties at the night clubs and the hunting, shootin', and fishin' of the careless days was rendered and paid in blood. You could see them in France in May and June of 1940 going out with machine guns and horribly antiquated armored cars to take on the big German tanks.)

If the Army was predominant socially, the Navy held military pre-eminence. It was the Navy which was the nation's "sure shield," the Navy which had been matchless and supreme since Trafalgar. It was the Navy which time and again had interposed its ships and men between the home islands and the fleets of Spain, France, and Germany. The naval officer standing on his bridge in the North Sea or off some tropic port was a watchman, a national symbol of security.

As the two senior services were so firmly implanted in the public consciousness, it is easy to see why the Royal Air Force, the youngest of the three, lived on such short commons before the war. Socially it did not count. "He's one of these flying chaps," a young Hussar said at Lille one day in 1939, "but a very decent fellow." It did not attract the young men who entered the Guards or the Cavalry, for the RAF dealt with machines and grimy hangars smelling of grease and oil, and it planned for the future without much hope of governmental financial assistance or any real support from tradition. Whereas the Loamshire Hussars had been fighting since Blenheim, the Secretary of State for War was an ex-officer, and the port at the mess was beyond praise.

Militarily, the RAF meant a great deal more. When the war began, it became the savior of Britain—for a few years the one service through which the country could strike directly and powerfully at Germany. The rise of the RAF to pre-eminence among the fighting services in post-war Britain began with its long, bitter, successful battle against the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.

The ascent of the RAF to its present position is the first of the changes that have overtaken the services in Britain, which is a martial if not a militaristic nation. Of course, the development of air power as the means of carrying the new nuclear weapons would have ensured an improvement in its position in any case. But the expansion of the RAF during the war, the post-war necessity for continued experimentation in associated fields such as the development of guided missiles, and the creation of a large, highly trained group of technical officers provided an opportunity for the new middle class and the upper levels of the industrial working class, the planners and technicians, to win advancement in what is currently the most important of the services.

The Battle of Britain was won by public-school boys. But the modern RAF, although it has its share of public-school boys especially among the combat units, is increasingly manned, officers as well as the higher noncommissioned officers, by products of the state schools. The RAF needs now and will need increasingly in the future the services of the best technical brains Britain can offer. The main source of supply will be not the officers' training units at the public schools or the universities but the new technical colleges and training courses in Britain.

It follows, then, that in time the military defense of the realm will rest primarily not upon the class who have always considered themselves ordained by birth and education to carry out this task but upon a new group springing from the new middle class and from the proletariat. This is a social development of the first importance.

The change in the character of the officer class is not confined to the RAF, although it is most noticeable there. There has been a change, too, in the composition of the commissioned ranks of the Army.

When World War II ended, the "military families," which for generations had sent sons into the local county regiments, found that the second war, following the terrible blood-letting of the first, had almost wiped them out. Perhaps one son in three or four survived. And he, surveying the post-war Army and the post-war world, was disinclined to follow tradition and devote the remainder of his working life to the service. He might gladly have served another twenty years in the "old" Army with its horses and hunting, its tours of duty in India, its social importance. But now tanks and armored cars had replaced the horses, India was gone, and a bunch of shirking Bolshies from the Labor Party were running things. Above all, the two wars had swept away many of the private fortunes with which young officers eked out their miserable pay and allowances. So the survivor of the military family became a personnel manager in a Midlands factory, and elderly men said to elderly wives: "Do you know that for the first time since '91 there's no Fenwick serving with the Loamshires?"

But the Second World War also raised to officer rank thousands of young men whose social and educational background would not have been considered suitable for commissioned rank in peacetime. They came from the state's secondary schools, from technical colleges, or from the ranks, and they did remarkably well. Many of them are still serving as officers.

At the war's end many of them remained in the service. I was always interested during the maneuvers of the British Army of the Rhine to find how many of the young officers in the infantry and tank regiments had served in the ranks or had come to the Army with a sound education and a proletarian accent from one of the state schools. The technical branches of the Army, such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, draw an increasing number of their officers from the noncommissioned officers and from among the graduates of technical schools.

