SILLY SEASON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 500, 21 January 1949, Page 31

SILLY SEASON

(By Airmail — Special to "The Listener" )

DECEMBER 15 FTER days of the worst fog London (and western Europe) has had for years, followed by howling winter gales, I have had to remind myself that it is not cold and grey on the other side of the world, and that it will be lazy summertime when this letter is tead. Therefore I confine myself to the short items, the odds and ends of passing interest, not too remarkable, that will as well serve to be a tent over the face of someone asleep in a deck-chair as to be read beside a radio that keeps interrupting itself for races or bowls or cricket. % x * JUVENILE offender was ordered last week by a woman magistrate to go home and take off the Old Pauline’s tie which he was improperly wearing. The Manchester Guardian reminds associations which are determined that their colours shall be worn only by

members that they have an easy remedy. Striped ties (such as the Old Paulines wear) are easily copied, but a : crested tie can be : registered with the Patents Office for five years at a cost of 10 shillings, and only authorised suppliers can then sell them against a list of members supplied by the Association. Eton, Harrow and St. Paul’s once had their ties sold against such lists, but nowadays have ‘ not bothered to keep

the lists up to date. Hence presumably the appearance of one, of them in court. Ea * Ea M ETEOROLOGISTS have been ‘examining Wagner’s operas and studying the weather conditions they describe. Cicely M. Botley writes in the November issue of Weather (the magazine of the Royal Meteorological Society) that in the Valkyrie there "seems to be a large depression somewhere out of the picture to the northwest, associated with sharp and rapidly moving troughs of low pressure." Jagged figures on the woodwind and strings, she says, give "a patter of cold-front rain." The Overture of The Flying Dutchman is a sound picture of "a deep depression over the North Sea with steep gradients, winds 8 or 9, and sea 6 or 7. The activity of the depression continues into Act I. There is a curious ‘local’ disturbance round the ghost ship in Act a" Even meteorologists get so bored they don’t know what to do with themselves sometimes. * * * T was left to The Times to do justice to the excellent news about the takahe. If ever a strange bird or beast does anything to draw attention to itself, The

Times will put it on record. Some months ago it was the bald-headed coot. Before that, it was the bristle-thighed curlew, which had been observed in its mating season for the first time (in Canada). Last spring, there was the "first cuckoo" in Hampshire which turned out to be an "old man who explained that he "used to do _ the nightingale when he had his teeth in" and that "they always fall for it.’ In the last week or two there has been what most people resort to calling "that New Zealand bird," with a very small division of attention in favour of the elephant-snout fish. The Times gave us a full account of the event, and devoted a fourth leader to the history of Notornis hochstetteri ("it is a sign of an increasingly liberal and comprehensive conception of natural ‘science that ‘the birds just found were not converted into further dead specimens in a museumor even living specimens in a zoo"). And the Natural History Museum has brought out from a cupboard its two stuffed takahe, which are 99 and 97 years old. » Pa *

"‘] HERE has been such a decline in the wearing of hats by women over re‘cent years that manufacturers have banded .themselves together and paid for an advertising campaign to try and persuade women that they need to wear them; the small posters with _ silly rhymes and grotesque drawings are one of the curiosities which a visitor to London notices when. he sits down in a London ‘Transport bus after an ab-

sence. The general idea seems to be to _ intimidatenot an unfamiliar technique of advertising where the product is not recognised to be indispensable-and to frighten (for instance) women with long noses into thinking that they should wear a hat that reaches forward, to make their noses less conspicuous. But still women persist in wearing the mittel Europa scarf or kerchief,. which is warm, cheap, quick to put on, and very becoming. Now the male sex is to be assaulted in the same way. Young men also are going hatless, and a Hatter’s Information Centre is to be set up, and £25,000 a year for two years will be spent on persuading us: "If you want to get ahead, get a hat." * * * N the same week in which it has been said in one of the newspapers that the Old Vic is fallen on bad times, and has difficulty in finding new plays of good quality, it is also announced that Shaw has written a new play, which will be put on at Malvern next year, if the festival there is revived; and T. S. Eliot has disclosed in Stockholm (where he (continued on next page)

HATS AND MARBLES

(continued from previous page) has gone to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature) that he has written a new verse play, which will be seen for the first time in London in 1949, Mr, Shaw’s play has no title, as yet, but he has admitted this much: "You can say it is a post-atomic play." See & it MONEY is needed to maintain the house where John Keats died in Rome, and the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is making a move to raise it. When war came to Italy all the rare books, relics, manuscripts and pictures which had been kept in the house in the Piazza

di Spagna were removed for safety to Monte Cassino. When the Germans took the town and the monastery the archivist _ managed to smuggle > them back to Rome, so that they escaped the bombardment which preceded the New Zealanders’ unlucky entry into the town. But they cannot be preserved against simple decay without money. bd * * HE Elgin Marblesfragments of the frieze of the Parthenon -also ¢scaped destruction in the war. They ieee ee i ae

were removed from their place in the British Museum and stored in an unused Underground railway tunnel beneath the Aldwych, and the work of carrying them back to the museum has just begun. They were carved 23 centuries ago, and stood at Athens until 1801, when Greece was a province of Turkey, Lord Elgin, British Ambassador to Turkey, obtained permission to remove what sculpture he liked, his reason being that the Parthenon was being used for target practice. He shipped 250ft. of the frieze, which was originally 524ft, long, but the vessel was wrecked, and for three years its cargo lay at the bottom of the sea. It cost Lord Elgin £74,000 to get them to England, and in 1816 he was given £35,000 for them by the Government. Some parts are forever lost, others are in Paris, and some are still in position in Athens. Before the war, the Elgin fragments were supplemented by plaster casts of the others, but they will not be when the present move is finished. In 1939 there was a controversy over the marbles being cleaned with a "blunt copper tool" which led to the resignation of two British Museum officials; not very long after, they had to be taken down into the Aldwych tube, and at first an official slept with them every night. Later, men were needed to perform

other tasks, and the figures of gods and goddesses of ancient Greece were alone in the darkness, except for having their temperature and humidity regularly measured, Now they are to come out, a few ata time, on their wooden trolleys, under brown paper covers, and the black dust of sub-London will be. "removed with a spoutless pair of bellows. * * e-3 ORD ELGIN’S manner of saving the Parthenon from target practice was to take it to pieces and remove it. From France, comes news that the Government has decided to protect Chartres cathedral -by removing the aerodrome that is near it. When the aerodrome was originally constructed near the

cathedral the municipality, under the influence of local opinion, refused toy support its transfer elsewhere on the ground that this would mean a loss of trade for the town. Now the municipality strongly supports the transfer. During the war no damage was done to. the cathedral, from which the windows had been removed, but another old church and the municipal library, containing valuable mediaeval manuscripts, were destroyed because of the placing of the aerodrome. It will cost about £1,000,000 to take the aerodrome away now.