ANDREW BONAR LAW: Scots in UK Politics (7)

Andrew Bonar Law (1858-1923) was only Prime Minister of Britain for 211 days in 1922-3 and has often been dubbed “The Unknown Prime Minister”. Yet Law was Leader of the Conservative Party for 12 years in the momentous 1911-1921 period, returning finally in 1922-23. Much less colourful than Lloyd George, Asquith or Churchill, he was astute and focussed and had the merit, rare in politicians, of being trusted as honest and valued for his straight talking.

                                              

Andrew Bonar Law

Bonar Law was born in the Colony of New Brunswick, which joined federal Canada in 1867. His Scots-Irish father was a Free Church of Scotland minister, who also had a small farm. He had a hard and very rural upbringing; his Scots mother died when he was two and for ten years he was looked after with his four siblings by her sister, his aunt Janet. Janet decided in 1870 to return to her native Helensburgh, near Glasgow, and it was agreed that Bonar would come with her. Bonar went to Glasgow High School, where his prodigious memory was noticed, but left aged 16. 

His aunt’s family, the Kidstons, were quietly prosperous, owning a small merchant bank where Bonar worked briefly. It was sold to the Clydesdale Bank but the Kidstons generously bought Bonar a partnership in an iron works. The senior partner suddenly retired and in his 20s Bonar managed the business and it prospered greatly. Glasgow was in those days a centre for iron-trading, just as Bradford was for wool and Manchester for cotton. Bonar became an accomplished businessman: he improved his education by attending lectures at Glasgow University and joining its debating society which copied the Westminster parliamentary model; his controversial skills burgeoned. He also developed his expertise in chess, a lifelong enthusiasm. Bonar married merchant’s daughter Annie Robley in 1891 and they were to have seven children. 

Bonar was rich enough (MPs were then unpaid) to become a sleeping partner in the iron business and in 1897 was adopted as the Tory candidate for Glasgow Blackfriars. He won the seat unexpectedly in the 1900 Boer War election and soon made his mark, joining the front benches in 1902. Balfour was Prime Minister but the leading personality was Colonial Secretary and Imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, leader of the Tory-supporting Liberal Unionists, who won over Bonar to two policies which became central pillars of his politics – Tariff Reform and opposition to Irish Home Rule.

                                                      

Dynamic Joe Chamberlain

      

 We tend to forget how passionately the Tariff Reform issue was fought in this era. It split the Tory party, between those opposed to food taxes and others who came to advocate Empire free trade. Law was more measured; his enthusiasm for tariff reform was based on the belief that it would protect employment in Britain. Free trade had been the watchword of the Liberals ever since Cobden and Bright agitated against the Corn Laws in the 1840s.  The tariff reform campaign lost much momentum when Joe Chamberlain was crippled by a stroke in 1906 and left public life; his elder son Austen Chamberlain did not have his father’s fire in his belly - it was wittily said: “He always played the game, and always lost.” 

Bonar Law was more animated by opposition to Irish Home Rule. His father remarried in Canada and later returned to live in the Co. Down of his ancestors. Law led the Tories to oppose Irish Home Rule by using its built-in majority in the Lords. After the Parliament Act of 1911 limited the Lords’ ability to merely delaying legislation, Law played a dangerous game with Carson and FE Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) in sowing a mutinous spirit within the Army to suppressing opposition from Ulster Unionists. The eventual exclusion of Ulster from the Act creating the Irish Free State was in part a legacy of Law.

After the Liberal landslide of 1906, bringing in the governments of Campbell-Bannerman and then Asquith, the Tories were in opposition and only slowly revived. Their struggle against the Peoples’ Budget and the Parliament Act failed and in 1911 Balfour resigned a Leader. The two leading contenders Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain cancelled one another out and the party rallied round Bonar Law as the compromise candidate. 

