Xmas (!) cheer to one and all

Spectator, The, Dec 14/Dec 21, 2002 by Arnold, Wallace

Wallace Arnold looks back on the happy days when our Christmas issue carried a bridge column by Joseph Goebbels

CHRISTMAS is always a very saddening time of year for our squat confreres on the New Statesman, whose luxury goods issue in December is invariably dominated by quarter-- page advertisements for Diane Arbus calendars from the Hayward Gallery and cut-price `toilet ducks' (dread item!). But for The Spectator Christmas has always been a hugely enjoyable season, awash with the promise of good claret, made all the more agreeable by an array of contributors offering a marvellously convivial mixture of sparkling anecdote and often highly provocative (!) opinion.

'Twas ever thus, Lord Copper! Thumbing one's way through old Christmas issues of The Spectator, that sense of wellbeing floats back, even from the most trying times. The latter part of the 1930s, for instance, is generally regarded as a thoroughly tiresome period in our nation's checkered history. But the 1938 Christmas issue of The Spectator proves such a view quite unjustified. It positively fizzes with goodwill, perhaps not to all mankind but certainly to like-minded sections of it.

The leading article, penned by contributing editor William Joyce, is a spirited defence of Santa Claus (`he represents the spirit of a New Britain, free of decadence'), calling on him to exchange his `alas, somewhat vulgar' red costume for something more in keeping, such as a black shirt with tight leather breeches. This Christmas issue boasts an early article, `The Year Ahead', by the young William Rees-- Mogg, who was to make such a name for himself in the years to come. `The possibility of war in Europe is highly remote and has, I think, been greatly overplayed,' he predicts. `And Mr Chamberlain can look forward to many comfortable years presiding over a country at peace with the world.' This sunny view, spot-on in all but the essentials, is echoed by many other contributors, among them the Marchioness of Londonderry. In her review of George Orwell's new book The Road to Wigan Pier, Lady Londonderry points out that in her view, `like many Old Etonians' the author `has a fairly sizeable chip on his shoulder'. She adds that `if Mr Orwell had ever bothered to set foot in Wigan [he] would have discovered a "perfectly decent" fishmonger only a couple of hundred yards from the Pier, as well as a factory to the west that manufactured "quite excellent galoshes". Why on earth,' she wonders, `do many of our fashionable left-wing authors choose to look at the world through spectacles marked "disgruntled" when there is such gaiety to be had?'

Coincidentally, question no. 41 in the 1938 Christmas quiz involves a reference to the `aristocratic inventor of a waterproof shoe-covering'. The answer, printed in small type at the back of the magazine, is, of course, `Lord Galosh, who originally devised the eponymous item as a thinner alternative to the sou'wester. But it did not fit, and only after his death was it adapted as footwear.'

The quiz - oft solved around a blazing log fire after a generous tuck-in! - has long been the mainstay of The Spectator Christmas. From 1951 to 1965, it was compiled by 'WW', who, it was to emerge in my ground-breaking tome Repast Without Repetition: A Concise History of The Spectator, was the nom de plume of none other than the Duchess of Windsor. Taking a fine-tooth comb to her collected quizzes, it is possible to detect a small strand of discord in her marriage. For instance, `The Duke of Windsor' is the correct answer not only to the 1954 brain-teaser, `Spineless royal weakling denies glamorous wife sufficient diamonds', but also the 1963 tie-breaker, `Silly little man in perfectly hideous plus-fours'.

Incidentally, in that same issue in `The Year Ahead' William Rees-Mogg predicts that `young people will shortly be turning their backs on the current "rock-and-roll" fad and returning in their millions to the more profound pleasures to be had from classical music, particularly the string quartet. Spats, too, will make a comeback.' There would, he added, be `no call' for a record titled 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' as `hand-holding between consenting adults, never popular at the best of times, seems to me most unlikely to catch on'.

Christmas never went out of fashion in The Spectator, even in the war years, throughout which, it should be remembered, it remained the only British magazine to boast a regular Bridge column by Joseph Goebbels. Nor was Christmas neglected in the Swinging Sixties, a decade so called because it was the period in which the then editor of The Spectator, Henry Brooke, was to spearhead his remarkable campaign for the retention of capital punishment. Society was changing, but The Speccie was still a periodical that kept up with the times: the 1966 Christmas Diary was by Mr Reginald Kray, who penned a delightful paragraph congratulating the Duchess of Devonshire on `an eminently civilised Xmas cocktail party' at Chatsworth, a `sumptuous mansion filled with pricey items' that `simply cries out for truly professional protection'.