Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Volume 159 July 21 1920 by Various Seaman Owen Editor

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After our half-baked victory over the Hun the popular watchword was "Reconstruction." We have now enjoyed a year and more of this "building-up" process, and the net result is that houses for those that lack them are as scarce as iced soda-fountains in the Sahara.

In this work of restoration, we were told, our women voters and legislators would play a leading part. What part are they in truth playing? Their main object apparently is still further to embitter the Drink question, although if they would only put a little more bitter into our national beverage they might help to lubricate matters. Is it not a significant fact that the slackness evidenced in every phase of industry manifests itself at a time when it becomes more and more difficult to get a decent drink? In this respect our progress is not so much to the dogs as to the cats, who sneak along on the padded paws of Prohibition.

The crazy conditions to be observed in the industrial world are well matched by the state of anarchy that prevails in the sphere of the arts. Take music, for example. I do not lay claim to more than a nodding acquaintance with Euterpe, and at a classical concert, I am afraid, the nodding character of the relation becomes especially marked. To me the sweetest music in the world is the roar of a fifteen-inch gun on a day when the visibility is good and plentiful. But I do know enough to be able to say that the wild asses who with their jazz-bands "stamp o'er our heads and will not let us sleep" are nothing less than musical Trotskys.

Music was once regarded as the staple nourishment of the tender passion, and in my younger days the haunting strains of "The Blue Danube" assisted many a budding love-affair to blossom. But these non-stop stridencies of the modern ballroom, even if they left a man with breath enough to propose, would effectually prevent the girl from catching the drift of the avowal. You can't roar, "Will you be mine?" into a maiden's ear as if you were conversing from the quarterdeck, and if you did she'd only think you were ecstatically emulating the coloured gentleman in the orchestra with the implements of torture and the misguided voice.

I will pass over in the silence of despair such other symptoms of national decadence as zigzag painting, whirlpool poetry, cinema star-gazing and the impossibility of procuring a self-respecting Stilton . Nor can I trust myself to speak of the spirit of Bolshevism that seems to animate our so-called Labour Party, though I comfort myself with the conviction that this doctrine will not wash, any more than will its authors.

Oh for a prophet's tongue to lash our visionless leaders into a realisation of the rocks on to which we are drifting! We need the scourge of a Savonarola, but all we get is the boom of a Bottomley.

ALL SORTS.

It takes all sorts to make the world, an' the same to make a crew; It takes the good an' middlin' an' the rotten bad uns too; The same's there are on land you'll find 'em all at sea-- The freaks an' fads an' crooks an' cads an' ornery chaps like me.

It takes a man for all the jobs--the skippers and the mates, A chap to give the orders an' a chap to chip the plates; It takes the brass-bound 'prentices--an' ruddy plagues they be-- An' chaps as shirk an' chaps as work--just ornery chaps like me.

It takes the stiffs an' deadbeats an' the decent shell-backs too, The chaps as always pull their weight an' them as never do; The sort the Lord 'as made 'em knows what bloomin' use they be, An' crazy folks an' musical blokes an' ornery chaps like me.

It takes a deal o' fancy breeds--the Dagoes an' the Dutch, The Lascars an' calashees an' the seedy boys an' such; It takes the greasers an' the Chinks, the Jap and Portugee, The blacks an' yellers an' half-bred fellers and ornery folk like me.

It takes all sorts to make the world an' the same to make a crew, It takes more kinds o' people than there's creeters in the Zoo; You meet 'em all ashore an' you find 'em all at sea-- But do me proud if most o' the crowd ain't ornery chaps like me! C.F.S.

Evening--Monthly Sermon for Young Men and Women.

'Love, Courtship, and Marriage.'

Anthem--'And it shall come to pass.'"

The organist seems to be a sympathetic soul.

At this rate we shall soon be unable to afford either to live or to die, and must try a state of suspended animation.

The handy-man! Prepared for all eventualities.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK WANTS BUILT.

CONVERTED CASTLES.

