My beloved newspaper

Celia Green at 18 months

I do not think anyone should think my parents were very wicked in letting me learn to read young. Once I had conceived the idea of learning to read, no power on earth could have stopped me, unless my mother had been forbidden to move her finger along the lines when she read to me, and my parents had been forbidden to answer my persistent questions about the sounds which the different letters represented. But the permissive society proceeds apace, in fact faster than I can keep up with, and perhaps by now it is accepted doctrine that any child who asks questions about letters of the alphabet before the socially approved age should be slapped down pretty sharply; and certainly not answered.

But the initiative was entirely mine. I can assure you that I was surrounded by toys of every description and even with social interaction. My mother was always bringing home children for me to play with – a few sizes larger than I was, usually, but I took little notice of that. It was simply that I found the printed word more interesting than anything else.

My investigations centred on the newspaper, which I found an object of the utmost charm. When my father read it, so would I. My first finding was that the same letters recurred. Then I would ask what sound a given letter was, and go down the page picking it out. I found out about capitals when they told me that a letter meant the same sound they had already told me for a different letter. (They were surprised I remembered). ‘Is that two letters with the same sound?’ I said. ‘It’s the same letter,’ they said, ‘but it’s a different shape if it’s big or if it’s small.’ I considered that very carefully. There was the headline with big letters all right, and the smaller print down below. But then I found one of the headline letters among the small print at the start of a sentence. ‘But that's the same shape,’ I said, ‘but it's big there and small there.’ ‘Well, it’s bigger than the others in the same line,’ they said. ‘And it comes at the beginning.’

So I knew there were two sets of letters to learn. How far I got in teaching myself to read before I was formally taught I don’t know, but it seems to me I probably could, very nearly, read before they got round to teaching me. I had a rag book to which I paid great attention, containing as it did fascinating and useful information such as ‘A for Ape. B for Bear’ - and so on. I was always asking questions about letters, and when my mother read to me I followed her finger along the lines with avidly attentive eyes.

Now I am sure you need not think my parents gave in too easily. They were very thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that children should never and on no account be ‘pushed’. But at last, my father’s ability to notice the obvious, combined with a certain natural generosity of disposition, overcame indoctrination, and he produced the really brilliant observation: ‘That child wants to learn to read.’

And so, about the time of my second birthday, an elementary reading primer was procured, and my mother set about giving me lessons, reading some each day with me. Now whether I am right that I had really by this time learnt most of the letters and picked up a good deal about reading, I don’t know, but I believe that I remember reading certain things before I was two, and in particular I think I read over my comic when my mother had once read it to me.

At any rate, the speed with which I now learnt supports the idea that this systematic practice of all the various letters and combinations was all that was needed to put the finishing touch. My mother says I went through the primer very fast; the lessons lasted only a matter of days. I never finished the primer though, as I she found me reading a book before I had reached the end of it.

The book she found me reading was The Story of Peter Pan. ‘What are you doing?’ she enquired. ‘Reading,’ I said. ‘You can’t read that,’ she said. ‘Yes I can,’ I said. By this time, she says, she was very curious. ‘If you can read it ,’ she said, ‘read it out to me then.’

This, of course, I did. Still sceptical, my mother thought I might have learnt it by heart as she had read it to me more than once, so she gave me another book which she had not read to me, and I read that out too.

When my father came home, she told him, and he gave me my beloved newspaper and asked me to read him that. My mother says it was quite surprising how I rattled off the long words.

My mother, of course, had taught many children to read, but said she never knew one who leapt at it as I did, nor one who learnt with so complete an absence of transitional stages. Many children sound the letters aloud to themselves for a time; I never did this, but read silently to myself from the start.

For the next couple of years my reading matter consisted of Chick’s Own, Sunny Stories, and – the newspaper.

‘Celia Green is a person of exceptional gifts, as the above piece demonstrates.She should be given the funding to develop the many research ideas she has been prevented for decades from developing. I make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to exceptional individuals.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

myths about early development

The near-death red herring, yet again

One regularly sees articles in the newspapers to the effect that so-called near-death experiences (NDEs) have an explanation that does not involve references to the supernatural. This has been the case now for decades. However many times it is supposed to have been ‘proved’, there always seems to be another research team willing to undertake a research project to prove it again. Each time the papers triumphantly report: NDEs (or whatever other experience they are talking about) are ‘all in the mind’.