Bonar was a very effective debater, concentrating on the narrow issue of the motion and seldom thinking laterally. Perhaps this was a limitation. In any event he placed the highest importance on party unity. He allowed the “big beasts” of the party, Birkenhead, Curzon and the maverick Churchill, to roam unrestrained but Law kept party discipline and had a mastery of the Commons. He supported the Great War loyally and joined in Coalition with Asquith in 1915, accepting the modest cabinet portfolio of Colonial Secretary. Asquith considered Law his social inferior and Law would shrug his shoulders and agree; Asquith went in for high literature and poetry-reading. Bonar enjoyed reading detective and mystery stories. When Asquith finally fell in 1916, Law could in theory claim the top position but he recognised the superior talents of Lloyd George and he worked constructively with him in the Coalition. This time Bonar became Chancellor of the Exchequer with a seat in the war cabinet and was in effect second in command.

Lloyd George, "The Welsh Wizard"

                                                      

Bonar’s alliance with Lloyd George was very productive. Bonar concentrated on domestic matters and in the remarkably successful financing of the War (although borrowings rocketed, Britain financed 26% of its expenditure through taxation, much more than other belligerents). Lloyd George only rarely attended the Commons and Bonar organised the Coalition supporters. After two budgets he relinquished the Exchequer to Sir Robert Horne and became Lord Privy Seal. He still led the Commons and chaired the cabinet when Lloyd George was heavily engaged in the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. In 1921 Bonar had some kind of breakdown and retired from politics – taking a rest cure on the Riviera.

Like most Conservatives, Bonar admired but did not wholly trust Lloyd George. Britain was war-weary and Lloyd George alarmed his allies by taking an aggressive line against resurgent Turkey: the Chanak Incident saw Lloyd George having to back down. The Tory backbenchers wanted to put an end to the Coalition. Bonar caught this mood and returned rejuvenated from his short retirement. At a famous meeting at the Carlton Club in October 1922, the Tories voted 187-87 to abandon Lloyd George and fight an election in their own colours. Bonar’s support was crucial although Baldwin was the ringleader and made the better speech. 

Intriguer Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook

The Tories duly won the subsequent election, Bonar’s government was castigated as the “Second Eleven”. Stanley Baldwin was second in command, Curzon a grandiose Foreign Secretary and surprisingly, given his obscurity, a place was found for Neville Chamberlain (Austen’s half-brother), later to be an effective domestic minister and disastrous Premier. Not much was achieved: the Irish Treaty was ratified but the South slid into vicious civil war. Baldwin came back from Washington with an onerous repayment deal on the American war loans: an angry Bonar remonstrated but eventually swallowed the terms. The French occupied the Ruhr to squeeze out German reparations, to general dismay.

Bonar’s days were numbered: he had to abandon a recuperative cruise; an urgent consultation in Paris diagnosed inoperable throat cancer. Bonar resigned as prime minister in May 1923 and died in October. He was buried at Westminster Abbey.

It is true that Bonar had a rather hang-dog look about him and was inclined to be depressive. His wife died at the early age of 43 in 1909 and he lost two sons killed in action during the War. He was a teetotaller and after too much rural solitude in his boyhood, disliked the beauties of nature. His vice was excessive smoking, always anticipating the next cigar and his clothes smelled of tobacco. He had little small-talk and took politics seriously. In his last eight years he became a close friend of Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook. Aitken was Canadian, indeed a son of the manse and adopted New Brunswicker, but apart from that they had little in common. Aitken was a very rich newspaper mogul, given to intrigue and mischief-making among his political friends and held office under Lloyd George. He was a ribald high-liver: it is said Bonar listened to but seldom took Max’s advice, but his friendship must have been warming.

Roy Jenkins thought Bonar was the “Sad Prime Minister” while Alan Clark dismissed him as “a nonentity”. This was unfair and I prefer his successor Stanley Baldwin’s publically expressed verdict: “a most lovable, elusive and wistful personality” and his private admission “I loved the man”. I reckon Bonar did pretty well and brought honour to his Scots ancestry and to British public life.

