case in his waistcoat pocket, tapping it on the metal, and posing even the most uncomfortable question without raising his voice. Peppiatt was certain no one could get the better of him or his banknotes.
If Phillips, Waley, and Keynes represented the English social conscience of what the playwright George Bernard Shaw once called Heartbreak House, Peppiatt was a doyen of Shaw’s equally symbolic but opposing Horseback Hall. He reported to Sir Montagu (later Lord) Norman, governor of the Bank from 1920 to 1944, whose staff basked in his personal arrogance — a reflection of the institution’s independence of elected governments. Norman never doubted that he alone was the rightful guardian of the nation’s currency. Keynes, also later ennobled and long a denizen of Heartbreak House in his role of financial eminence to the writers and artists of that corner of upper Bohemia which gathered in London’s Bloomsbury, was considered by his social equals, and probably by himself, as the cleverest man in England. Not surprisingly, he disdained Norman as “always absolutely charming, always absolutely wrong.” No wonder the Bank was the first institution to be nationalized when the Labor government came to power at the end of the war and placed it under the governorship of Thomas Catto, a Scottish self-made banker and Keynes’s close wartime associate.
In marked contrast to the mindset of Germany, this dichotomy between brains and character marks all of English life and helps explain why the English would shy away from counterfeit currency as a weapon of war while Germany embraced it. Ideas flicker across the English horizon like summer lightning, from Shakespeare to Francis Crick, but they are generally distrusted even though they eventually turn out to be world-changing. Because of the emphasis on character, breeding plays perhaps an excessive role, but Britain is saved from stagnation by the openness of its aristocracy to new talent. Its great prime ministers come from all classes — Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher. All had to think on their feet under fire in the House of Commons and dispose of their opponents with wit rather than Nietzschean will. For example, Disraeli’s classic put-down: “There sit the leaders of the opposition like the coast of Chile — a line of extinct volcanoes.”
But the Germans are the great philosophical system-builders of Europe, along with the French, the latter tending to emphasize logic rather than heavy Teutonic ideas about duty, will, and power —
Macht,
as the Germans call it. There is little history of tolerant argument in Germany and a strong component of Martin Luther’s obedience to divine will. (Even that founder of Protestant individuality thought in lockstep terms of “the priesthood of all believers.”) The deep play of imagination does poke into German literature and philosophy during occasional romantic outbursts, but in general, the debasement of human standards, first money and later life itself, was within bounds permitted for the benefit of the
Volk.
Long before its rhetorical capture by Hitler and Goebbels, this word commingled ideas of race, nation, and state. There is no equivalent in English.
Even when the Bank of England issued the low-denomination counterfeit-proof notes in 1940, the British government decided not to warn the public of the real reason, lest a counterfeiting scare cast doubt on Britain’s currency. In 1940 a reporter for the
News of the World,
the most widely circulated paper in the country, telephoned Sir John Simon for the exchequer’s comment on what he had been hearing from various sources, including an unimpeachable High Court judge: that the British government already knew Germany was going to dump huge amounts of counterfeit pounds on Britain. The chancellor recounted the conversation coolly in an internal memo: “I said I did not wish to make any request to the News of the World or any other paper, but
If Phillips, Waley, and Keynes represented the English social conscience of what the playwright George Bernard Shaw once called Heartbreak House, Peppiatt was a doyen of Shaw’s equally symbolic but opposing Horseback Hall. He reported to Sir Montagu (later Lord) Norman, governor of the Bank from 1920 to 1944, whose staff basked in his personal arrogance — a reflection of the institution’s independence of elected governments. Norman never doubted that he alone was the rightful guardian of the nation’s currency. Keynes, also later ennobled and long a denizen of Heartbreak House in his role of financial eminence to the writers and artists of that corner of upper Bohemia which gathered in London’s Bloomsbury, was considered by his social equals, and probably by himself, as the cleverest man in England. Not surprisingly, he disdained Norman as “always absolutely charming, always absolutely wrong.” No wonder the Bank was the first institution to be nationalized when the Labor government came to power at the end of the war and placed it under the governorship of Thomas Catto, a Scottish self-made banker and Keynes’s close wartime associate.
In marked contrast to the mindset of Germany, this dichotomy between brains and character marks all of English life and helps explain why the English would shy away from counterfeit currency as a weapon of war while Germany embraced it. Ideas flicker across the English horizon like summer lightning, from Shakespeare to Francis Crick, but they are generally distrusted even though they eventually turn out to be world-changing. Because of the emphasis on character, breeding plays perhaps an excessive role, but Britain is saved from stagnation by the openness of its aristocracy to new talent. Its great prime ministers come from all classes — Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher. All had to think on their feet under fire in the House of Commons and dispose of their opponents with wit rather than Nietzschean will. For example, Disraeli’s classic put-down: “There sit the leaders of the opposition like the coast of Chile — a line of extinct volcanoes.”
But the Germans are the great philosophical system-builders of Europe, along with the French, the latter tending to emphasize logic rather than heavy Teutonic ideas about duty, will, and power —
Macht,
as the Germans call it. There is little history of tolerant argument in Germany and a strong component of Martin Luther’s obedience to divine will. (Even that founder of Protestant individuality thought in lockstep terms of “the priesthood of all believers.”) The deep play of imagination does poke into German literature and philosophy during occasional romantic outbursts, but in general, the debasement of human standards, first money and later life itself, was within bounds permitted for the benefit of the
Volk.
Long before its rhetorical capture by Hitler and Goebbels, this word commingled ideas of race, nation, and state. There is no equivalent in English.
Even when the Bank of England issued the low-denomination counterfeit-proof notes in 1940, the British government decided not to warn the public of the real reason, lest a counterfeiting scare cast doubt on Britain’s currency. In 1940 a reporter for the
News of the World,
the most widely circulated paper in the country, telephoned Sir John Simon for the exchequer’s comment on what he had been hearing from various sources, including an unimpeachable High Court judge: that the British government already knew Germany was going to dump huge amounts of counterfeit pounds on Britain. The chancellor recounted the conversation coolly in an internal memo: “I said I did not wish to make any request to the News of the World or any other paper, but
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