Nowhere is the middle class's ability to assimilate new groups and thus perpetuate itself more striking than in the Army. The officers from the ranks or from a state school assume the social coloration of the established officer class. Manners, accent, turns of phrase, and dress alter to conform with those of the old officer class. At present the new group is in a minority. There naturally are many members of the old officer class still serving. With the return of prosperity the upper middle class has resumed the tradition of sending its sons into the Army as a matter of course.

The general officers of the old school, which in this case means the old public school, vehemently defend the middle class as the only proper breeding-ground for service officers. They assert that only men from a certain class, by which they mean their own, and from a certain background, by which they mean a public school, will accept the responsibility and provide the leadership necessary in war. A general told me: "It's really very simple. Men who drop their h's won't follow an officer who also drops his h's. They don't think he'll take care of them as well as some young pipsqueak six months out of Eton but with the correct accent."

This will strike Americans as ridiculous. Certainly it ignores the high quality of leadership exercised by sergeant pilots of the RAF Bomber Command. But the general cannot be dismissed as unrealistic. The correct accent does count in Britain. The public-school boy has been trained to look after others. The idea of an officer class may offend us as contradictory to democratic equality. But it can and does work. Nowhere in the world is the officer caste better treated than in the proletarian society of Soviet Russia.

The Army and the Navy will continue to assimilate into the commissioned ranks of their services an increasing number of men of working-class origin. Science's invasion of the military art, long established but tremendously accelerated since 1945, makes it inevitable that the sharp young technician, "without an h to his name" as the middle class says, will continue to rise to commissioned rank. It also seems relatively certain that as he rises he will assume some of the social patina of the middle class.

The old conception of military leadership as a prerogative of the aristocracy died hard. It took the blunders and casualties of the Crimean War, the Boer War, and the First World War to kill it. During World War II the British services produced a large number of outstanding leaders: Alexander, Brooke, Dill, Montgomery, Slim, Wavell, Leese, Horrocks in the Army, Cunningham, Fraser, Vian, Mountbatten in the Navy, Portal, Harris, Tedder, Slessor, Bowhill in the RAF. With the exception of Alexander and Mountbatten, all were products of the old middle class. But in a changing Britain the authority of this class in the field it made particularly its own is being undermined both by new techniques of war and by the shifts in internal power which have occurred in Britain since 1940.

Those officers and ex-officers who recognize this are not greatly concerned for the survival of their class leadership; most are convinced that it will survive. They are concerned, however, lest in this rapidly changing century the traditions that their class perpetuated and, in some cases, changed into fetishes should perish. Regimental traditions, some of which stretch back three centuries into military history, will, they insist, be as important in the era of guided missiles as they were in the days of the matchlock.

It is argued that the sense of continuity, the conviction that men before them have faced perils as great and have survived and won is essential if Britain is to continue as a military power. The composition of the Army, Navy, and Air Force officer groups may change. But the new men will have to rely quite as much on the service and regimental traditions as did the men who fought at Minden, Waterloo, or Le Cateau.

WORKER'S PLAYTIME

The leisure activities of the British people in the present decade offer a revealing guide to the changes that have overtaken their society. One can learn a great deal by comparing a rugby crowd at Twickenham and a soccer crowd at Wembley. The rise in popularity of some forms of entertainment, notably television, testifies to the new prosperity of the working class. The slow decline of interest in some sports and the shift from playing to watching illustrate other changes in the make-up of Britain.

Television is the greatest new influence on the British masses since the education acts of the last century produced a proletariat capable of reading the popular press, a situation capitalized by Lord Northcliffe and others. And the mass attention to "what's on television," like every other change in Britain, has social connotations. Among many in the middle class and the upper middle class it is close to class treason to admit regular watching of television. "We have one for Nanny and the children," a London hostess said, "but we never watch it. Fearfully tedious, most of it."

Significantly, the middle class, when defending its right to send its sons to public schools, emphasizes that the working class could send its sons to the same schools if it were willing to abandon its payments for television. This may reveal one reason for the middle-class dislike for this form of entertainment. Television sets are expensive, and possibly the cost cannot be squeezed into a budget built around the necessity of sending the boy to school.