The latest such article (Daily Mail, 13th August) refers to a University of Michigan study which looked at the brain activity of rats before and after their hearts were stopped.

Apart from the dubious ethics involved, this research in itself tells one nothing about NDEs, or about any other quasi-perceptual experience. Even if, as the researchers claim, the rat’s brain shows activity after clinical death, this does not get you very far in understanding the hows and whys of the kinds of experience people report in analogous circumstances.

The key issue raised by hallucinatory and quasi-perceptual experiences – whether they occur in sleep, near death, under normal conditions or otherwise – is the question of what they tell us about the way the brain, or mind, generates representations of its environment from external and internal data. This is a fundamental issue in psychology, and therefore ought to be of the greatest interest to psychologists, philosophers and neurophysiologists. However, it has been ignored in favour of whether or not there is an afterlife, ever since I established these phenomena as suitable subjects for scientific study over 40 years ago.

Having placed the phenomenon of out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) on a scientific footing, we should have been provided with finance to take the work further, leading to the possibility of important advances in our understanding of conscious experience and its relation to brain physiology. As we did not have an institutional environment with residential and laboratory facilities, we need funding to set this up in the first instance. Such funding should still be provided now, even more urgently, to prevent the continuing waste of our abilities which could and should be being used in making significant advances. This would be true even if people other than ourselves had shown any sign of adopting a sufficiently analytical and open-minded approach. In fact they have not. The resistance to the possibilities suggested by the phenomena, which had prevented their being recognised by academia before our book on them was published, continues to restrict and distort the work carried out, and leads to the unsatisfactory conclusions drawn from it.

more on out-of-the-body experiences

Sir Henry Keswick

edited text of a letter to an academic

Dear ...

Herewith a copy of a letter from Charles to Sir Henry Keswick, who was page with him to Lord Alanbrooke at the Coronation.

There have been some dos in London celebrating the 60th anniversary, to which former pages were invited. We wondered whether someone would try to get at Charles on behalf of his family, as people in the modern world like to think that if a person interacts socially with a given person or group, he is supposed to have written off the need for reparation for any wrongs done to him, no matter how serious.

In fact this Keswick did attempt to strike up conversation with Charles, but in a way which seemed very artificial as he had never had anything to do with him throughout the intervening years. Charles asked him for financial support and he refused. It may be pointed out that he is quite rich enough to relieve our position significantly without his noticing it. According to the Sunday Times, the Keswick family has a £2.3 billion stake in Jardine Matheson.

In common with many other people related to or known to Charles’s family, Henry Keswick could no doubt change our position significantly overnight. This in part explains Charles’s family’s motivation for slandering Charles and making him into an outcast, because if he had been allowed to remain a normal member of his social class, financial support from all quarters would have been more or less automatic.

Sir Henry Keswick is said to be a major donor to the Conservative Party. He should therefore be particularly interested in giving financial support to a research organisation which, while not being politically affiliated, does not subscribe to the leftist ideology that prevails in academia.

text of a letter from Dr Charles McCreery to Sir Henry Keswick

Dear Henry,

I am withdrawing any invitation I may have given you, implicitly or explicitly, to visit me here in Cuddesdon.

I was very aware, before our recent meeting at the lunch for the Queen, of the fact that I had written to you a number of years ago and invited you to support my research, and that you had declined, in very much the same terms as you did in person following the lunch.

I do not find it possible to have normal social relations with people who I know are in a position to support my work but who have chosen – in your case, not once, but twice – to reject my request.

I also consider that you should put pressure on my family to reverse the financial effects of their slanders and disinheriting over the last 50 years. I was obliged to describe some of their disgusting behaviour in a series of letters to a recent biographer of my father, and I have published them here:

http://celiagreen.blogspot.co.uk/

They are grouped under the heading ‘Charles McCreery and his family’ (see ‘Topics’, some way down the column on the right of the page).

