MARQUIS, DUKE, AND A' THAT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 118, 26 September 1941, Page 8

MARQUIS, DUKE, AND A' THAT

— 2YA Does Some Research —

had a summons to serve on a Marquis, how would you make it out, giving due consideration to all of his titles and distinctions? And if you were giving a crayfish party on the occasion of your second son’s twenty-first birthday, and a mixed bag of noblemen and diplomats turned up, who would take precedence at table, the younger son of a Viscount or the secretary of the Chilean Legation? These are knotty problems, calculated to tax the ingenuity of the wiliest debt collector and the most careful host, and .) you were a debt collector and

although diplomats and noblemen are regrettably scarce in this country, it is pleasant to think that anything can happen in these days of air travel. It is therefore all to the good that 2YA is launching a series of talks (the first scheduled for Sunday, September 28, at three in the afternoon) which should clear up any difficulties in the use of distinctions and titles. Titles and Distinctions is actually the title of the series, with a sub-title Who’s Who and What’s What. Titles of nobility are not the only subject dealt with, later talks concerning themselves with awards of merit, university degrees and medals awarded for active service. The talks take the form of a lively dialogue between two gentlemen, one an inquisitive dullard who hardly knows whether an Earl ranks above or below a Baron, and the other a gentleman whose name should be Burke and who is a mine of information concerning the English aristocracy. Those Worthy GentlemenApparently noblemen are not at all well regulated or ordered, and all sorts of anomalies and oddities keep creeping in, a statement which is not to be taken as a reflection on those worthy gentle-

men who give large sums of money to certain objects and suddenly find themselves in the House of Lords. It is a fact, however, that not every Lord has the right to sit in the House of Lords; that not every Bishop is strictly entitled to be addressed as " My Lord"; that a man with a title can sit in the House of Commons provided he is not a Peer; that the Archbishop of Canterbury is Primate of All England, while the Archbishop of York is Primate of England; and that General Fitz-So-and-So may be respectably and legally married and yet his wife would continue to be known as Lady Someone-else if she were a Peeress in her own right, which might conceivably cause a good deal of embarrassment to everybody concerned. Peers have been heard to claim that in view of the present rate of income tax it is hardly in order to describe them as members of a privileged class, but there is one privilege which is probably guarded jealously. If (by any unlikely chance) he is sentenced to death, a Peer has the right of demanding to be hanged by a silken rope. Other Nice Points In the more prosaic department of university degrees and military medals, there are many other nice points of privi-

lege and preeedence. Why, for instance, should a graduate be prouder of a B.A. (Oxon.) than of an M.A. anywhere else? This may recall the story about the young New Zealand lawyer who studied hard and made great sacrifices and finally won his LL.M. and set up in practice in a country town. Proudly he had LL.M. inscribed on his name plate, but clients were slow in arriving. Eventually he discovered why. " You go back to University and get your LL.B. like the other lawyer over the road, and you'll do a lot better young man," a farmer told him one day.