"Game Gaffers"

The behavior of the Oxford Union last week was more than a campus scandal. To the whole rugged, wealthy British upper middle class (not to mention the peerage & landed gentry) it was a national calamity. They had known that the Oxford Union, that famed debating society which is the traditional school for British statesmen, has been increasingly attended by studious greasy grinds, apt to be Laborites. But what indeed was the Empire coming to when the Union sank so low last week as to adopt by a vote of 275-to-153 this proposition:

Resolved: that under no circumstances will we fight for King and Country.

Cambridge's reaction was immediate. In every quad from Trinity to Jesus up went the cry "CANCEL THE BOAT RACE!"--the most stinging rebuke that undergraduate minds could conceive. Officials of the Cambridge Union, second only to the Oxford in Empire prestige, described the 275 pacifist Oxonians as "game gaffers." *Promptly President F. M. Hardy of the Oxford Union received a box containing 275 white feathers. They had been sent, London newspapers said, "from a women's college." Next day a second box brought 275 more white feathers. "Neither consignment," stiffly announced the President of the Union, "came from a women's college." Meanwhile 25-year-old Lord Stanley of Alderley and five other members of the Oxford Union appealed to life members all over Britain, urged them to gather on the night of March 2 and wipe their Union clean by voting to expunge the pacifist resolution from its minutes.

As things turned out Oxford did not have to wait that long. Night after Lord Stanley's appeal 30 broad and beefy Oxonians gathered outside the Union's double doors during a meeting, put shoulders to the doors and burst them in.

Bearing down on the Union's Secretary, the 30 Green Shirts seized the minute book and ripped out its pacifist pages. Carrying their prize to the Martyrs' Memorial, the Gothic needle opposite Balliol College,* they solemnly burned the resolution against defending King & Country.

"Mr. President! Mr. President!" taunted Union Member His Highness Prince Leonid Lieven (nephew-in-law of onetime Lord Mayor of London Sir Kynaston Studd). "Mr. President, although you may not be willing to fight for King & Country, I do think you might have put up some sort of show for the Union's minute book."

Patriotic Prince Leonid's country was Imperial Russia; his grandfather was Grand Master of Ceremonies at the Tsarist Court.

*Defined in dispatches from Cambridge as "men who play dominoes and wear their hair long and wool next to their skin in warm weather." *Erected in 1841 in memory of Protestant Bishops Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, the Martyrs' Memorial is decorated with domestic crockery by Oxford undergraduates almost as often as Princeton's Christian Student is defiled with empty gin bottles.

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