My brothers and sister were all complicit in the slanders, and in at least one case actively promoted them, and they have all benefited directly (and in the case of their children indirectly) from the disinheriting.

Yours sincerely,
Charles

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

* first published 28 June 2013; republished, with illustration added, 6 August 2013

Oxford’s Professorship of Science and Religion

A year ago I applied for the University of Oxford’s recently created Professorship of Science and Religion. This was set up to investigate

questions raised for Theology by the natural and human and social sciences (including moral and social questions), and on the impact of Theology on the natural, human and social sciences.

I was not shortlisted for this post, even though I have plenty of ideas about how aspects of what is called ‘religious’ thought might have implications for science, and vice versa.

I think – and my colleagues at Oxford Forum agree – that if Oxford was genuinely interested in making interdisciplinary progress on the overlap between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ then the individuals responsible for filling this post should at least have wanted to meet me to find out what ideas I have for research and what I might do if offered the position.

In fact of course, it is doubtful that such motivation exists in modern academia, at a level capable of having an impact on such decisions.

Far more important is that mechanical rules are observed. For example, the candidate should have at least so many publications under their belt, they should have at least x years’ ‘experience’ at other institutions. This regardless of whether they have actually contributed anything significant to the advancement of knowledge, or are likely to be capable of doing so in the future.

The successful applicant will be an outstanding scholar, with an international reputation and distinguished research profile in Science and Religion ...

said the advertisement for the post. I suspect that the ‘research’ carried out by the candidates whom they did interview has made negligible contribution to the understanding of anything of significance, though no doubt it satisfied appearances. Something was written which seemed to have at least a nominal connection with religion and may have looked vaguely clever. That anything ground-breaking was said, however, is highly unlikely.

If opportunity is to depend on previous publications, and on ‘experience’ within the system, then those who have been rejected (and implicitly repeatedly rejected, as all their efforts to gain reinstatement have been ignored or opposed) are condemned to permanent exclusion. This has been my position. The difficulties of supporting myself and an independent academic institution, without status or funding, has effectively prevented any but the most minimal expression of my views.

The present attitudes to science and religion are determined by the most fundamental unexamined assumptions in modern philosophy and psychology, and realistic analysis of these assumptions is taboo.

The area covered by the professorship is probably particularly prone to the principle that nothing genuinely progressive should get done. In subjects such as physics it is necessary to pretend that progress is aimed at. The desire that the status quo be maintained has to be kept at a subconscious level. In ‘science & religion’, by contrast, the goal of keeping things safe and unthreatening may well be openly espoused by those in charge.

Needing to expand

text of a letter

I think that Christine has mentioned to you in the past our interest in renting rooms or houses in the vicinity. We would like you to know that this is an ongoing need, as you might hear of something.

We are freelance academics, in effect a residential college, although living in separate houses for the time being. Eventually we are aiming to expand to a larger campus with a dining facility and live-in staff, but at present it is convenient if we expand in separate houses within Cuddesdon, and we do not want to tie up capital in house property at the moment.

The reason we are outside the University is that we are not in tune with the modern ideology, and it is difficult to get university appointments without being left-wing, apart from any other considerations. As the ideology gains ground, it has become even more difficult for us to expand our operations, as our main source of funding is from investment, not from jobs or pensions, and one of the aspects of the ideology is that it extols the norm and makes no room for exceptions. Nevertheless, we are respectable in an old fashioned middle-class way.

In fact we are experienced and sophisticated investors, as I started trying to make money to compensate for the loss of a university career over fifty years ago. I started with no capital but over the years, as my present associates joined me, we have become well-informed about investment newsletters, to the best of which we still subscribe. On the other hand we regard ‘normal, sensible’ investment, as advised by banks and accountants, as risky and vulnerable – as many have found to their detriment of recent years as the government has assailed building society deposits and pension funds.

At best, managed funds are usually pedestrian, and a good deal of the benefit is eaten up in management fees.

It was the change of social outlook which led to the credit crunch, started by the sub-prime lending crisis in America.

We not only need to expand our operations, but also to accommodate visitors who might become permanent associates. Since we have been in Cuddesdon, we have had three, from America, Sweden and Slovenia, and although none have become permanent, we are likely to go on getting such visitors.

