Will your
your initials take you
to the top?
INDER Miss Nancy Mit-
UN
By J. W. M. THOMPSON
CHINA MAIL, MONDAY, JULY 18 1960.
This fantastic story of escape they
AL
ford's tuition the most innocent of us can place a man socially nowadays by noting whether he has a drawing-room or a lounge.
when he looks back junior officers (3.08) to briga-in Today, whether he puts milk in
at that moment, it must seem to ders (5.42)but then began to or last, and him comparable to the his tea first
day drop again, to generals at 3.12. whether he sits by a man- telpiece or a chimney-piece any rate he thought he detected while he does il.
Well, from today the really
serious snob-fancier can сать
sider all this sociological eaves dropping an obsolescent techni-
que.
Obvious
social patterns In the numbers of that the
initials bome by members of right school tie and the right
wanted to hide...
LL afternoon the Nazi commanders had been in conference, in the Mairie of an occupied town France.
As the early autumn dusk darkened their win- Newton saw the apple fall. At "This shows," he concludes, dows someone knocked at the door. A local elec- right family, the trician apologetically explained that the bulbs in different colleges. The concept accent get one most of the way, the room had fused. With their permission he took hold of him. It has led him but beyond that other factors would replace them. lo spend a wild number of hours. (maybe professional ability) tracking down the dala over count for more."
since.
"The thing about it is," he explained to me with the kindly indulgence of Einstein trying to It appears that, even if simplify relativity to a man met
Every syllable
"that It works cur speech, m a train,
the whole range of labelled through
social divisions.
eliminate non-U talk from we are still indelibly
by
of
a class-indicator of the most luminous simplicity.
It consists of nothing more than the average number initials which members of each
social group possess, If your group average is large, you are a Top Person. If it is low, you are Bottom. If it is in between, so then are you.
"It is far more subtle and exact than U and non-U, It is the only complete, scientific, non- quantitative, non-verbal, literary method DI denning class."
One test
A few moments later an This same rising-and-failing ADC pressed down the pattern of promotion is shown switch to turn on the lights. in the Government. Tory back- Immediately the entire room each, junior ministers 3.44, but disintegrated in a wall of benchers average 3.13 initials
mere flames. All the officers in
| side were killed.
Freedom
cabinet ministers have a
$.00.
*
Hutton.
Recently: Hutton published the story of this group." The electric light bulbs were only a sideline:
flexible saws capable of cutting
steel bars an inch thick:
even
the leather calves could be cut away to leave a prisoner with
a
pair of ordinary civilian shoes. imagination could invent the dozens
Only someone of astonishing
of fantastic gadgets described in this story.. Hutton, of London's greatest
one
BY JAMES LEASOR
their main aim was to expedite the escape of British and Allied prisoners of war.
individualists, is such a man.
Major Chris- topher Clayton Hutton with zome of the fantastic pad- gets his group invented,
One office or department would His grant it, another refuse. plans for an American lecture lour and a major film about it were postponed and then aban- dozed.
forecast that the factory wouki take months to be rebuilt.
Hutton refused to accept this view and cabled Lord Beaver brook, Minister of Aircraft Pro- duction, explaining their prodi- cament and begging his hein.
Beaverbrook
imme- acted For years before the war he thought out schemes to publicise diately. Next morning six lorries Once he persuaded a with men, bricks and cement Hutton and his team working battalion of troops to parade at arrived at the still-smoking from a London hotel, invented, Southampton as escort for
a. ruins of the factory. Within 3 manufactured and smuggled into reel of American film arriving week bomb sights and the tiny prison camps all
over Europe from New York.
compasses were in production strange and unlikely gadgets to serve as keys to freeedom.
films.
Questions were asked about again. this in the House. But Hutton enjoys living at the centre of a vortex, Maelstrom. London, should be his cable address, for :: anyone rash enough to CTDES
Ingenious
1
He was visited by special branch officers, charged at Bow Street with breaking the Official Secrets Act, although there can what is be no secrecy about already known, and thousands of these gadgets were put on sale shops in Government surplus
after the war.
