Tradition

Under the gauze of London's blue-grey November mist, the Portland stone buildings of Whitehall, the delicate tracery of trees in Parliament Square, the twin towers of Westminster Abbey all melted together to form a silver backdrop. Fresh sand strewn along the procession route made a golden carpet.

British coal production was off about 55 million tons since 1937; in many old mines, the coal face was three miles from pithead.

The Household Cavalry on gleaming chestnut horses flashed sabers, glinting silver. Behind them came the royal coach, drawn by four grey horses, with the driver and two footmen splashes of vivid scarlet above the deep maroon of the coachwork. Through the windows the crowds could see the King in an admiral's uniform, sitting erect and wooden-faced under his gold-peaked cap, while the Queen, with her plump, pink-and-white face, powder blue hat, grey-fawn furs, was all smiles and gracious waves. The Welsh Guards Band played God Save the King as the coach went by.

The Americans were powerful and uncomfortably unpredictable; the Russians were powerful and uncomfortably predictable.

As they had for 340 years, the Yeomen of the Guard, in white Elizabethan ruffs, flat hats with rosettes, and red-&-gold uniforms, poked tasseled halberds into corners of Westminster cellars, in the traditional "search" for conspiratorial descendants of Catholic Plotter Guy Fawkes.

Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Zionist terrorist organization, had threatened to extend its violence to the British Isles.

Chattering peers and peeresses, red-robed judges and black-robed bishops fell silent when the royal procession filed into the House of Lords, headed by heralds and medieval figures like the Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, Bluemantle Pursuivant and Clarenceux King-of-Arms.

In the King's speech, written by his Socialist Ministers, there was not much news. Electricity and inland transport would be nationalized, but the gas industry got a reprieve, and private ownership of steel mills might even draw a suspended sentence from Britain's Socialist masters.

Against all tradition, two M.P.s had insisted on debating the first reading of a traditional dummy bill against "clandestine outlawries," which is not debatable and never gets to a second reading. The Member for Rugby, Independent Will Brown, cried: "There probably was a time when [the Outlawries Bill] was by no means a formal matter and when the House, before it spoke its mind, may well have desired to have guarantees on the subject of outlawry. That form of outlawry has now gone, but there are many other forms of outlawry--and especially the closed shop--which I submit it would be appropriate to discuss now."

When the King and his coach had gone, the House of Commons got down to what was really on its mind: the "revolt" [strictly verbal] of Labor backbenchers, led by Richard Grossman and Tom Driberg, who think Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's policy too anti-Russian. Said Driberg: "I must warn the Foreign Secretary that . . . the people of this country will certainly not follow him to war now or in five years' time against Soviet Russia in partnership with the barbaric thugs of Detroit or the narrow imperialists of Washington or Wall Street."

This, too, was contrary to tradition. Through the centuries, the overwhelming majority of British M.P.s had voted as they talked, but Grossman & Co. let it be known that if Prime Minister Attlee forced the issue they would not vote to censure the Foreign Secretary. Socialist Attlee, as much a part of the British tradition as any Clarenceux King-of-Arms, promptly forced the issue--on an amendment sponsored by 58 Laborites who wanted a "softer" British foreign policy. When Attlee made the vote a question of confidence in the Government, none of the 58 voted for the amendment and it was beaten, 353-to-0.

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