SMD

23.06.13

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

  

GREEK BROADCASTING WOES

On 12 June 2013, the conservative New Democracy government of Antonis Samaras suddenly decided to close the state public service broadcaster ERT (Greek Radio and Television) with a view to reopening quite soon in a drastically slimmed-down form. New Democracy had not consulted its coalition partners, centre-Left PASOK and smaller Democratic Left, and sent in riot police to ensure the terrestrial channels were pulled. The government spokesman described ERT as “A haven of waste”.

Samaras acted under pressure from a “Troika” committee which was delaying an urgently needed €3.3bn tranche of bail-out money: the Troika wanted to hold the government to its promise to cut 4,000 people from the public payroll by 30 June. The closure of ERT, with 2,656 employees losing their jobs met their requirements nicely and the bail-out tranche will soon be disbursed.

Closing ERT has sparked off the mother and father of all rows, and at first blush, has handed the Left a propaganda windfall. ERT’s studios were not cleared and it is still transmitting to those who have the kit to pick up the signal, as it still had a satellite “wild feed” enabling it to connect with the European Broadcasting Union in Switzerland who beam it back to Greece for viewing via mobiles and IPads. I have been watching ERT non-stop for the last 6 days, full of indignant commentators and panellists telling us how marvellous ERT has been. The front of the huge ERT building in suburban Athens teems with demonstrators protesting against the closure, banners galore, trade unionists with their flags, hairy artistes, strident ladies, much slogan chanting, occasional speechifying, the inevitable folk-singers of revolutionary songs and impromptu musical concerts. It has been a, so far peaceful, Leftie Fest.

                         

Crowds of Protestors at ERT

                                         

ERT has some similarities with the BBC in that it once had a monopoly of terrestrial TV (after absorbing the Army’s YENED channel) and runs a network of radio stations serving remote rural areas and the many islands. With the advent of private TV channels, ERT has lost market share with now a shaky 15% audience. ERT’s news coverage is reasonably balanced, it produces decent documentaries, carries key sporting events, manages various orchestras and sometimes screens concerts. It is financed by a licence fee levied through electricity bills of €4.60 per month. Its finances are opaque (an operating surplus is somehow creamed off) and very high salaries are paid to the higher echelons. There is an arrogant institutional culture with executives believing they have a divine right to feather-bedded luxury at the expense of the licence-payer. (Yes, the parallels with the BBC are rather striking!). Over the last 20 years, ERT has been plagued by a proliferation of political appointments from both main parties, failed management, expensive rebranding exercises and is riven by nepotism, graft and corruption. In other words, it is a typical Greek public institution.

          

                            

Weeping ERT Chorister

   

ERT needs to be re-organised and at least Samaras had the cojones to tackle it head-on. Sadly he has been heavy-handed. The general public does not much admire the ERT workforce but the closure has triggered an emotional reaction; shame at the nation’s subservience to the Troika, anger at government by decree and a nostalgia for better past times. The TV images of a tearful ERT violinist playing Elgar’s Nimrod and weeping choristers singing the stirring Greek National Anthem have been quite affecting.

A tearful ERT Orchestra violinist

            Samaras seems to want to patch up a temporary compromise but I doubt if he will retreat from the eventual closure of ERT; new elections now would be suicidal for all three coalition partners. Tonight the coalition partners are wrangling and early reports are that ERT will reopen soon on a much reduced basis.

 

The larger question remains unresolved. Why is Greece having to suffer for a sixth year? The dysfunctional Troika’s austerity medicine plainly has not worked. Greece cannot repay its debts in anything like their present form. A total restructuring is required and other Eurozone countries, the IMF and banks throughout the world will have to recognise substantial losses as Greek debts are written down. The EU could help if a blanket default is to be avoided, but maybe the Northern European taxpayers will not care about this. It is however placing the Greek people in a quite false position to ask them to make no move until after the German elections in September. German elections are entirely Germany’s own business. Meanwhile Greek politicians have an urgent duty to salvage now what they can from her ruined economy and the blighted hopes of her people.