The spread of television-viewing in Britain has had far-reaching economic and social effects. A sharp blow has been dealt the corner pub, by tradition the workingman's club. Since the rise of modern Britain, it is to the pub that the worker has taken his sorrows, his ambitions, and his occasional joys. There over a pint of bitters he could think dark thoughts about his boss, voice his opinions on statesmen from Peel to Churchill, and argue about racing with his friends. "These days," a barmaid told me, "they come in right after supper, buy some bottled ale—nasty gassy stuff it is, too—and rush home to the telly. In the old days they came in around seven, regular as clockwork it was, and didn't leave until I said 'Time, gentlemen, please.'"

Television also has affected attendance at movies and at sports events. The British have never been a nation of night people, and nowadays they seem to be turning within themselves, a nation whose physical surroundings are bounded by the hearth, the television screen, and quick trips to the kitchen to open another bottle of beer. My friends on the BBC tell me this is not so; television, they say, has opened new horizons for millions and is the great national educator of the future. It is easy to forgive their enthusiasm. But how can a people learn the realities of life if what it really wants on television is sugary romances or the second-hand jokes and antics of comedians rather than the admirable news and news-interpretation programs produced by both the BBC and the Independent Television Authority? The new working class seems to be irritated by attempts to bring it face to face with the great problems of their country and of the world. Having attained what it wants—steady employment, high wages, decent housing—it hopes to hide before its television screens while this terrible, strident century hammers on.

The view that the British have become a nation of spectators has been put forward with confidence by many observers, British as well as foreign. It is valid, I believe, only if one takes the view that the millions who watch soccer (which the British call football), rugby football, field hockey, and other sports on a Saturday afternoon in autumn are the only ones who count. But there are hundreds of thousands who play these sports. Some few hundred are professionals playing before thousands, but many thousands more are amateurs. Stand in a London railroad station any Saturday at noon and count the hundreds of young men and young women hurrying to trains that will take them to some suburban field where they will use the hockey sticks, football shoes, or cricket bats they are carrying.

Neither soccer nor rugby football is so physically punishing as American football, although both demand great stamina. So the British play these games long after the American college tackle has hung up his cleats and is boring his friends at the country club with the story of how he blocked the kick against Dartmouth or Slippery Rock. An ex-officer of my acquaintance played cricket, and pretty good cricket, too, until he was well into his forties. On village cricket grounds (the British call them "pitches") on a Sunday afternoon one can see sedate vicars and husky butchers well past fifty flailing away at the ball.

If one adds to these the thousands who take a gun and shoot or a rod and fish, and the tens of thousands more who cycle into the countryside spring, summer, and fall, the picture reveals a nation which does not rely solely on watching sports for its pleasure but which still gets enormous fun out of playing them.

Sports of all sorts, either spectator or participant, occupy an important, even a venerated, place in British society. Kipling's warning against the damage that "the flanneled fool at the wicket and the muddied oaf at the goal" might do to the nation's martial capacity was never taken very seriously. After all, Britons have been told interminably and mistakenly that Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. The Duke of Wellington, who commanded the British forces in that notable victory, could recall no athletic triumphs of his own at Eton save that he had once jumped a rather wide ditch as a boy. The Duke's pastimes were riding to hounds and women, neither of which was in the Eton curriculum at the time he matriculated. Nevertheless, the tradition remains.

When an American thinks of British sport, he automatically thinks of cricket. But cricket is a game that can be played in Britain only during the short and frequently stormy months of late spring and summer. In point of attendance, number of players participating, and national interest, the game is soccer. Soccer, the late Hector McNeil loved to emphasize, is "the game of the people." It is also the game of millions who have never seen a game but who each week painfully fill out their coupons on the football pools, hopeful that this time they will win the tens of thousands of pounds that go to the big winners. The football pools are an example of a diversion that has moved upward in the social scale. The British, almost all of them, love to gamble, and the retired colonial servant at Bath finds as great a thrill in winning on the pools or even trying to win as the steel worker at Birmingham does. These days the steel worker has a little more money to back his choices.