Rural England, I learn, is rapidly changing hands--not for the first time, by the way, but we cannot go into that just now. Excellent treatises on feudal tenure, wapentake, the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosure of common lands may be picked up dirt cheap at any second-hand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road with the words "Presentation Copy" erased from the flyleaf by a special and ingenious process. What is happening now is that farmers are buying up the big estates in pieces, and Norman piles or Elizabethan manors are beginning to be too expensive to maintain, what with coal and the rise in the minimum wage of vassals and one thing and another.

"The stately homes of England How beautiful they stood Before their recent owners Relinquished them for good,"

as the poet justly observes. And even if there is enough money to keep up the castle without the broad acres there is no fun in having a castle at all when the deer park has been divided into allotments and the Dutch garden is under swedes.

The question is then what is going to happen to Montmorency Castle, and The Towers at Barley Melling?

This brings me back to the country again.

There will not be enough of the new rich to purchase a castellated mansion apiece, partly because of the Excess Profits Duty, which is crippling this kind of enterprise, and partly because so many baronial seats, romantic and picturesque in their way, are terribly under-garaged. On the other hand you cannot expect a farmer who happens to be buying the fields round Badgery Mortimer to have any use for a dungeon keep or the haunted picture-gallery in the west wing. No, there is only one thing to do and that is to break these places up into a number of self-contained homes.

HISTORIC FLATS TO LET

is the house-agents' advertisement which I seem to see, and what you will actually find will be a sort of concentrated hamlet where modern improvements are mixed with ancient grandeur and the white-haired seneschal is kept on to operate the electric lift.

Let us take, for instance, the case of Soping Hall. There will be none of that untidy straggling arrangement about it which detracts so largely from the beauty of Soping Barnet, Little Soping and Soping Monachorum. In Soping Hall the billiard-room will be the village club, the armoury the blacksmith's shop, the housekeeper's room the place where you buy buttons and balls of string and barley-sugar, the cellars the village tavern, and very nice too. In the state-saloon, with a few trifling alterations, such as the introduction of a geyser and a sink, will live Mrs. Ponsonby-Smith, who will sniff a little at the Jeffries in their attic suite and the Mutts who live in the moat. But Mrs. Jeffries will have compensations, because the air is really so much more bracing, my dear, on the higher ground, and on fine days one can walk about the roof and peep through the boiling-oil holes, while as for the Mutts they are protected, at any rate, from those bitterly piercing east winds and have an excellent view of the draw-bridge.

A further advantage of residing at Soping Hall will be that you can do all your shopping and pay your calls without going out-of-doors on a wet day, and, if you like, have a communal dining-room or restaurant, where only those who have been recognised by the county should sit above the salt. And if your friends come to visit you in expensive motor-cars they will have the privilege of passing through the great iron gates on the main road and up the large gravel drive planted on each side with the cedars of Lebanon which Roger de Soping brought back in his haversack from the Second Crusade.

I am quite aware that when federal devolution becomes really infectious and every county insists on a legislative assembly of its own it may be necessary to turn some of these great houses into Parliament chambers, and the rural civil service will also no doubt insist on having offices comparable with the vast hotels which their parent bodies occupy in London. But this will not account for nearly all the ancestral seats, and, in calling the attention of the Minister of Health and Housing to this little memorandum of mine, I would specially urge him to note how it will solve some of the most difficult problems which confront him to-day.

Three acres and a cow was all very well in its way, but what about two wyverns and a flat? Evoe.

TIPS FOR UNCLES.

Dear Mr. Punch,--I am writing to you about uncles because you are in a way a kind of general uncle. Uncles are much more useful than aunts, because uncles always give money and aunts mostly give advice. Only, as the Head always says when he jaws our form, "I regret to see in this form a serious deterioration"--I mean in uncles. They come down here and trot us round and say what a luxurious place it is compared with the stern old Spartan days. They know something, though. They ask us to have meals with them at an hotel. They take care not to face a luxurious house-dinner. And while we dine they tell yarns about the hardness of the old days and how it toughened a fellow. And then, because about 1870 it was the custom to tip a boy five bob, they fork out five bob and tell you not to waste it.

