Competitions nos. 141A and 141B: results

Another new judge, Beverley Nichols, (who had just published his classic Up the Garden Path), sets a quite badly-phrased competition, but this is the gist. Beaverbrook has sent James Douglas not (as he thinks) Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, but Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford by accident. Douglas, who has been the butt of parodies in these competitions before, was the editor of the Sunday Express, and known for his acerbic reviews and editorials, and his campaigns against obscene books, The Well of Loneliness in particular. Beaverbrook has asked for the headline ‘A Book That Britain Should Burn’. (The attack on Hall in 1928 had been headlined ‘A Book That Britain Should Ban’, and concluded ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’ The key line in The Well of Loneliness is ‘they were not divided that night’. Strong meat.)

Actually, although the setting is a mess, this is a competition that could be set now. In fact Nichols feels that not many readers have heard of Douglas (we know this is not true), and that the relatively light postbag is possibly because it is impossible to parody a parody. He quotes a Douglas line, ‘Mars is the Moloch of Motherhood’, an opening line, but to what, alas, I don’t know. It certainly augurs badly.

The first prize goes to William Bliss, and the second to Non Omnia.

I think these two are both brilliant. 141B also promises fun – six celebrities are banned from entry through the pearly gates by St. Peter. What witty remarks did they use to get in? The six are: Edith Sitwell, Gandhi, Noel Coward (a friend of Nichols), Winston Churchill, Bernard Shaw and Mayor Walker (Jimmy Walker was the mayor of New York from 1926 to 1932, until September 1st, when he stepped down in the face of corruption scandals. At the time, he was In Europe, keeping out of the way of any charges). But Nichols describes the entries as ‘third rate quibbling’, declines to give a prize, manages an honourable mention for Pibwob, and is prepared only to quote Cuniculus, who has Churchill saying ‘I have not yet worn a halo’.

 

 

Competition 140: results

A new young judge, John Collier, sets a competition which must hold some kind of record: the terms of the competition are longer than the sole winning entry, which is in any case disparaged. All the usual prize money – four guineas – is offered for the best attempt at coming up with six questions which might persuade a new dictator, conducting a viva with each of the country’s inhabitants, to keep the answerer on as one of the proposed 1,000,000 survivors of a cull (the rest are to be hanged, so this is jolly). I’d like to have been there when Collier proposed this one.

The report is necessarily lengthy. It is also quite grave. First Collier congratulates himself on how hard the competition is, then bemoans the difficulty of judging it. He is hoping, however, for some Machiavellian wit, something he doesn’t get. Several entrants come up with ‘Which six questions would you ask?’ Others try ‘gems’ such as ‘Are you Winston Churchill or Lord Beaverbrook?’ and even ‘Are you a virgin?’ He was, he admits (this is a ‘guess what’s in my head’ comp) hoping for questions that would suggest a Malthusian, internationalist outlook – and someone who likes the same art and literature. Weird.

The winner is W.G., who is not really commended – he gets four-and–a-half out of six. On the other hand, were four guineas (the largest prize yet offered) ever won by something so easy and tedious?

To rub salt into the wound, Collier says he wouldn’t pick W.G. …

Competitions 139A and 139B: results

Ernest Betts asks for an introduction (up to 250 words) to a new aerial Bradshaw (a Bradshaw was the annual and hefty guide to the times of trains, connections between lines, and a) retained the name of Bradshaw though he had died in 1853 and b) survived until 1961: I can just remember it, and its pages of addenda). This didn’t strike me as a very promising subject for wit or humour, and I’m afraid I was right. ‘Few in number and not extraordinary in quality,’ is Betts’ laconic comment. The winner is J.H.G.Gibbs, and the runner-up is Guy Hadley.

The B competition was for a ‘Song On The Day I Was Born’, providing you were Masefield (a bit of a WR favourite for parody), Mussolini, Bertrand Russell, or Noel Coward.

Almost nobody goes for Coward or Russell, several for Masefield, but almost everyone for Il Duce.  Many says Betts, treated Mussolini ‘flippantly’, which is a ‘political crime of the first order’. I’m not so sure. The winner is nearly T.E. Casson, but Casson makes the mistake of introducing T.S. Eliot into his Mussolini song. The winner is Cottontail, and the runner-up is W.A.Rathkey.

Mussolini had been power for over 7 years at this stage. His invasion of Abyssinia was another three years in the future.