To many Americans soccer is a game played by national groups in the big cities and by high schools, prep schools, and colleges too small or too poor to support football. Soccer, actually, is an extremely fast, highly scientific game whose playing evokes from the crowds very much the same passions that are evident at Busch Stadium or Ebbets Field. There is no gentlemanly restraint about questioning an official's decision in soccer as there is in cricket. The British version of "ya bum, ya" rolls over the stadium on Saturday afternoons. Once I heard a staid working-class housewife address a referee who had awarded a free kick against Arsenal as "Oh, you bloody man!" The English can go no further in vituperation.

Although soccer is principally the game of Britain's working masses, there are some among the middle class who find it entrancing. But the great game of this class in the autumn and winter is rugby football.

Here we encounter a social difference. Rugby was popularized at a public school and is pre-eminently the public-school game. The "old rugger blue" is as much a part of the rugby crowd as the ex-tackle from Siwash in the American football crowd. The games, incidentally, have a good deal in common and require similar skills. There is no blocking or forward passing in rugby, but the great backs of rugby football would hold their own in the American game.

In the middle class it is good form to have played rugby or to watch rugby. At the big games at Twickenham just outside London one will see a higher percentage of women than at the major soccer matches. The difference between the classes watching the two sports is emphasized by the difference in clothing. Twickenham costumes are tweeds, duffel coats, old school ties, and tweed caps. At Wembley there are the inevitable raincoat (usually called a "mac"), the soft gray hat, and the decent worsted suit of the industrial worker on his day off.

Rugby crowds are as partisan as soccer crowds but less vociferous. A bad decision will occasion some head-shaking and tut-tutting, but there will be little shouted criticism—with one exception: the Welsh.

The people of the Principality of Wales take their rugby as the people of Brooklyn take their baseball. In the mining valleys and the industrial cities rugby, not soccer, is the proletarian sport. The players on an English team in an international match with Wales will include university graduates, public-school teachers, and law students. The Welsh side will boast colliery workers, policemen, and teachers at state schools. More than a sport, rugby is a national religion. Consequently, the invasion of Twickenham by a Welsh crowd for an international match is very like the entry of a group of bartenders and bookmakers into a WCTU convention. The Welsh feel emotionally about rugby, and they do not keep their feelings to themselves. They are a small people but terribly tough. My happiest memory of the 1956 international at Twickenham is of a short, broad Welsh miner pummeling a tall, thin Englishman who had suggested mildly that Wales had been lucky to win.

There is another break in the pattern of middle-class allegiance to rugby. A game called Rugby League, somewhat different from the older and more widely played Rugby Union, is played in the North of England. It is definitely a working-class game and a professional one, whereas Rugby Union is, by American standards, ferociously amateur. The English feel badly when one of their players succumbs to the financial lure of Rugby League and leaves the amateur game. The Welsh feel even worse, not because the player is turning professional but because "Look, dammit, man, we need Jones for the match with England."

There are survivals of the old attitude toward professionals in sport in the English (but not the Welsh) attitude toward rugby football. Soccer football, like baseball in America, began as an amateur game and at one time was widely played by the middle class. But middle-class enthusiasm and support dwindled as the game became professionalized. Of late there has been a revival of interest in the amateur side of the sport, but basically the game is played by professionals for huge crowds drawn from the industrial working class. However, thousands in the crowds also play for club and school teams.

Yet here we encounter another contradiction. Cricket, considered the most English of games, is played nowadays mostly by professionals, as far as the county teams (the equivalent of the major-league teams in baseball) are concerned. But many English approach cricket with something akin to the Welshman's attitude toward rugby. Professionalism is no longer looked down upon, and the old distinctions between Gentlemen and Players are slowly vanishing.

John Lardner once mentioned how difficult it was to explain the extraordinary ascendancy that baseball assumed over Americans in the last half of the nineteenth century. It is equally difficult to explain the hold that cricket exercises today on a large section of Britain. More people watch soccer, but that game does not seem to generate the dedicated, almost mystic attitude displayed by cricket enthusiasts. Cricket is an extraordinarily involved, delicate, and, at times, exciting game. But it cannot be merely the game itself which brings old men doddering to Lord's and rouses whole families in the chill cold of a winter morning to listen to the broadcast of a match played half a world away in the bright sunshine of Melbourne.

