As I Hear... THE COINS: A WORD MORE

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31001, 5 March 1966, Page 5

As I Hear... THE COINS: A WORD MORE

[By

J.H.E.S.]

TT is late in the day to be saying anything about the designs for those new decimal coins; and I shall not say much. First, just this, that 1 am much tickled by the disclosure that started the argument. I have not yet heard who or what precipitated it. Not that I deprecate the disclosure; and much less that I deprecate the argument. But it is an interesting question, isn’t it, how the lid was taken off?

Second, I am tickled by the fact that the diclosures stirred so general and fierce a reaction. I am not merely tickled; I am thrilled. To find this country shaken into outcry upon an aesthetic question, which it is, amazes me and exhilarates me. And third, against so much, there is the countervailing little. Why, when thrown on the defensive, do politicians so often defend themselves without considering what really they have to answer and to maintain? I am thinking of Mr Muldoon’s early response to criticisms of the coin designs so startingly made public. Mr Muldoon said he “liked the concept” of the coins. Mr Muldoon said the committee responsible for the designs “could have produced non-controversial,” designs—as, for example?—at the risk of “laying itself open to the charge that they were unimaginative.” What vexes me in that is the suggestion that the designs put forward were imaginative, and for that reason controversial, whereas unimaginative designs might have been put forward and objected to as such. Mr Muldoon seems to have .missed entirely the objection against the designs put forward; that they were unimaginative. That is the central fact. How odd that the first defender of them should miss it. I thought the design of the flax bush charming, aS such. But is a flax bush, now, very significant of life and industry in this country? I thought the mountains and the sea such as might be used by many another country. I was shocked by the totem pole Rugby footballer. Where, in these designs, was life, was movement? That sort of significance was missing. But I am too late, and too incompetent, to criticise the first set of designs. It is enough to say that public reaction has been strong enough to reduce Mr Muldoon to silence and to induce second thoughts on the Hill. What cheers me

is that the public have been stirred upon an issue far removed from the price of butter or the level of taxation. sfr sfc

I have attended three of the five promenade concerts of the N.Z.B.C. Symphony Orchestra in Wellington this week, and have been thrilled by the sight and the sound and the response of three packed halls. I have seen them before, truly, but I think not such a sequence of packed halls since James Robertson took over from Michael Bowles the plan of the Proms and gave it the impetus of his wonderful gift of . . . what? Establishing a personal intimacy with his audiences? Something like that. I suppose it is not generally known; but James Robertson arrived in Wellington in time to read in the

morning paper the report of what was, in fact, the last of the attacks in Parliament, in the Estimates debate, on the waste of public money on the National Orchestra. He shivered, and wondered if he had not better begin by looking for a return passage. So he told me, more than once. But he found that, if the National Orchestra had hostile critics—a few—in Parliament, it also had sturdy friends, among whom it is pleasant to recall Dame Hilda Ross; and the hostile criticism he read on his first morning in New Zealand was the last he ever had to hear or read, and it was James Robertson who did most to silence it. What he did was confirmed by John Hopkins. But as for this present Proms series, conducted by Arthur Fiedler, there could hardly be a better example of the attraction of a name long established by recording and broadcasting. The remarkable thing is that Fiedler shows none of the tricks of display and showmanship to be expected of a conductor whose name is identified with popular music.

He has, in fact, given us a perfect example of unobtrusive conductorship and of perfect efficiency in it. * *

I recently quoted Lord Birkett’s triumph—very quietly asserted—over the Archbishop of Canterbury on a question of the text of the New Testament. As 1 love coincidences, I quote the one that a week-end browsing turned up for me. I found this extract from a 1957 8.8. C. broadcast by Alan PryceJones on his recollections of Hilaire Belloc:

I remember one evening in Sussex long before the last war, staying at a house near his own at which he was coming to dine. Just before dinner our host, Lord Rosslyn, remembered that there was no port in the house. He remembered, too, that Belloc liked port. At the end of dinner, therefore, after someone had gone to the village and brought back a bottle of three-and-sixpenny port from the local off-licence, the wine was decanted and

brought up with ceremony. “This," said Lord Rosslyn, “is all I have to offer. I have kept it as a historical curiosity. It is the last bottle of my father’s port laid down for me” —and here he went into elaborate details of place and date. “It will probably be undrinkable by now. It may be sugar. It may be vinegar." And he poured a glass out. Belloc drank it slowly. “A remarkable wine,” he said at last. “An admirable wine. There is no reason to waste it on these young people.” And while he kept the decanter by him, pausing in his talk occasionally to refill his glass (“No, no, Lord Rosslyn would expostulate. “No more for me. I have only brought it up for you.") I felt for him my one moment of true affection. There is nothing more endearing than to catch a great man in the middle of a huge mistake.

There you are. A perfect story. One exactly to my mind, as I think it would have been to Lord Birkett’s.