The case was immediately withdrawn but the damage was done.
the Forces was magnetised so swords with him is treated to a with Clayton Hutton. How he hammer power of the faceless
The Foreign Office is a clear exception to this pattem, but then everyone in the Foreign Office from top to bottom is socially very OK, indeed, and The replacement bulbs con- rates very high intially. cealed tiny bombs, the product Among MPs, the Tories-Sir of a small British organisation Hugh Veer Huntly Duff Lucas run by a man with a mind as A playing card would peel in Tooth and all-came out ahead convoluted as their fiaments two to reveal a map of the area; One test of the Law, he said, of Liberals and well ahead of Major Christopher Clayton a collar stud concealed a com- Of course it has long been
Hall complains obvious that the upper classes was to work through the whole Labour, but
pass, every rozor blade issued to tend to have more names than of Debrett's peerage calculating that the Liberals are too few to wholly rellable
that it could show the lower classes. It is accepted the average number of initials provide that possessed by each rank of titled statistic.
North and home. 39 a fact of English life
Well, he did this (De- someone called Reginald Aylmer person. Ranfurly
Plunkett-Ernle-Erle brett has 3,708 pages) and the Drax should be an admiral while result was; Dukes average 4.00 carls Jack Smith is more suitably em- initials, marquesses 3.98,
3.92, barons 3.53, baromels 3.48, ployed as, say, a postman.
If, after all this, you wish to viscounts 3.41 and knights 3.06,
In other words the number of work out your own rating, it is quite simple providing you Initials diminishes
exactly have, the me and staying secording to precedence-except power. Remember that double-
viscounts,
this and for the
barrelled names count two, and' underprivileged group forms
that De, Le, and so on, score as special case because an excep separate names. tional proportion (80 per cent) have been created this century from superammuated politicians and the like.
until now, however, has it been proposed that this is not but a merely a vague trend
that the matter of exact fact: weight of names carried around by social groups is a precise indication of their class char-
acter.
Indulgence
The nobility are too easy, it The man responsible for this marvellously unimportant dis might be said. Very well. Hall covery is a young Cambridge applied his Low to test one of a those subtle jewels of class dis- graduate ramed Ron Hall,
Shefeld. tinellon which adorn all levels bricklayer's son from After working through hundreds of English life.
He chose the of thousands of names
a basic snob assumption that, over years be period of three
has cricket, it is smarter to be what he calls batsman' than a bowlor.
come up with Hall's Law:
"For any sufficiently large group of people,
average
is
the
The pattern
It's simple
And remember, too, that your
do not own Initials
signify anything: it is the average of your group-profession, school. club, zic-which tells the tale. A sample of at least 200 names is desirable.
This means, of course, that if you find you come out un- pleasantly low it is no good try. at ing to gain status by changing a your name from (cay) J. Thompson tu J, W. M. Thomp- son. The only way to advance is to adhere to a new group.
You could become a brigadier, join the Foreign Service, or even accept junior office in the Government. At least you would then face life within an initial
number of initials (including Does science support this? Christian and surnames) pos- Yes, says Hal. His law, applied assed by members of that group to the 1,023 pages of fine print direct measure of the pre- in Wisden, gave. Batemen an dominant social class of that initis! rating cight points advantage." group."
superior to the bowlers. Bats- men average 2.88 Initials each, bowlers 2.78.
He is now getting ready to launch a book on the subject, and meanwhile he has sketched But he claims to do more out the essentials in an article in than make precise the intuitive today's Crossbow, the magazine shades of class-distinction of the young Tory intellectuals, which every true Englishman Like many another Hash of loves, His Law can also reveni scientific enlightenment, the the hidden limits to the advan- Law came to Hull in a simple tages that go with the right manner, while he was stil at class background. Cambridge, He was jokingly invited to review a list of mem bers of the university for an undergraduate paper.
Hall spent a 101 of time working through the Army List. He found that the average num- ber of intials rose steadily from
"Pre boet dawn, with key back' me'invită Dr. Gordon and his wife
RUN!
