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or in the importance of being good at cricket. In fact, his instructions ruined my cricket, because he taught us that by far the most important thing when batting was to have your bat in the twelve o’clock high position as the ball left the bowler’s arm, and that you should then bring the bat down in a vertical swing. The result, as far as I was concerned, was that I could hardly ever get the bat down before the ball was past my crease and I had been clean bowled. It was only after I went to Oxford and gave up the twelve o’clock fetish that I managed to make many runs.
my first experience of an individual perceiving a truth that was staring the crowd in the face, and yet all the rest failing to see it until it was spelled out for them.
Of all the books that I acquired, the one which I have valued most was Bartlett’s Quotations. Years afterwards I found that Churchill at Bangalore had done exactly the same thing: ‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.’
‘Brocken Spectre’
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What sometimes happens is that a man thinks of an idea and tries it before the time is really ripe, and so he fails. He then invents a reason for his failure which overlooks his own deficiencies and blames instead the operation of some fundamental law.
It arose from a demonstration at Farnborough of a very powerful loudspeaker system and amplifier system that had been developed for installation in aircraft policing the North-West frontier of India. This policing was sometimes done by punishing marauding tribesmen by bombing their villages, after due warning. Someone thought that the warning would be all the more effective if it came as from the voice of God, bellowing out from an aircraft.
The country was fired by the epic of the small boats that had sailed, some as many as seven times, into the teeth of the Luftwaffe to bring back our Army; and among those who took their boats to Dunkirk was my cousin Reg Mytton. I heard of the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort, standing on the beach with two Guardsmen as loaders while he tried to shoot down German dive bombers with a rifle. He also told one of his staff officers, Captain George Gordon Lennox, that however few of the Army could be evacuated, priority was to be given to the R.A.F. pilots who had parachuted from aircraft shot down
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Somethow Madam Foussé got enough heat to boil a kettle, even though all the grates were stacked high with dislodged soot, and made tea. Tradition in this situation clearly expected my mouthorgan, and so I began to play.
‘The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is the commonest explanation of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’
Tiny knows that I am a professor, and he has a great respect for professors. So all I say to him is, “You can’t say that, it isn’t English!”
‘The Man Who Never Was’,
Read.
(Giant Würzburg)
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This is an example of a phenomenon where an action can have the opposite effect than that intended, and a lesson always to be borne in mind by politicians and administrators.