SMD

17.06.13

Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

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THE HEIGHTS OF POETRY

I think it is striking that that some of the greatest poetry in the English language was written in two quite short periods by five poetic giants. 1797-1805 saw the fruitful close cooperation of Wordsworth and Coleridge and 1816-1824 witnessed the finest flowering of the genius of Byron, Keats and Shelley.

I am a mere amateur of poetry and much better-informed students and more deeply-read scholars will contest my assertions. Of my chosen five, much was written outside these dates – but not their best and I want to celebrate their heights of achievement. I learnt many of these pieces at school and I earnestly hope today’s teachers, spurred on by vigorous Michael Gove, continue to inculcate Beauty and Truth into the minds of their precious pupils.

I open with Coleridge at his most Gothic and mysterious:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover! 

To be followed by a transcendent vision:

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 (from Kubla Khan)

Poetic visions indeed, even if Coleridge sometimes needed opium to give him a helping hand.

Wordsworth wrote his incomparable Prelude with Coleridge’s advice and who could fail to be moved by his opening lines:

    Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
    Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:

Or by his evocation of the voice of Nature:

I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motions, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

(from The Prelude)

Wordsworth’s mastery of high poetic diction is surely his greatest strength:

                                             And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

(from Tintern Abbey)

Wordsworth of course belonged to a group both lyrical and romantic:

The rainbow comes and goes,
        And lovely is the rose;
        The moon doth with delight
    Look round her when the heavens are bare;
        Waters on a starry night
        Are beautiful and fair;
    The sunshine is a glorious birth;
    But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

Later, a paean to Youth and Love:

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!   
        And let the young lambs bound   
        As to the tabor's sound!     
We in thought will join your throng,   
      Ye that pipe and ye that play,   
      Ye that through your hearts to-day   
      Feel the gladness of the May!   
What though the radiance which was once so bright    
Be now for ever taken from my sight,   
    Though nothing can bring back the hour   
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;   
      We will grieve not, rather find   
      Strength in what remains behind;

(from Intimations of Immortality)
   
Both Coleridge and Wordsworth were sons of the Enlightenment and were liberated and inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution.

Their successors Byron, Keats and Shelley rebelled against the conformity of England after the Napoleonic Wars and her reactionary attitudes.

Byron’s was the most confident voice, often satirical and cynical, but classic as he describes a dramatic shipwreck:

Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell—
     Then shriek'd the timid, and stood still the brave,
Then some leap'd overboard with dreadful yell,
     As eager to anticipate their grave;
And the sea yawn'd around her like a hell,
     And down she suck'd with her the whirling wave,
Like one who grapples with his enemy,
And strives to strangle him before he die.

    And first one universal shriek there rush'd,
     Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder; and then all was hush'd,
     Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash
Of billows; but at intervals there gush'd,
     Accompanied with a convulsive splash,
A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony.

(from Don Juan)

Quite different was Keats, who in his Odes reached heights unscaled by any others.

Thou was’t not born for death, immortal Bird!   
  No hungry generations tread thee down;   
The voice I hear this passing night was heard   
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:   
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path            
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,   
    She stood in tears amid the alien corn;   
          The same that oft-times hath   
  Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam   
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.   

(from Ode to a Nightingale)        

His final flourish was his rich Ode to Autumn   
    
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
            To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
        Until they think warm days will never cease,
            For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cell.

Shelley was an admirer of Keats and his enormous talent was inspired to eulogise Keats when he died prematurely. The elegy Adonais is the magnificent result.

He begins with the greatest eloquence:

I weep for Adonais-he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

Shelley concludes on a hopeful note

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe
     That Beauty in which all things work and move
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
     Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
     Which through the web of being blindly wove
     By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
     Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
     The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

(from Adonais)

 All five poetic giants suffered in life broken relationships, financial worry and, in the cases of the younger three, early death. Yet all five produce rhythms to excite us, use diction to enchant us and express ideas that reach and stir our deepest beings. How lucky we are to have a Literature which embraces such masters and we can rejoice in their poetic immortality.