Part of the hold may be explained by cricket's ability to remind the spectators of their youth and a richer, greener England. To that nation, secure, prosperous, and powerful, many thousands of the middle class return daily in their thoughts. Cricket—village cricket or cricket at the Oval or Lord's, twin sanctums of the game—represents that other England. For a time they can forget the taxes, forget the unknown grave in France or Libya, forget the industrial wasteland around them, and return to the village green and the day the Vicar bowled (struck out) the policeman from the next village.

It is a peaceful game to watch. The absence of the noise, the strident criticisms and outbursts, of the baseball game has been noted by enough Americans. In addition, there is a soporific atmosphere about cricket. Men sit on the grass and watch the white figures of the players make intricate, shifting patterns against the bright green of the grass. Their outward show of enthusiasm is confined to an "Oh, well hit, well hit indeed, sir" or applause when a player makes fifty runs or is bowled. There is no need to hurry or to worry about anything more important than saving the fellow who is on. The pipe is drawing nicely, and later you can meet old So-and-so at the club, or the pub, for a chat about the match. "I go out on a summer evening to watch them play," a Londoner said. "Sort of rests me, it does."

The influence of cricket on the middle class that follows the game has been and is remarkable. Cricket terms have become part of the language of this class. Such phrases as "hit them for six" and "batting on a sticky wicket" pepper the speeches of politicians. As cricket was played originally by amateurs who were presumed to be gentlemen, it assumed an aristocratic tone. Anything that was "not cricket" was not gentlemanly.

Many Britons in World War II showed a tendency to think of the war in terms of cricket. This was discouraged by the tougher-minded commanders on the sensible grounds that war is not cricket. But no one could stop Field Marshal Montgomery from promising his troops they were about to "hit the Germans for six." This introduction of a sporting vocabulary into a fight for survival is one of the reasons why many Continentals regard the English as a frivolous race. I remember still the look, compounded of awe and disgust, on the face of a Norwegian, lately escaped from his homeland, when in the summer of 1940 he found that the newspaper-sellers on the street corners were writing the results of each day's fighting in the Battle of Britain in cricket terms. "Here they are," he said, "fighting for their lives, and I see a sign reading 'England 112 Not Out.' I asked the man what it meant, and he said: 'We got 112 of the ——ers, cock, and we're still batting.' A strange people."

If soccer is primarily a working-class sport and cricket the central sporting interest of the middle class, horse racing is the attraction that transcends all class distinctions. In Britain, as in America, great trouble is taken by those who administer the business to clothe it with the attributes of a sport. But essentially horse racing is a means of gambling, and the British, beneath their supposed stolidity, are a nation of gamblers. I do not recall during my childhood buying a ticket for a sweepstakes on the Kentucky Derby. But in Britain boys and girls of ten and eleven customarily buy tickets in "sweeps" run by their classmates, and the more precocious swap tips on horses.

A tremendous amount is bet each day on racing in Britain, and it is estimated that more money is bet on the Epsom Derby each June than on any other single horse race in the world.

Derby Day at Epsom is one of the best opportunities of seeing contemporary British society, from the Queen at the top to the London barrow boy at the bottom, en masse. Inside the track are the vans of the gypsy fortune-tellers, the stands of the small-time bookmakers, scores of bars and snack bars, carousels and other amusement-park attractions. Across the track are the big stands filled with what remains of the aristocracy and the upper middle class of Britain carefully dressed in morning coats, gray top hats, and starched collars. Its members may envy the great wads of bank-notes carried by some of the prosperous farmers and North Country businessmen across the track, but on Derby Day anything goes, and there are champagne and lobster lunches, hilarious greetings to old friends, and reminiscences of past Derbies.

Queen Elizabeth II's love of racing endears her to her subjects. An interest in racing has always been a passport to popularity for monarchs or politicians. Sir Winston Churchill, who divined the wishes and thoughts of his countrymen with uncanny ability during the years of crisis between 1939 and 1945, had few interests in common with the people he lectured and led. He cared little for soccer or cricket. But when, after the war, he began to build up a racing stable, he acquired a new popularity with the people. Naturally, this was the last thing in Sir Winston's mind. He had made some money, he was out of office, and racing attracted him.

