THE HONGKONG
TELEGRAPH.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY : 13, 1937.
CHAMPION
T
SONG ON YOUR BUGLES By Eric Knight
(Boriawood, 78, Gd.)
| HIS story has one outstanding morit which outweighs all its dofecta: it reports working- -einsa life, loyalties and talk in an
· absolutely convincing manner.
The accent is Yorkshire, and the characters toll in mills and mines, in glassworks, and boller-making stops. Yet, even if you have never been Potters Bar, than further norik, you will knew that you are reading the truth.
Herrie Champlon, who started as a half-timer in n mit, was determined
to shake of poverty and clogs and be An artist.....
But that burning
ambition was only a part of him.
が ❖
It drove him to work at night so that he could draw and paint by day: 1 forced him to use the walls of his room when the cost of paper ami can- But it yas went beyond his reach.. could prevent his final loyalty being given to his mintes, men who time and again stopped him from taking the road to fame and, in the end, killed 1
Herria is a fine fellow, plctured in the round and bursting with vitality. You believe that he was an artist NA firmly as you believe that he would have joined those strikes, knowing they were doomed to fall. Above all, you believe in his conviction, against the evidence, that angry. hungry men can be persuaded to listen to
reason.
There are conventional turns to the plot, one or two of the characters have been taken off a dusty shelf in the Kock cupboard-notably that garru- Jous, irascible, eccentrle art-master-e and certain passages are prétentiously overwritten.
But when Mr. Knight lets his people talk, fight, drink, play, laugh, strike and work, every word rings true.
R. P.
TYPEWRITING AND COPYING
Gestetner
PHONE 25318
GLOUCESTER
BOOKS OF THE WEEK edited by Roger Pippett
COCKNEY'S MIRROR
WILLIAM
L
HOGARTH: COCKNEY'S MIRROR By Marjorie Nowen (Methuen, 163.).
THE
ONG ere the Hapsburga had fled the wrath of their subjects, Gibbon foretold of Fielding's work
as a novelist that it would out- live the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the house of Austria.
No less surely might the predic- tion have been made of the work of Fielding's equally great contem- porary, Hogarth, who, in his famous pictorial dramas-A Har- lot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage à la Mode-did with the engraver's tools what the author of Tom Jones and Jonathan Wild accomplished with his pen.
Abundant facilities for studying Hogarth's work as an artist (and his great merita on a painter havo been largely obscured by his dazing fame as graphic satirist) will be found in the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and elsewhere. But such a study will bo immensely enriched you can coti: William trivo to
buy
borrow Hogarth: The Cockney's Mirror.
Mias Bowen, a Hogarth enthusiast from her teens, skilfully assembles the known facts of his life and, what ls more important, sketches with the practiced hand of a novelist the period in which he lived and the background against which his work was done,
It was in the London of William I that Hogarth, the son of a poor school- master, was born, and it was in London that he lived and worked, fer?- ing always as reluctant to desert the Cockney sceno as was his contem- porary, Samuel Johnson,
The City he knew was a city in whileh
dour puritanical restraints existed side by side with manners and morals which revealed all the licentiousness and little of the ele- gance of the Resto- ration.
It was an
age which counten- anced the merciless dogging of soldiers, sailors, children and a numerous class comprehensively defined as vaga- bonds."
It took its amuse- ments in the form of cock-Oghting, prize- fighting and bear-
Hogarth's cartoon of John Wilkes, tho eighteenth-century Radical,
baiting. Fith filled the gutters of the cobbled streets and crado rum ruined the health of the frequently. whipped sailor, what time the aris tocracy and moneyed classes rushed riotously down all known ronds to damnation.
An appreciation of the grossness and brutality of the nga helps to explain what to modern eyes must seem tho uncompassionate attitude of Hogarth toward some of the victims of his entire, such as the unhappy trull, Mary, Hackabout, whose story, from her ar- rival in London, where she falls into the clutches of the beguiling Mother Sinclair, until her death in a Drury-, lana garret, following a period in Bridewell Prison, is vividly depicted in 'A Harlot's Progress,
There was, indeed, in Hogarth, as in so many satirista (including to-day'a flagellator of the children of thes Riz
Coward) Noel
marked Calvinistlo strain, which mado him incapablo
that *mild humour, finding expression In
gentle slop, which we are too ready. to accept as pictorial satiro.