Our having visitors from a variety of countries arises from the fact that the books we have published are widely read throughout the world, although they are suppressed and censored in this country and we are no longer invited to express our views on broadcasts. If we could get more apartments or houses with spare rooms, it would be easier for us to have more visitors who might stay longer.

Anyway, if you ever do hear of a room or house going vacant nearby, we would be very glad to know about it.

Modern society is becoming increasingly hostile to those who have been able to keep themselves alive and healthy into later life without the aid of the state. People may like to consider the idea of moving to Cuddesdon, or nearby, well in advance of retirement age. They could do some voluntary work for us and perhaps join in on some of the smaller business projects, in anticipation of more full-scale involvement at a later stage.

Why reparation is due to Charles McCreery

Throughout my life I have often seemed to be in a ‘secret court’ situation in which everyone knew that I had been condemned in some way, but without my being able to find out what it was. The same thing sometimes happened to people who became, or might have become, associates in my enterprise. As an illustration of this, the following is an extract from a letter which I wrote to the biographer of Charles McCreery’s father, General Sir Richard McCreery, about events that took place in 1965. (Some of this material was previously blogged in 2010.)

It is probable that widespread slanders had been spread about me and my incipient research institute from the time I was thrown out in 1957, but one seldom had direct evidence.

However, it happened that one of our Consultants, Graham Weddell, a physiology lecturer at Oxford, rang me a year or more after Charles McCreery had graduated in 1964, at which time he (Charles) had called a temporary halt to communication with his family so as to recover from the run-down state he had got into as a result of his mother’s constant pestering.

Invitation to Dr Charles McCreery to attend the 

Service to Celebrate the 60^th Anniversary of the 

Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Dr Weddell sometimes seemed a somewhat tactless person, who revealed inside information, perhaps to gain the confidence of the person to whom he was talking. On this occasion, he said, ‘They are making an awful lot of fuss about your research assistant.’

I was nonplussed and thought of various part-time workers we had employed whom I had not known very well, and wondered what any of them might have done.

‘Can’t I at least know who it is you are talking about?’

Weddell seemed to hesitate. ‘Well, he has a very important father and his father is beside himself about his drug-taking.’

‘You mean Charles McCreery, son of General McCreery?’ I said, surprised. ‘There is no question of his having ever taken drugs.’

After a bit more reiteration of this, Weddell seemed to accept it and said that it must have arisen from the association of ideas between parapsychology and drug-taking.

I had reservations about this, because when some really damaging slander or piece of hostility against us was revealed, and we gave our side of it, people always found it easy to brush it aside with, ‘Oh, it’s just the subject’ (‘the subject’ being parapsychology). Actually I thought that was a rationalisation, and the reasons for the hostility were more profound. But I went along with the idea on this occasion, partly to show that we did not regard ourselves as part of some ‘parapsychological’ population.

‘I suppose it has not helped that Steve Abrams [an American parapsychologist who had a research organisation in Oxford] has been in the papers recently,’ I said. ‘He has been going to the Home Office to tell them that marijuana ought to be legalised since he claims it is an aid to creativity for writers.’

I asked who had been saying these things about Charles, and Weddell gave me the names of three people whom Charles subsequently proceeded to tax with it by phone: Oliver Van Oss (headmaster of Charterhouse), John Butterworth (Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University) and Sir Folliott Sandford (Registrar of Oxford University).

Having had experience of such situations in the past, I advised Charles to immediately ring the people whose names I had obtained, before Weddell had time to warn them. Charles did so, and had conversations with the three people [see Charles's account of the conversations here], and finally with his father, General McCreery. Charles told his father of what he had gathered from his conversations and asked the General to account for his alleged part in the goings-on. Charles told me that, after a silence, his father answered that he refused to confirm or deny anything.

* * *

No attempt has been made by Charles’s family to reverse the financial effects of their slanders and disinheriting over the last 50 years. His brothers and sister did nothing to stop the slanders although they must have known perfectly well that they were baseless. They, and their children, have all benefited from the disinheriting.