Racing is an upper-class sport in the sense that only the rich can afford it. But the true upper-class sports that survive are fox-hunting, shooting, and fishing, known in upper-class parlance as "huntin', shootin', and fishin'." Shooting is bird-shooting—pheasant, grouse, partridge. Fishing is for salmon or trout. As Britain's sprawling industrialization has gobbled up land, the field sports have become more and more the preserve of the rich or at least the well-to-do. George Orwell once noted the dismay of British Communists who learned that Lenin and other revolutionary leaders had enjoyed shooting—shooting birds, that is—in Russia, a country teeming with game. They thought it almost treasonable for the Little Father of the masses to engage in a sport that in Britain was reserved for the capitalists.

Fox-hunting, chiefly because of its close connection with the cult of the horse, takes social precedence over shooting and fishing. But here again we encounter a change. Death duties, taxes on land, and income taxes have impoverished a large number of rural aristocrats who formerly supported local hunts. Their places have been taken by well-to-do farmers and professional men and women from near-by towns. Some of the better-established hunts, such as the Quorn and the Pytchley, try to maintain the old standards of exclusiveness.

The attention paid the cavalry regiments in the old Army, the middle-class conviction that children must be taught to ride because it is a social asset, the aristocratic atmosphere of fox-hunting and show jumping are all expressions of the cult of the horse which flourishes in one of the most heavily industrialized nations in the world. This, too, may express an unconscious desire to return to the past and a secure Britain. Here, too, we see the newly emerging middle class sending its sons and daughters to riding schools where they will meet the sons and daughters of the established middle class.

Golf and tennis are two games that Britain spread around the world. Golf is every man's game in Scotland and a middle-class game in England. I well remember my first trip to St. Andrews in 1939 and my delight at watching a railroad worker solemnly unbutton his collar, take off his coat, and play around one of the formidable courses there in 89. The incongruity was made more marked by the foursomes of expensively outfitted English and Americans who allowed the Scot to play through.

Tennis in Britain, like tennis in America, retains aristocratic overtones. But today it is a middle-class sport; membership at the local tennis club is ranked below membership in the local yacht club or the local hunt.

In both games British representatives in international competitions are at a disadvantage because there is not in Britain the urgent drive to develop players of international ability which exists in the United States and Australia. British cricket and rugby football teams, on the other hand, have enjoyed a number of brilliant successes in competition with Commonwealth teams since the war, and English soccer football, after some lean years, has begun to climb back to the top of the international heap.

In this land of paradox which was the birthplace of the modern "sporting" attitude, the original home of "the game for the game's sake," we find that the most popular sport is soccer football played for money mainly by professionals; that rugby football can be a middle-class game in England and a working-class game one hundred miles away in Wales; that cricket through the years has acquired the standing not of a sport but of a religion among one important class in society; and that shooting and fishing, two proletarian pastimes in both the United States and the Soviet Union, are the domain of the wealthy, the well-bred, and the middle class in Britain.

PUBS AND CLUBS

Long ago one of my bosses advised me to spend less time listening to people in pubs. Had I taken his advice, which fortunately I did not, I would be richer by many pounds but poorer in both friends and information.

Although writers have contended otherwise, the public house is not a unique British institution. Frenchmen gather in estaminets to drink, to argue, and to write interminable letters. Americans meet at bars and taverns. The Spaniard patronizes his cafÉ. The unique aspect of the British pub is its atmosphere.

The pub is a place where you can take your time. In city or country it is a refuge. A man may enter, drink three or four pints of beer in moody silence, and depart refreshed. Or he can come in, drink the same amount of beer, debate the state of the nation and the world with other drinkers and the barmaid, and play darts. Dart-playing, of course, is a national sport, and there are enthusiasts who claim it has more devotees than tennis or golf. Dart leagues flourish throughout the country, to the delight of the publicans, who reap a rich harvest from each match.