It was not in llogarth to indulge in mero quips and skits, and he would not have been happy in an age in which evila and tyrannica which well deserve the tribute of a blow are more often made the subject of a pun.
But, whether you prefer your satirist to be a he-man ahee-hee-man, all of us who practise the art owe some- thing to the genius who, with untiring Invention and no purposelem stroke. gave us that unsurpassed comedy in line, Marriage à la rode,
No doubt we are Ane ellows in our way, but we can't bite a comment on the passing show as Hogarth did.
Will Dyson
He Doesn't
BEAT
about the BUSH!
B
GIANT'S STRIDE
By Brian Penion (Cassell, R, Gd.)
OOKS, books, books, novels full of glamour, paychologi- cal novels, daring novels, novels with a purposo... but how rarely a novel with a atory.
Praise the Lord, then. for Mr. Penton, whose Giant's Stride lo first and foremost a grand yarn, grandly Брип
He has sifted the dust of Innumer- ablo Ristories, blographiles and doent- ments for this tale; which he began in Landtakers, of the growth of a
conviola'
tcoining colony into continent.
All those who sigh for their boyhood days, when they read paper-backed oples of reckless prairie heroes, will rovel in this book with its vivid back- ground of fe the Australian bush Lowards the end of the last century, confused and complicated by the scheming and speculation that Tol- lowed the discovery of gold, shaped inexorably by the clumsy processes of history,
The people in this novel, principala and walkers-on, are overpoweringly alive. Their speech shouls at you from the page, the violence of their actions is often physically painful, at times they almost smell.
They hate and they love, they scheme and they envy, they plan and build and baltic, changing as they do so the face of their country, fleeing from tho shadows of their convict fathers and grandfathers into more shadows- those of modern civilisation.
No one should fail to read this ang novel, which turns history and the im- plications of history to such splendid necount. STUART FLETCHER.
RADIOPERATORS
SINCERE'S
STORE REMAINS
CLOSED TO-DAY
(FOR CHINESE NEW YEAR
VACATION).
WILL RE-OPEN
ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14th
at 12 noon
My Idea of a Perfect Day-
I DO LIKE TO RISE WITH A LARK IN
THE MORNING
THEN A BUSYy DAY AT THE
OFFICE
AND A SHOWER
BUT MOST. OF ALL I
ENJOY A
GOOD BEER
AND A RIDE
"ACROSS COUNTRY,
ESPECIALLY
IF ITS
FOLLOWED BY
TENNIS
UB.
Sole Agents: W. R. Loxley & Co. (China), Ltd.
P
SOS
By Karl Baarslag (Methuen, 101, 6ď.)
ARDON the cliché, but "- ing a long-felt want" seems to be the phrase to use about this book. For Mr. Baarslag has told the story of disasters of the sea from the point of view of a wireless operator-a slant which I have not seen before.
Wireless men aro usually anonymous -80, for that matter, are officers and engineers of steamers except in vari- ous much-publicised luxury liners-but the author brings them before you in person and shows you the vital part that Sparks" takes to-day in seeing that ships reach port safely or that ald ta brought quickly to them when they are in trouble.
Here are the stories of the Titanic, the Empress of Ireland. the Vestris. the Antinoe, the Volturno and the
talk to himself across space. No one would answer or even hear him." So he spent his whole trip explaining his apparatus to wondering passengers, most of whom didn't believe him.
On the way back, getting near the Irish coast and trying to raise the new station at Crookhaven, họ was amazed to get a reply from another ship, the Cunarder Lucenia, on her first radia equipped voyage to America!
The descriptions of the big marine disasters are vivid and accurate- attributes which do not always follow each other in stories of the sea!
There is, too, much interesting In- formation about wireless itself, in- cluding the fact that the SOS alynal came from Germany to supersede CQD, the first wireless distress enli SOS (in Morse signalled- ...) standa equally for VTD, IJS or SMB and la used merely to have one easily recognisable, unbroken signal, not for any sentimental spelling out of "Save Our Souls," "Send Out
Republic graphically told from per-Succour or any-fancy-message-like...