When we heard that General McCreery’s biographer was about to start writing a book about him, we hoped that this would make Charles’s family think that they should set their house in order before attention was drawn to the General’s life, but they did not do this. Instead, both his brothers approached Charles with disingenuous attempts to embark on social interaction as if nothing had gone wrong in the past that needed to be set right.

I have suggested to the McCreerys that buying a house advertised at £500K, in the name of Charles, would indicate a wish on the part of his family to start making reparation to him for the damage to his prospects that was done, and continues to be done, by slander and disinheritance. This amount is almost certainly far less than the present value of the Chelsea flat which Charles’s mother, Lady McCreery, left to his sister in her will; a will from which Charles was excluded. Our current enquiries show that the value of such a flat at Cranmer Court in Chelsea is not less, and probably more, than £800K, this being the current market value of a one-bedroom flat there. In fact, the flat which was left to his sister appears to have had at least two bedrooms.

It should not be overlooked that, deprived of financial support as we are, the gift of a house would need to be accompanied by a gift of money which could be invested to provide for the running costs, insurance and expenses of the house. £500K in cash could be added to bring the total up to £1m. This would indicate a serious intention to start making reparation to Charles, but would still be a small fraction of the benefits which would have accrued to him over the years by investment of the inheritances of which he was unjustly deprived.

An eyewitness account of the Coronation

This was originally posted 19 August 2010 under the title ‘Genes, prep schools and Eton’. It has been re-posted ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Coronation.

In connection with the absurd claims by Alan Ryan (former Warden of New College, Oxford) that it is 'crazy' to look for a genetic element in determining intellectual ability, I may comment that I have never known, or known about, a family in which the innate variations in IQ and other aptitudes between the various members were not very definitely recognised by both parents and siblings. My colleague Charles McCreery was decidedly the most precocious of his family, although some of the others had IQs well above average, and his precocity aroused hostility and obstruction even within his own family.

Photograph of Charles McCreery
taken by Hay Wrightson, London,
at the time of the Coronation, 1953.

Below is an article by Charles (written when he was 11) which was published in the magazine* of his preparatory school after he had been a page at the Coronation. It aroused agitated reactions, and mockery of the vocabulary he had used, perhaps partly because it was accidentally published with no adult editing or alterations, so that it was unmistakable evidence of Charles’s precocity.

His form master was agitated to find that Charles had handed it in to the headmaster – ‘Oh, but you were supposed to show it to me first’ – and the headmaster, perhaps assuming that it had already been edited, published it in the magazine with no alterations at all. (The spelling, as well as the vocabulary, was all Charles’s own.)

On seeing the article, his mother also became agitated and asked him repeatedly if he had written it entirely without help. Was he sure he had? Really sure? She reverted to this issue so often that Charles started to feel guilty, as if he must have done something wrong.

At about this time his mother was colluding with his headmaster, who was also hostile to him, to prevent him from taking the scholarship exam for Eton, as it had always been assumed that he would. This was allegedly to spare him ‘stress’, but actually ensured that he would get nothing positive out of his time at Eton.

Scholars at Eton were in a different position from the others. Although a bit looked down upon socially, as they included some boys whose parents could not have afforded to pay the fees, they were the only ones in whose case it was regarded as socially acceptable to work; so it was really a necessary position for someone like Charles who had strong academic inclinations. Everyone who was not a scholar at Eton was expected to manifest indifference and to be interested only in sporting activities.

MY CORONATION EXPERIENCES

Acting as page to Lord Alanbrooke at the Coronation was a wonderful experience for me as it is a thing I will remember all my life and I will be able to tell my children when I grow up.

I met a lot of very famous people such as Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister and the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, whom I thought was wonderful in the way he managed everything alone and yet remained calm and impassive. I was also greatly struck by the demeanour of our Queen who too remained cheerful yet dignified.

The music was very moving and impressive, with a choir of 400, an orchestra of sixty and a large organ. The service began with the Psalm "I was glad when they said unto me", some of the verses of which I learnt during Scripture.

