simply by giving the name in Hebrew for The Place Of The Skull, and that of the Founder of University College? Did not Gibbon describe his time at Oxford as the most idle and unprofitable of his life? Instead of the Lords and Baronets who used to cram the place, it’s true there are now many sons and indeed daughters of KSG Majors, Town Council Chairmen, Empire Alliance District Organisers and various other Modernist sycophants and high ups. But that in itself can hardly be described as making Oxford different—more a question of the old girl responding as she has always done to the ever-shifting times.
The editor of the Daily Sketch was probably right when he told me over a compensatory lunch at the Savoy that the time was no longer suitable for a weekly column filled with old-fashioned facts, and that the John Arthur connection was well and truly played out. And I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It seems, to quote Gibbon again, little more than a register of cruelties, follies and misfortunes. For example, in the Year of Our Lord 1099, the First Crusade under Geoffrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem from the infidels, then set about slaughtering the entire population. And in 1919, in Poland, Jews were gathered up by Nationalist gangs, stripped and flogged, then made to dig their own graves…
In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and, although there were savage pogroms in York, London, Norwich, Stamford and Lynn in the late 12th century, we’ve generally been tolerant. Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had little more to fear from exposure than a silence in the greengrocers as they entered and the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter box. After all, Jewishness isn’t like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism, militant Irishness: they can’t exactly help being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn’t mind them living , but not here, not with us… In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government policy.
One of John Arthur’s first acts when he finally became Prime Minister in 1932 was to push a bill through the then still-functioning Parliament authorising what was termed a new Domesday Book. This amounted to a detailed tallying not only of Britain’s land, but also of her people, their racial background, their wealth, their contribution to society. From this many things followed. The issuing of identity cards. The reform of the tax and welfare system. The clear identification of minorities.
The unemployed, ex-offenders, Indians and the Irish were required to report twice-weekly to the local Police Station. Jews were dispossessed of their homes and shuffled to holding camps at the edges of towns. I can well remember the Homeland for British Jewry newsreels: they were probably one of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews clear in black and white as the projector flickered through the spiralling cigarette smoke above the one-and-sixpennies. Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been empty but for a few sheep since the Highland Clearances a century before. It was hard not to think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding, harvesting, fishing.
So many other things have happened in Greater Britain since then that it has been easy to forget about the Jews. I remember a short piece on Pathé that I watched before Disney’s Snow White in what must have been 1939 at the old Electra Cinema. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold
The editor of the Daily Sketch was probably right when he told me over a compensatory lunch at the Savoy that the time was no longer suitable for a weekly column filled with old-fashioned facts, and that the John Arthur connection was well and truly played out. And I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It seems, to quote Gibbon again, little more than a register of cruelties, follies and misfortunes. For example, in the Year of Our Lord 1099, the First Crusade under Geoffrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem from the infidels, then set about slaughtering the entire population. And in 1919, in Poland, Jews were gathered up by Nationalist gangs, stripped and flogged, then made to dig their own graves…
In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and, although there were savage pogroms in York, London, Norwich, Stamford and Lynn in the late 12th century, we’ve generally been tolerant. Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had little more to fear from exposure than a silence in the greengrocers as they entered and the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter box. After all, Jewishness isn’t like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism, militant Irishness: they can’t exactly help being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn’t mind them living , but not here, not with us… In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government policy.
One of John Arthur’s first acts when he finally became Prime Minister in 1932 was to push a bill through the then still-functioning Parliament authorising what was termed a new Domesday Book. This amounted to a detailed tallying not only of Britain’s land, but also of her people, their racial background, their wealth, their contribution to society. From this many things followed. The issuing of identity cards. The reform of the tax and welfare system. The clear identification of minorities.
The unemployed, ex-offenders, Indians and the Irish were required to report twice-weekly to the local Police Station. Jews were dispossessed of their homes and shuffled to holding camps at the edges of towns. I can well remember the Homeland for British Jewry newsreels: they were probably one of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews clear in black and white as the projector flickered through the spiralling cigarette smoke above the one-and-sixpennies. Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been empty but for a few sheep since the Highland Clearances a century before. It was hard not to think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding, harvesting, fishing.
So many other things have happened in Greater Britain since then that it has been easy to forget about the Jews. I remember a short piece on Pathé that I watched before Disney’s Snow White in what must have been 1939 at the old Electra Cinema. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold
Similar Books
![Fit to Be Tied [Marshals: 2]](https://fs.collectorofbookboyfriends.com/471596/thumbs/152x264/fit-to-be-tied-marshals-2.jpg)