-London Express Service).
*OFFICIAL Parrish, 18.
SECRET
the way withering broadside of tele- grams, express letters and phone Darlboards sent 10 camps calls innumerable, contained radies; the heels of Hutton a stim, slight figure Max flying boots hid maps and food in his 80's, with a balding domed
tablets, their laces
contained head and horn-rimmed glasses, became interested in escape more than 40 years ago.
The escapers' propelling pencil. The false barret hold map and there were also three tiny compasses, two of which were the ferrule and- the clip, both highly magnetised,
Lesson
As a boy working for 5s. a week in his uncle's dimber yard at Nottingham he challenged Houdini to escape from a wooden box Hutton supplied on the slage of the Birmingham Empire.
ones
Others might have bowed with Results were all that counted' resignation before the sledge-
got them was unimportant; rules could be bent or broken, He. possessed unlimited enthusiasm, spent his own money in develop ing his ideas.
Sometimes he bribed people to make a prototype gadget by casually offering them a crate of jam. Before the war he had been associated with a pre- serving firm and had boxes of samples left over,
His ingenuity and tirelessness were only equalled by his ability to antagonise official authority. When some senior officer dis agreed with his plans he sent them each, at his own expense, small wooden coffins.
Houdini escaped because he bribed the carpenter who made He explained that he had the box to use small nails. utilised almost every other can- Hutton lost the challenge but tainer to conceal his keys of learned a lesson: always go freedom and that they might direct to the man in charge.
care to make use of these. never deal with middleinen,
After the war it seemed that He practised this theory con authority some of its own
back stantly throughout the war.
In December 1940, for
During the past nine years example, a firm making bomb Hutton has been engaged in a sights and midget compasses to constant and often cruel running be hidden in sugar cubes was fight with the Air Ministry and badly bombed. Production War Office for permission to ceased immediately. People publish this book.
This stupendous
Picasso.
... NOW YOU CAN JUDGE
HIS GENIUS FOR YOURSELF IN THE MOST
GLITTERING ONE-MAN SHOW OF THE CENTURY
PICASSO equals
Genius. For at least
a quarter of a century this convenient formula has been accepted by the entire Western world.
BY DAVID CARRITT
Cezanne and El Greco with the barbaric forma at African sculpture, must then have seemed the negation of taste.
Seep half a century later we can enjoy it for its austere majesty of colour and design. Picasso can never wholly escape his own exquisite sensibility.
Virtuosity, Inventiveness, taste. Theme alone should suffice to
The naturalistic Child with a Dove, painted by Picasso in. 1901.
First, that a genius must be Negro Period, the Cubist and born with prodigious technical neo-Cubist Periods and so on, ability,
Fundamentally these group- Not only by his admirers,
The few remaining nitwits' ings are correct, but Picasso has collectors and critics, and artists who believe that Plcasse distorts never been consistently
Any- who imitate him or try not to because he doesn't know how to thing but himself. Few of his Imitate him, but by academics draw will have to explain away paintings do not recall or make a painter of genius. But humanitarian's polemic directed who deplore his refusal to paint such feats of classical draughts anticipate. works of other Picasso has more than that. He against the age of Buchenwald. only a style which resembles manship as the large allegorical periods. but far surpasses their own, and painting called La Vie painted by a vast public which knows when the artist was 22. him only through the colossal ballyhoo which has made his name as famous
As a composition it is not fault-
as any Alm less but the sensitiveness with
Consistent
posseuses - what Wordsworth called "a soul of power."
offices. in Government Hutton refused to do so. He fought on doggedly and alone, was finally rewarded by getting complete approval to publish this whole fantastic story.
Offers
During this long and point- less ight Hutton could take no permanent job, His savings dwindled in legal fees and ex- pentes. Sometimes he thought his only falthful friend was his
black Labrador dog, Angus.
Now, victorious and successful,. Hutton is sought out; he is vin- dicated. He is a director of the George Shaefer-Sidney Kaufman
company producing Macbeth in colour.