I got to the Abbey on Coronation Day at 6 a.m. in the morning, and had to wait, in the specially built annexe, about four hours with nothing to do but watch and wait, in rather uncomfortable clothes, for the arrival of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret. At last the Queen arrived, amid cheers from the people, and, after about ten minutes interlude, took up her place in the already formed procession for the entering of the Abbey. I myself did not carry a coronet because Lord Alanbrooke, being Lord High Constable, and the Earl Marshal, have two pages and my partner, being older than me, carried it instead. Beside me were four other pages, all but one carrying coronets and not far behind them the Queen herself with her six maids of honour carrying her train. On either side of the nave, west of the screen, were tiers of specially constructed seats. Although these people had a wonderful view of the procession in and out of the Abbey they saw nothing of what went on in the Theatre. My parents however were lucky and had seats on the top right of the peers who are on the right of the dais in the centre of the Theatre, on which is the real throne, and saw practically everything. When my row of pages reached the dais four of us turned to the left and one to the right; I turned to the left and proceeded up a gangway between the lovely blue velvet chairs in which the peeresses were seated. About half way through the ceremony, at a signal given by our "Goldstick", all the pages walked back down the gangway, carrying their coronets, and delivered them with a bow, to their respective peers and returned to the steps where they had been sitting. I, however, did not have to do this as my partner went by himself while I remained seated. At the historic moment when the Archbishop, Dr. Fisher, placed the crown on our beautiful Queen's head, all the peers and peeresses put on their coronets, (some of which were so small that they had to be kept on with hair combs, elastic etc.), to the sound of a fanfare of trumpets and great guns being fired from the Tower of London.

At the end of the service, all the pages walked to their peers and formed up for the procession out, to the triumphant music of the National Anthem.

C.A.S. McCreery, (aged 11).

* Cothill House Magazine, Vol. LXIX, September 1953, pp.17-18.

Statement by Charles McCreery: ‘With regard to Dr Green’s piece introducing my contemporaneous account of the Coronation service, and which describes my mother’s reaction to my essay, I can vouch for its accuracy since it is based on accounts I have given Dr Green over the years concerning this episode, and I read over her account before she published it.’

We appeal for funding to enable Dr Charles McCreery to continue and extend his Oxford doctoral research into hallucinatory experiences in normal people, which would have practical and theoretical implications both for the fields of psychopathology and for the philosophy of perception.

Mother Joseph of the Ursulines

text of a letter about the headmistress of my convent school, the Ursuline High School in Ilford, who later became head of the Ursuline order in England

Mother Joseph Powell

Thank you very much for the photograph of Reverend Mother Joseph Powell. I certainly remember her with very much that expression on her face.

She was sufficiently exceptional (and old-fashioned) to come near to giving me the chance in life which I needed to have; but not exceptional enough to stand by me against the opposition which was aroused.

My father was often blamed for wanting me to have a chance in life, but in fact it was not he, but the Reverend Mother, who proposed that I should take the School Certificate exam at the last chance before the age limit came into force.

Being prevented from taking the School Certificate exam left me in a terrible position from which I have never been able to recover, although my position now is less bad than it might be. But the harm done to the lives of my parents was never remedied, although I was always trying to improve my position by building up capital sufficiently to allow me to do so.

Potential supporters or associates could come to live nearby, perhaps by buying a holiday home in the first instance. Cuddesdon is a pleasant hilltop village with clean air and good views of countryside, accessible to Oxford and the main road to London.

Many thanks again for the photograph.

Margaret Thatcher and the BBC

Where she [Margaret Thatcher] did not think she was among friends … she scarcely made the effort to convert anyone. Most Leaders of the Opposition take great pains to woo the BBC: not so Mrs Thatcher. In her demonology, the BBC was the very heart of the pinko-liberal conspiracy which was dragging Britain down. The Director-General, Ian Trethowan – a good friend of Ted Heath – insists that the broadcasters were not ill-disposed towards her. But she certainly believed she was venturing into hostile territory: ‘the lady arrived with all guns firing, she showed scant interest in, let alone tolerance of, the editors’ problems and berated them on their failings over a wide area, particularly their coverage of Northern Ireland.’ Mrs Thatcher came into office in May 1979 already determined to bring the BBC to heel. (John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer’s Daughter, Jonathan Cape, 2000, p.408)

Margaret Thatcher

John Campbell seems to suggest that Margaret Thatcher was mistaken in her attitude to the BBC. Actually she was right in identifying it as a central element in the ‘pinko-liberal’ movement that was ‘dragging Britain down’. The use of the word ‘conspiracy’ is unhelpful, as it deflects attention from what was clearly going on, to insoluble questions about who originated these tendencies, who said what explicitly to whom, and so on.

