I once received a double round of applause. It had been at my
school's Speech Day and Lord Butler was giving out the prizes that
year. I received my book for being top of the Upper IVth that year
and the rest of the school and parents below me gave me the
conventional round of clapping. As I started to leave the platform,
Lord Butler called me back and whispered in my ear. He spoke so
quietly that the line of dignitaries close behind him, including the
Headmaster, couldn't hear. I immediately laughed out loud, thus
breaking all the conventions of this otherwise serious, not to say
solemn, occasion.
And then the audience -- somewhat approaching two thousand people
altogether, I suppose -- laughed and started applauded again. Loudly,
too. This had never happened before, certainly not in the previous
years I'd been attending Speech Days in a humbler role. As the
clapping was going on and I was descending the steps, I glanced to
the platform. Lord Butler was beaming at me and gave me the smallest
hand gesture, the dignatories on the platform were variously smiling
or were looking non-plussed at all this levity, and the Head Master
was glowering.
So what was all this about? I must go back a couple of months when
the class marks had been totted up. I was called to the prize room by
the deputy Head Master and told to choose a suitable book for the
Speech Day. There was, I suppose, a couple of hundred books to
choose from, all brand new and some with quite elegant gold leaf
bindings. History books, poetry anthologies, books of essays and so
on. All earnest stuff. I remember that there was a thick War and
Peace by Tolstoy which was even more inhibiting than the rest (though
I've read it three times since then, once in French, with great
appreciation). I stammered to the deputy: "But . . . there is nothing
here that I'd like". He paused, then snapped: "Go to a bookshop in
town then. Choose a book there and then let me know." He pushed me
from the room.
I duly went to a bookshop and chose a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Conan
Doyle's Valley of Fear. It also had a particularly lurid cover -- a
masked man holding a dagger. But before I reveal what Lord Butler had
whispered to me, let me also reveal that this eminent prize-giver had
not inherited a peerage but had earned it after a lifetime in
politics. He came close to becoming Prime Minister once. A few years
previously as a former Minister of Education he had, in fact,
introduced the most radical Education Act ever. That is, ever since
the government had nationalized all the workers' independent schools
in the industrial cities of England in the 1880s and since then had
inculcated the glories of the British Empire into millions of young
minds -- and, of course, obeying the middle- and upper-classes implicitly.
Back to Speech Day. Lord Butler had whispered to me, but
emphatically: "That's the best book of the lot!". And that's why I
laughed. But why have I remembered this this morning? Because
Sherlock Holmes is in disgrace. In the book, Study in Scarlet, it
seems that author Conan Doyle expresses some distaste for Mormons. In
this age of political correctness, this would never do! In fact, the
Albemarle County School Board in Virginia voted on Thursday to remove
the book from sixth-grade reading lists. Who knows, this might spread
right across America!
Anti-Mormonism will never do these days! Particularly as one of the
contenders for the Republican presidential candidature is Mitt
Romney, a Latter Day Saint and a missionary when he was a young man.
Not only does he believe that an angel directed Joseph Smith in the
1820s to dig up plates of gold -- the Book of Mormon -- but, if he's
a true Mormon, he also believes that he will be a god when he dies
and that many of his electorate will have to serve him in glory when
they die. All this is acceptable to many of our modern relativistic
intellectuals and opinion moulders, but the early Presidents of the
United States must be turning in their graves.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/
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