Pubs come in all shapes and sizes. Recently many of the old London pubs have been modernized. Plastics and neon lights have taken the place of huge glass walls engraved with advertisements for gin and beer and old-fashioned glass-shaded electric lights. In their efforts to meet the competition of television at home and milk bars or soda fountains down the street, many pubs have adopted new and, to a purist, disgusting attractions. The news that a pub in Cambridge intended to sell ice cream convinced many serious thinkers that this was the end of the Empire. Similarly, a friend told me in shocked tones that when he was served a pint of beer in a suburban pub the barmaid handed him "a damned doily" to put under the glass. He informed her, he reported, that he had given up spilling his drinks at the age of three and a half.

Despite the inroads of the milk bars and the trend toward bottled beer bought in the pub and drunk before the television set, draught beer is still the mainstay of British drinking. "Beer and beef have made us what we are," said the Prince Regent. (His friend, the Duke of Wellington, somewhat surprisingly, thought the Church of England was responsible.)

English beer has a bad name in the United States. The GI invading the country in 1942-5 found it weak, warm, and watery. During the war years it was indeed both weak and watery. Today, however, it has regained its old-time potency.

In addition to the standard beers and ales, the British brew small quantities of special ales that, as the old saying goes, would blow a soft hat through a cement ceiling. The Antelope, in Chelsea, had managed to hoard some bottles of this liquid as late as the autumn of 1940. After two bottles apiece, three Americans walked home through one of the worst nights of bombing exclaiming happily over the pretty lights in the sky.

The merits of the brews in their respective countries are a favorite topic for conversation between Britons and Americans. The tourist will find that his host holds no high opinion of American beer, considering it gassy, flavorless, and, as one drinker inelegantly described it, "as weak as gnat's wee." The British are continually surprised by American drinking habits. They consider that the GI who hastily swallows three or four double whiskies is asking for trouble, and that the object of a night's foray in the pub is not to get drunk but to drink enough to encourage conversation and forget your troubles. Prohibition, gone these many years, is still a black mark against Americans in the minds of the pundits in the pubs. They regard it as a horrible aberration by an otherwise intelligent people.

It should not be assumed that the British drink only beer. When they are in funds or when the occasion calls for something stronger, they will drink almost anything from what my charwoman once described as "a nourishing drop of gin" to champagne. During the war they drank some strange and weird mixtures and distillations that, if they did not kill the drinker as did some Prohibition drams, at least made him wish he were dead the next morning.

But the pub's importance, let me repeat, is due to its place as a public forum as much as to its position as a public fountain. There questions can be asked and answers given which the average Briton would regard as impertinent if the conversation took place in his home or his office. There interminable public arguments will probe the wisdom of the government's policy on installment buying or Cyprus or, with due gravity, will seek to establish the name of the winner of the Cambridgeshire Handicap in 1931.

The atmosphere of discussion and reflection of the English pub thus far has been proof against the juke box, the pinball machine, and the television set. But the fight is a hard one. These counterattractions to the bar are making their appearance in an increasing number of pubs each year. At the same time, publicans are giving more thought to the catering side of their business. The bar, which was the heart of the pub, has become merely an adjunct to the "attractions" and the restaurant.

The spread of restaurant eating is itself a novel change in British habits. Until the Second World War the great majority of the working class and the middle class ate their meals at home. Even today, in the New Towns, the industrial worker prefers to return home for lunch. But the shortage of servants, the difficulties of feeding a family on the weekly rations, the need to get away from the drabness of chilly, darkened homes during the war and immediate post-war years combined to send millions of Britons out to eat.

This has changed the character of a large number of pubs. It has also improved restaurant cooking, especially in the provinces. British cooking is a standard music-hall joke, but the comedians are somewhat behind the times. It has improved steadily since the war, largely because the British had to learn how to cook in order to make their meager rations palatable. The squeeze on the established middle class forced the housewives of that group to study cookery. Dinners in that circle are shorter and less formal than before the war, but the cooking is vastly improved.

DÉcor in modern pubs varies from the overpoweringly new to the self-consciously old. Tucked away in the back streets of the cities, however, or nestling in the folds of the Cotswolds one can still see the genuine article. There the political arguments flourish as they have since Bonaparte was troubling the English. There on a Saturday night you can still hear the real English songs—"Knees Up Mother Brown" or "Uncle Tom Cobley and All."