SMD
14.06.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

RIB-TICKLERS

Comedy is a notoriously personal taste and I do not want to write a general survey but rather to describe those artistes whose performances made me personally laugh. Some may find my enthusiasms peculiar and I have to confess my tastes are “broad”. Those of a delicate or genteel disposition may be advised to avert your eyes now.

Hailing as I do from Scotland, and as the family biz ran His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen and other summer show venues there, I was reared on a rich diet of Variety performers. In the 1960s the undoubted star in Scotland was exuberant Andy Stewart. Andy sang maybe too much, but to see him imitate a Doric-speaking, pawky Buchan “farm loon” was a memorable theatrical experience. Andy himself was brought up in nearby Arbroath and captured the essence of the character in a masterly fashion with his nicky-tams (trouser strings) and tackety boots (hob-nailed boots). He would end his turn with a comic ditty and always brought the house down.

Andy Stewart

Crossing the border into England, I became very fond of Northern comedians with their rich accents and idiosyncratic delivery. An early favourite was gormless and toothy George Formby with his ukulele, often twanging his great hit “I’m leaning on a Lamp Post”. While his heyday was the 1930s and the wartime years, George was still treading the boards in the 1950s. His jokes, related in his giggly Lancastrian accent, were of the lengthy “shaggy dog” variety and often featured a parrot. I recall one concerning a commercial traveller, who found that his usual bedroom, in his usual hotel had been let to a honeymoon couple. He had left some of his necessities in the room and about to enter, he heard voices from within;

Husband: And whose little neck is this?
Bride: It’s mine, Darling
Husband: And whose little shoulders are these?
Bride: They’re mine, Darling
(Inexorably, the Husband was heading South)
Husband: And whose little belly-button is this?
Traveller (to break the tension) shouts out: When you come to the hot-water bottle. It’s mine!

Yes, well, at least I laughed.

I also admired a rare lady comedienne Hylda Baker, barrel-shaped and vociferously Northern. She was a cherished old trouper with her catchphrase “She knows, you know” addressed to her silent stooge. Her finest role was as Nellie Pledge, co-proprietor with her brother Jimmy Jewel, of Pledge’s Pickle Factory and dropping malapropisms everywhere in the hilarious TV sit-com Nearest and Dearest.

George Formby warbles

Hylda Baker as Nellie Pledge

Everyone’s favourite Northern comedian was lugubrious Les Dawson with his amazing face-pulling, his rasping Mancunian tones and his cod piano-playing. His love of words made him wax poetic:  The other day I was gazing up at the night sky, a purple vault fretted with a myriad points of light twinkling in wondrous formation, while shooting stars streaked across the heavens, and I thought: I really must repair the roof on this toilet! To my mind his funniest character was Ada Shufflebotham, for ever gossiping in curlers with her friend Cissie, nudging her ample falling bosoms back into place and easily confusing hysterectomy as “hysterical rectumy”.

Les Dawson as Ada

   

Ken Dodd

 Ken Dodd, born in Knotty Ash, Liverpool is happily, at 86, still with us. Manic and anarchic, Dodd makes me laugh despite myself, overwhelmed by the quick-fire torrent of fun, clocked at 7 jokes a minute. He is a Liverpudlian National Treasure.

My other English clown is cherubic Benny Hill, whom I first saw in the 1950s, modestly placed towards the bottom of a variety bill. He played both parts in a comic Romeo and Juliet, had many changes of clothing, and had constantly to go up and down a ladder. His audience was in stitches and he still had the energy to sing to the contemporary tune “Remember me, remember for the rest of your life”:

Her teeth were green and yellow, and some were black as jet
And if she had a blue one, she’d have a snooker set!