If the Head had any sense--only you can't expect sense from Heads--he'd put up a notice at the school gates: "Parents, Uncles and Friends are respectfully reminded that the cost of tuck has increased three hundred per cent. since 1914." Why, old Badham, my bedroom prefect, who was a fag in 1914, turned up the other day and declared that then he could buy four pounds of strawberries for a bob, and that a fag could get enough chocolate for two bob to give him a week in the sick-room.

Yet we have uncles coming down in trains , smoking cigars , cabbing it up to school and then tipping as if the old Kaiser was still swanking in Potsdam.

Now Sutton minor, who has a positive beast of a house-master and is practically a Bolshevist, says that we ought to go on strike against the tipping system and demand a regular living wage from relations. He says that if a scavenger gets four quid a week a fellow who has to tackle Greek aorists ought to get eight quid a week.

But I'm afraid a strike might aggravate uncles. It's no use upsetting the goose that lays the silver eggs, so I thought it better to write to you, pointing out that there was one luxury still at pre-war prices and that uncles should never miss a chance of indulging in it, and whenever high prices bothered them they should write us a bright cheerful letter enclosing a postal order--they're still quite cheap.

So hoping that all uncles will put their hands to the plough--I mean in their pockets--and then the bitter cry of the New Poor will cease in our public schools,

Yours respectfully, Bruce Tertius.

"Notice.

"Notice.

Where was the Censor?

THE STATE AND THE SCREEN.

Great satisfaction has been evinced in film circles over the conferment of a signal honour on Signor Pavanelli, the outstanding Italian screen luminary. The rank of Chevalier of the Crown of Italy is equivalent to a knighthood in this country, and Pavanelli's elevation is a gratifying proof of the paramount position which the cinema is assuming in Italian national affairs. But gratification is sadly tempered by the deplorable lack of State recognition from which film-artists suffer in this country. The joint co-starring Sovereigns of the Screen, though acclaimed by the populace with an enthusiasm unparalleled in the annals of adoration, were allowed to depart from our shores without a single official acknowledgment of their services to humanity. No vote of congratulation was passed by the Houses of Parliament; no honorary degree was conferred on them by any University; no ode of welcome was forthcoming from the pen of the Poet Laureate.

The discontent caused by the indifference of the Government to the wishes of the people is fraught with formidable possibilities. Already there are serious rumours of the summoning of a Special Trade Union Congress to discuss the desirability of direct action as a means of compelling the Government to abandon their attitude of hostility to the only form of monarchy which the working-classes can conscientiously support. It is further reported that Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy, M.P., will seize the first opportunity to move the impeachment of Dr. Bridges. The indignation in Printing House Square has reached boiling-point, and it is reported that the authorities are only awaiting the delivery of a huge consignment of small pica type to launch a fresh and final onslaught on the Coalition.

The provocation has undoubtedly been intense. It was proved in an article of studied moderation and exquisite taste that the time had come to revise our estimates of bygone grandeur and substitute for the devotion to a Queen of tarnished fame and disastrous tendencies the spontaneous and chivalrous worship of her beneficent and prosperous namesake. Yet in spite of this dignified and convincing appeal no invitation was sent to the one person whose presence at the recent proceedings at Holyrood would have lent them a crowning lustre. The action or inaction of the Lord Chamberlain is inexplicable, except on the assumption that Queen Pickford's engagement to attend the Spa Conference would have rendered it impossible for her to accept the invitation to Edinburgh. None the less the invitation should have been sent. Besides, the resources of aviation might have surmounted the difficulty. In any case this deplorable oversight has knocked one more nail in the coffin of the Prime Minister.

Obviously the right club for the purpose.

A clear case of robbing James to pay Peter.

ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.

As usual much of Question-time was devoted to Russian affairs. Colonel Wedgwood wanted to know whether the Cabinet had approved a message from Mr. Churchill to the late Admiral Kolchak, advising him how to commend his Administration to the Prime Minister, who was described in the telegram as "all-powerful, a convinced democrat and particularly devoted to advanced views on the land question." Mr. Law, while provisionally promising a Blue-book on Siberia, declined to pick out a single message from a whole bunch.

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