Aorial interviews with survivors and after painstaking search of officiat records.
They deal with wireless at sen from those early days when the Lake Champlain set out proudly
from Liverpool with a ten-inch spark coll apparatus and nobody to talk to, be- cause there were no stations in the United States in 1001 and Marcon! equipped slips on the Atlanile.
The operator "did not have to worry about any ship calling him while he slept. He could start up his set and
thal.
Incidentally. Mr. Baarsing shows that the United States, usually anxious to be ahead in mechanical matters, has logged woefully in legiantion which makes wireless on wips fully ci cient.
*The practical result has been that shins of many nations have carried the burden of greater radio protection · while American chipping has saved some cpense throught this indequacy of the America radio fanya "
CARR JONES.
VICTORIANA
WE WERE SEVEN
By William Fryer Harvey (Constable, 85, d.)
HE further it retreats Into history the more charming the Victorian prospect grows. In the eyes of unborn historians it will doubtless be viewed as a second Golden Age.
It was the calm before the atorm, but how calm, how placid, how stolld!
Family prayers, water tortoises in the conservatory aquarium, bamboo- and-bead curtains, religious Jigsaw puzzles. Sunday books, texts in se0- weed on the sand, Bible stories, engrav- ings of William Penn meeting Red Indian savagery with Quaker kindli-
ness.
*
Summer rides in a wagonette drawn by three horses, a plebald guinea-pig called Oscar Wilde, a family that ex- tended beyond two parents and seven children, vla an infinity of cousins, great-aunts and missionary visitors, to A tribal grandmamma, the Queen,
Only a corner of the picture, per- haps, but how perfectly Mr. Harvey presents it in his story of a Victorian childhood.
Listen to him; "My evening prayers
had become to me a real problem. They tended to get longer and longer, and I could see no way of cutting them short without the people and causes for which I prayed suffering, ... It often happened that the missionaries in Madagascar would be remembered by me just before I was falling asleep, Out of bed I would scramble and, kneeling down, would ask for their pro- tcelion."
수
And once more: "The largest school prize I ever received.... was 'Draw. ing from Nature, a Series of Progressive Instructions in Sketching to which ure Appended Lectures on Art Delivered at Rugby School.'
The Quiker background to Mr. Har vey's story gives it a touch of genuine ideallam absent from most Victoriani angas-but the ban imposed by his parents on toy soldiers was very easily defented by childish materiallari. Halma men, it was discovered, could quite satisfactorily be marshalled into
mobila expeditionary forces."
This is a nice book, inevitably un- exciting quietly humorous, unsenti- mentally retrospective. A modest re cord of a world that has had its day, B. I.
CHILDREN'S
WARM WINTER CLOTHING URGENTLY
REQUIRED
Boys' and mon's sweators, underclothing, overcoats," shoes, socks, etc.
Will be very gratefully received by the HONGKONG BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
DAILY PRESS BUILDING
ICE HOUSE STREET/
on
MONDAYS & THURSDAYS
from 10.30 aim, to 12.00 noon.
LEARN TO
FLY
COMPLETE TRAINING GIVEN FOR EVERY TYPE OF BRITISH LICENCE BOTH PILOTS AND ENGINEERS. :
FOR PROSPECTUS APPLY:——
FAR EAST
FLYING TRAINING SCHOOL, LTD. Kai Tak Airport, Hongkong
Phone 59282.
REMINGTON 16
MUSTARD & CO., LTD. DAVID HOUSE
Tel. 31141.
HỒNG KONG SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN. THE SOCIETY ASKS FOR
$25,000
Equipped with 5 KEY
Decimal Tabulator
in 1937 to continue its work for sick and destitute children.
Hon. Trensurers:
Mr. A. McKELLAR, CA
c/o Mackinnon, Mackenzie & Co.,
F. & O. Building.
Mr. KWOK CHAN,
c/o Banque de L'indo Chine,
Hongkong.
November, 10, 1930.
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