Benny went on to international stardom, unrivalled master of the visual gag.

Another favourite, coming to me through the late 1940s radio, was Vic Oliver, whose Hi, Gang! show had been very popular. Oliver came to live in Britain but was a Jewish Austro-American. A gifted musician, he made fun of playing the violin badly and told his jokes in a heavily accented gravelly voice (am I right in thinking he disconcertingly clicked his teeth?). Vic Oliver married Winston Churchill’s wayward daughter Sarah in 1935 (divorced in 1946) but he was not a favourite with the great man, who humorously stated that Mussolini’s sole merit was that he had his son-in-law (Ciano) shot! Oliver also has the distinction of being the first ever castaway guest on the BBC’s iconic Desert Island Discs in January 1942.

Benny Hill

Vic Oliver

 

Perhaps under the influence of Vic Oliver, I came to like many mainly Jewish American comedians. I enjoyed laid-back and genial George Burns, dropping wisecracks between puffs from a large cigar. He lived to 100 and starred with Walter Matthau in the movie The Sunshine Boys in 1975 aged 80. A more recent pleasure has been Jackie Mason another lugubrious figure, this time from the upstate New York Borscht Belt, whose often politically incorrect monologues, delivered at high speed, amuse me greatly.
   

George Burns and cigar

Jackie Mason explains

My final comedian is Bob Hope, whose string of one-liners is legendary; his movies made me laugh from the 1940s onwards. Bob Hope’s other distinction is that he is a dead ringer for my esteemed eldest brother, Herbie. Hope died aged 100 and Herbie is a sprightly 76 but otherwise the resemblance is uncanny: I fully expect Crosby and Lamour to materialise too every time I see him.

Bob Hope (or is it my brother Herbie?)

Herbie had a career front-of-house in the theatre business. In about 1965 he kindly invited me to the first night of a new review his company were mounting at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow. The show was pretty dire but redeemed by the performance of one of the two comics and, as is the custom, we “went round” after the show to the dressing room of this talented comic. Herbie, who knew the ropes, constantly muttered “Great show, Great show”. Fool that I was, I felt a more judicious opinion should be expressed and opined “You were great – it was a personal triumph”. I hit the mark for about 10 seconds as the comic preened and swelled; then suddenly he shot back “So you did not like the show?” reducing me to stuttering confusion. I wish I had read Alan Bennett’s hilarious essay Going Round (in Writing Home, 1994) which sets the rules for such visits amid the manifold insecurities of the acting profession. Express no opinions, but use one word and repeat one word only – “Wonderful! Wonderful!”




SMD
12.06.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013

                                        

H L MENCKEN: COMMENTATOR SUPREME

More than 50 years ago, I purchased a modest paperback in an Oxford bookshop called The Vintage Mencken, with an introduction by Alistair Cooke, then is his heyday as a journalist for The Guardian and unmissable radio broadcaster of Letter from America. The book is an anthology of writings by Mencken and it has been my inseparable bedside companion ever since. Mencken was essentially American yet the sheer vivacity of his writing, his humour, his rhythms, his use of remarkable new words, all influenced me deeply and can teach valuable lessons to any user of the English language. I pay this grateful tribute to him.

HLM with his characteristic centre parting and cigar

Henry Louis Mencken later always known as “HLM” (1880-1956) was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Apart from 5 years of marriage, he lived in the same house at 1524 Hollins Street all his life. His father August Mencken was of proud German extraction and owned a cigar factory. Henry loved Baltimore, its blowsy docks, the seafood bounty from Chesapeake Bay, its gentle civilisation and, as a newspaperman, its bibulous reporters, cops and judges. He discovered Twain’s Huckleberry Finn at the age of 9 and always described it as the best in American literature. Fearing his son would become a bookworm, his father sent Henry to the local YMCA which had a gym, but Henry came away with a hatred of sport and exercise. What finally drove him away were the activities of a pest in the Reading Room:

I became aware of the pimply one and presently saw him go to a bookcase and select a book [by a Methodist bishop]. “See here, fellows, let me have your ears for just a moment. ….” What it was he read I don’t recall precisely, but I remember some thumping and appalling platitude or other – something of the order of “Honesty is the best policy” or “It is never too late to mend”….The poor ass, it appeared, was actually enchanted and wanted to spread his joy. It was easy to recognise in him the anti-social animus of a born evangelist, but there was also something else - a kind of voluptuous delight  in the shabby and preposterous, a perverted aestheticism like that of a latter-day movie or radio fan, a wild will to roll in and snuffle balderdash as a cat rolls in and snuffles catnip….. My father was immediately sympathetic when I told him about the bishop’s book, and the papuliferous exegete’s labouring of it. “You had better quit” he said, “before you hit him with a spittoon, or go crazy. There ought to be a law against such roosters.”

On leaving school, Henry was obliged to join the family cigar business where he did not shine.  His father’s death in 1899 released him and he immediately joined The Baltimore Herald to learn the newspaperman’s trade; he worked and wrote hard, soon becoming the highest paid reporter. He also wrote short stories for other publications and in 1908 became a contributor to the monthly The Smart Set. Many of his best known pieces were published there and in its successor The American Mercury. HLM was the joint editor of The Smart Set from 1914 with his friend George Jean Nathan. He also moved to The Baltimore Sun, writing for it until 1941. He edited the Sunday then the Evening Sun and his various controversial columns, book reviews and drama criticisms, under the “HLM” bye-line, became widely read.

Mencken’s original literary heroes were Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, but he fought against cultural colonialism, whereby London opinions were given undue weight in America. He championed American writers, notably uneven Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie), later F Scott Fitzgerald and many others. He admired and wrote a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, promoting the notion of the Superman.

Some of this was his pride on his German roots and ancestry. He hosted a music society in Baltimore comprising many German-American musicians, convivially refreshing themselves with Sauerkraut and seidels of Lowenbrau: he played the piano well and all his life he revelled in Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. He was particularly proud of his ancestor Johann Burkhard Menken from the University of Leipzig, who had employed Bach as a choirmaster. In the run-up to US entry to the Great War, Mencken was strongly pro-German, visiting Germany with a group of neutral US correspondents in 1917, deploring British propaganda and criticising Woodrow Wilson. His was a minority opinion before US entry and it became an unpopular and untenable one after entry.

A flavour of Mencken’s views can be garnered from his 1920 piece Star-Spangled Men, mocking the gaudy medals distributed to those serving the patriotic cause.

Imagine what (Sir) John Pershing would look like at a state banquet of his favourite American order, the Benevolent and Protective one of Elks, in all the Byzantine splendour of his casket of ribbons, badges, stars, garters, sunbursts and cockades – the lordly Bath of the grateful motherland, with its somewhat disconcerting “Ich Dien”; the gorgeous tricolor baldrics, sashes and festoons of the Legion d’Honneur………… Alas, Pershing was on the wrong side – that is, for one with a fancy for gauds of that sort. The most blinding of all known orders is the Medijie of Turkey, which not only entitles the holder to four wives, but also requires him to wear a red fez and a frozen star covering his whole façade. I was offered this order by Turkish spies during the war, and it wobbled me a good deal.
 ……………..If the nickel-plated eagle of the third class were given to every patriot who bored a hole through the floor of his flat to get evidence against his neighbours, the Krausmeyers, and to everyone who visited the Hofbrauhaus nightly, denounced the Kaiser in searing terms and demanded assent from Emil and Otto, the waiters,………..there would be no nickel left for our bathrooms…..Palmer [the oppressive Attorney-General] deserves to be rolled in malleable gold from head to foot and polished until he blinds the cosmos.

Mencken confidently entered the 1920s, doing battle with Puritanism, injustice and Prohibition which he defied and decried. He was interested in medical matters and railed sardonically against the “preposterous quackery” of Chiropractic:

Its pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord – in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummelling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.