New Alm offers were made for Ouicial Secret, there are plans for a TV series, translations, serials
All, this is very gratifying, o Clayton Hutton But what 11 more important is that this thorny, stubborn genius had the courage and tenacity to take on the assembled and unknown might of Whitehall as an indi vidual. And win.
--(London Express Service).
(London: Exprem Service),
To call him a painter of genius like Braque or Matisse would be to circumscribe him, In the last analysis, it is
He is a. genlus transcending The Charmel House (No. 178), Picasso's range and power of:
makes him Pictorial limitations. The ex- painted just after the war, imagination which
a great imaginative com
one of the supreme figures of hibition proves it.") star's, sportsman's or politician's. which the artist has drawn the. For instate the naturalistic position in the tradition of our time..
young naked couple confronting Child with Dove (No. 14), Goya's protests against human Now at last those in Britain mother holding her baby in her painted in 1901, is clearly the fally and cruelty.. have the chance to decide for arm is worthy of many of the ancestor of Paul as Harlequin themselves of precisely what great Renaissance masters whom (No. 107) painted in 1924, when this gualus consisis,
Picasso's detractors use as a After months of frantic labour, slick to beat him with, aggravated by political and private bickering, Picasso's old Irlend, Mr Roland Penrose, has assembled in the Tate Gallery a stupendous array of 268 paint-
Lyrical
This lyrical naturalistic way ings and drawings, ranging from of drawing has persisted
Picasso was working in his neo-. Cubist idiom,
Brutality
Apropos of this picture
Beneath his chameleon changes there is a real consistency of image and intention. What is Picasso said: "Painting is not so astonishing about him is his done to decorate apartments t ability to discover innumerable is an instrument of war against and often antithetically dier- brutality and darkness" The lnguage of Picasso's protest From time to time, whatever ing ways of expressing them...
Then a pictorial genius should might seem obscure it the ex- hibition "did not make us
a portrait of a girl painted in throughout Picasso's career 1895, when the artist was 14 to,
a large Composition with a Dal- more metaphysical form of vision matian Dog painted just over a may be his current preoccupa possess sensibility of, if you le familar with its evolution.. 1year ago,
Lion, he will suddenly hark back it taste. Picasso possesses it in That is one of the great merits
Stupefying
to the great draughtsmen of the such abundance that it seems of the show by revealing the
positively to disturb him,
entire, course of Picamo’E development we can come close to comprehending even his most private later vida.
Taste in teclt is not enough A painting like the Girl with a Basket of Flowers, of 1905, is so delicious that its solid virtues"
are easily overlooked.
past: the Greek vase painters, Raphael, Ingrés, or mast sur- prising of all-Rembrandt, And The general effect of the ex- always be makes their styles his hibition is stupefying. But the own. patient visitor who works his Then a geofus must possess
With its cold, rants of blacks way carefully, through the in- unfarging power of invention. A terror of prettiness may and greys and walles and its cessantly changing phases of Not even Picasso's fiercest critics even have been one of the violent quasi-abstract, distor- Pleanor art will the binssir would deny him this The ex motives, which caused him to tơng Thế Chirpel House and rewarded by an insight into the hiblion proves the truth of embark the following year upon silice the spectator no no more processes of artistic creation Picasso's too often quoted dice the huge Demoiselles d'Avignon than a brilliant but austere which probably no tele-man show, timp do not seek, 1 and gra (NO HO which at the date by any other artist, Ulving or Art historians have attempted haribe most of his keenest décoration.
could provide
copy i hollave, une the things
Learn.
MEET MR CLOGGHEAD*
Bik by the Might of the Dai ig pisngi bola, Trichino's Thapan, champions,
dois the Hi Thi Thi violent but heroic com- Ings that have gone before it, it ||
Politoe brendi Hements of is clearly: BONBON
lightsideac
moving
CLOG; ANYTHING THAT HINDERS MOTION OR RENDERS DIFFICULT.
BAKER
section of the green! light, even thou
mithun from
ked in the right position to