A sense of calm pervades the rural bars. The countryman is a long-lived, tough person. At the Monkey and Drum or the Red Dragon or the Malakof (named for a half-forgotten action in the Crimean War) the beer is set out for wiry ancients in their seventies and eighties, masters of country crafts long forgotten by the rest of the population. The sun stays late in the sky on a summer evening. From the open door you can see it touching the orderly fields, the neat houses. It is difficult, almost impossible in such surroundings to doubt that there will always be an England. Yet this is precisely the England that is and has been in continuous retreat for a century and a half before the devouring march of industrialization.

The pub is the poor man's "club"—in the sense that it is a haven for the tired worker and a center of discussion. The actual British clubs are another singular institution. There are, of course, men's and women's clubs throughout the West, but only in Britain have they become an integral and important part of social life. Like the pubs, they are changing with the times. But they still retain enough of their distinctive flavor to mark them as a particularly British institution.

London's clubs are the most famous. But throughout the islands there are other clubs—county clubs in provincial capitals, workingmen's clubs that compete with the pubs. There are women's clubs, too, but the club is mainly a masculine institution in a nation whose society is still ordered for the well-being of the male.

"Do you mean to tell me that these Englishmen go to their clubs for a drink after work and don't get home until dinnertime?" a young American matron asked. She thought it was "scandalous." Her husband, poor devil, came home from work promptly at six each night and sat down to an early dinner with his wife and three small children. I suppose he enjoyed it.

London's clubs cater to all tastes. There are political clubs such as the Carlton, the Conservatives' inner sanctum. There are service clubs: the Cavalry or the Army and Navy. On St. James's Street are a number of the oldest and best: White's, Boodle's, Brooks's, the Devonshire.

The same American matron asked me what a club offers. The answer is, primarily, relaxation in a man's world. Like the pub, the club is a place where a man can get away from his home, his job, his worries. If he wishes, he can drink and eat while reading a newspaper. Or he can stand at the bar exchanging gossip with other members. He can read, he can play cards, he can play billiards. If he wants advice, there may be an eminent Queen's Counsel, a Foreign Office official, a doctor, or an editor across the luncheon table. There is the same atmosphere of relaxed calm which marks the best pubs.

Because for centuries the clubs have been the refuges of the wealthy or the aristocratic or the dominant political class they have exerted considerable political influence. Feuds that have shaken great political parties have begun before club bars and, years later, been settled with an amicable little dinner party at the club. In politics, domestic and foreign, the British put great faith in the "quiet get-together" where an issue can be thrashed out in private without regard for popular opinion.

During the worst days of the debate over the future of Trieste a Foreign Office official remarked to me that "all these conferences" complicated the situation. "There's nothing that couldn't be settled in an hour's frank talk over a glass of sherry at White's," he said. Foolish? Old-fashioned? Perhaps. But how much progress has been made at full-dress international conferences where national leaders speak not to one another but to popular opinion in their own and foreign countries?

The clubs are centers in which opinion takes form. As the opinion of many who are leaders in Britain's political and economic life, it is important opinion. For instance, it was obvious in the clubs, long before the failure of the Norwegian campaign brought it into the open, that there was widespread dissatisfaction in the middle class over Neville Chamberlain's direction of the war. Similarly, stories of the aging Churchill's unwillingness to deal with the pressing domestic economic problems of his government were first heard in the clubs.

The high cost of maintaining the standards of food, drink, and service required by most members has hurt the clubs. There are in every such institution a few staff mainstays whose remarks become part of club lore. But the Wages and Catering Act has made it difficult to staff clubs adequately.

The food in clubs is man's food. Its emphasis on beef, lamb, fish, and cheese would upset a Mamaroneck matron. But some of the chefs are as good as any in Britain, and the food can be accompanied by some of the finest wines in the world.

Essentially, the club remains man's last refuge from the pressures of his world. He can talk, he can listen, he can drink a second or even a third cocktail without the slight sniff that betokens wifely censure. The latest story about the Ruritanian Ambassadress or the government's views on the situation in Upper Silesia will be retailed by members. The taxes may be high, the world in a mess, the old order changing. Here by the fire with his drink in his hand he is his own man. "Waiter, two more of the same."

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