He muses that the popularity of Chiropractic is some kind of natural selection reducing the population of the botched and the moronic:

If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s Spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe he is badly wanted in Heaven.

Mencken loved to clown but there was a serious issue to fight at Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 with a test case on the teaching, banned in that state, of Evolution. A schoolteacher Scopes was in the dock, defended by the famous civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, volubly supported by Mencken. The prosecution was led by three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a leading Fundamentalist. HLM’s despatches describing the trial and a Holy Roller outdoor service, The Hills of Zion, became classics. The court decided in favour of the state, but the $100 fine was derisory and Bryan had been badly mauled by Darrow. A fictionalised 1960 movie of the play Inherit the Wind tells the story with Fredric March, superb as Bryan, Spencer Tracy a fine Darrow and Gene Kelly a rather lightweight Mencken

Gene Kelly as Mencken

Spencer Tracy (Darrow) and Fredric March (WJB) clash

Bryan died 5 days after the trial and Mencken’s obituary pulled no punches:

One day he (Darrow) lured poor Bryan into….his astounding argument against the notion that man is a mammal. I am glad I heard it, for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic – there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering  stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at. The artful Darrow led him on; he repeated it, ranted for it, bellowed it in his cracked voice. So he was prepared for the final slaughter. He came into life a hero, a Galahad, in bright and shining armour. He was passing out a poor mountebank.

Mencken was an avid reporter of US politics (he loved a free show) and attended every 4-yearly Democratic and Republican presidential nomination convention from 1904 to 1948. He admired Cleveland, was doubtful about Theodore Roosevelt and debunked Woodrow Wilson, in particular for his speeches:

He accomplished [better than editorial writers] the great task of reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones – that he knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else. The vulgar like and respect that sort of balderdash…..He knew how to make them glow, and weep. He wasted no time upon the heads of his dupes, but aimed directly at their ears, diaphragms and hearts.

He remarked upon the good luck of Calvin Coolidge:

No other President ever slipped into the White House so easily, and none had a softer time while there. When in Rapid City SD on August 2 1927, he loosed the occult words, “I do not choose to run in 1928”, was it prescience or only luck? For one, I am inclined to put it down to luck. Surely there was no prescience in his utterances and manoeuvres otherwise. He showed not the slightest sign that he smelt black clouds ahead; on the contrary, he talked and lived only sunshine. There was a volcano boiling under him, but he did not know it, and was not singed. When it burst forth at last, it was Hoover who got the blast, and was fried, boiled, roasted and fricasseed.

 Although Mencken wrote a classic account of the nomination of Franklin Roosevelt, from 1933 onwards, HLM lost his influence. His mocking of the New Deal played badly with 10m Americans unemployed. Mencken gave FDR credit for finally ending Prohibition but castigated him as craven for declining to make the “hallowed Southern tradition” of lynching blacks a Federal crime, so as not to offend his Southern Democrat supporters. Worse, Mencken’s love of Germany, made him blind to the institutionalised outrages against the Jews. He visited Berlin and toured Germany in 1938. He was silent, no doubt like many Americans, but much more was expected of Mencken.

Mencken celebrates the 1933 end of Prohibition

Mencken ended his column in The Baltimore Sun in 1941 and devoted great labour to the revision of his remarkable tome The American Language recording with pride its distinctive words and idioms. First published in 1919 with major supplements in 1945 and 1948, this was a considerable achievement, as Mencken was a lover of words but not a trained philologist. Struck down by strokes in 1949, Mencken lingered on, sadly unable to read, write or properly communicate, with only his music and his garden at his beloved Hollins Street to console him, finally dying in 1956.

In this piece I have left Mencken to speak with his own voice. A man of many talents and many contradictions, he was always arresting; at his best Mencken was incomparable. He is my journalistic lodestone and I am immensely thankful for his influence.

SMD
10.06.13
Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2013