Communists knew that in taking over a country it was important to infiltrate its centres of influence. Marxist ideas were in evidence when Margaret Thatcher was at Oxford in the 1940s; and active exponents of them at the BBC interacted with like-minded Oxford academics.

Dame Janet Vaughan was already Principal of Somerville College, and Mary Adams was Head of Television Talks at the BBC, both of them committed Fellow Travellers, as communist sympathisers were then called.

A decade later, when I was at Somerville, the ideological revolution had progressed; the Labour landslide and Education Act of 1945 signalled the onset of the Welfare State.

From the start, the forces of collectivism and egalitarianism scarcely even hinted at their real objectives. One needed extensive experience of what results were being brought about in practice to see that a far more extreme and well worked out agenda was being acted upon, overriding previous principles of respect for factual objectivity, for an individual’s right to make decisions about his own affairs, or for individual differences in ability, and so on. This, however, happened without the previously accepted set of principles having been explicitly rejected.

Mary Adams

Mary Adams of the BBC was the mother of a friend of mine at Somerville, so that I often visited her house. On one such occasion, hearing my father's voice on the telephone when he came to pick me up, Mary Adams said dismissively, ‘He sounds very common’. She did not invite him in to hear his interesting views on education in East London, of which as headmaster of a primary school he had direct experience. The only times she spoke to people with accents as common (or commoner) than my father's was when they were members of the Labour Cabinet and hence freely welcome at her tea parties.

Of course, the people I have described as ‘communists’ were usually careful not to identify themselves as such. Like the Fabians, radical socialists in sympathy with communist ideology had to proceed slowly and cautiously. They might agree with every element of the Marxist perspective, but being described as a communist has typically been controversial, and was therefore to be avoided. Rejecting innate ability, inheritance, private capital, inequality of outcome (at least for others), and the idea of anyone having servants, people such as Mary Adams nevertheless had to call themselves ‘socialists’ and wait patiently until the things they believed in came to be regarded as harmless and normal, indeed barely ‘socialist’ at all – which they duly did.

E. Nesbit and the Fabian Society - a topsy-turvy world

Extract from Five Children and It:

[The Psammead to Jane] ‘Just wish, will you, that you may never be able, any of you, to tell anyone a word about Me.’

‘Why?’ asked Jane.

‘Why, don’t you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They’d get hold of me, and they wouldn’t wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they’d ask for a graduated income-tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy. Do wish it! Quick!’

Anthea repeated the Psammead’s wish ...

(E. Nesbit, Five Children and It, Puffin Books 1959, pp.213-214)

Edith Nesbit wrote a number of highly popular children's books, under the name ‘E. Nesbit’. Five Children and It, first published in 1902, is about children who find a Sand-fairy, or Psammead (a small furry creature which is able to grant wishes) in a gravel pit.

Edith Nesbit was a founder-member of the Fabian Society, dedicated to social reforms in a generally socialist direction, so she may well have been in sympathy with the developments which the Psammead deplores as likely to turn the world topsy-turvy.

The Fabian Society took its name from a Roman general* noted for his delaying tactics, and its motto was ‘Festina Lente’ (hasten slowly). Its logo was a tortoise. The Fabian Society was soon superseded by other socialist societies with a more aggressive and collectivist approach, which eventually led to the Welfare State in 1945.

By now we have all the social reforms which the Psammead would have liked to avoid (and more), Western civilisation is on the verge of collapse, but almost no one would question the desirability of ‘free’ secondary education, of the vote depending only on reaching a certain age, or of graduated income tax, as well as of miscellaneous ‘benefits’.

The national health service had not yet been thought of in 1902, and Nesbit does not mention it in the extract quoted. But it was not difficult to predict that reforms of this kind, once they started to be made, could never be reversed (Margaret Thatcher’s ‘ratchet effect’) and would eventually ruin any society which adopted them.

* Fabius Maximus