Drunk interpreters
I promised some book reviews, but you'll have to wait a bit yet, as I decided to read all four books simultaneously and haven't finished any (I gave up on the John Lloyd book because it is desperately dull).The biography of Anthony Eden, by DR Thorpe, is excellent. It was commissioned by his widow, Lady Avon, to revive Eden's reputation, so it is sympathetic is no surprise. I've also read every bit but the Suez bit, so the worst is yet to come. Even so the picture it portrays of Anthony Eden is so positive one almost wants to dig him up and try to get him to stand as Tory leader.
The book is also good for political anecdotes. One funny one is when Kruschchev visited Britain in 1956. Misunderstandings were rife -- when Lord Cilcennin hosted a lunch at the Painted Hall in Greenwich, the Russian foreign minister thought it was his own private residence. Kruschchev thought Holyrood House was a distant outpost for retired peasants (in fact they were senior members of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland). The culmination of this was a luncheon at Carlton Gardens, where the Foreign Office interpreter fell ill, and was replaced by one who was drunk. Lord Lambton was introduced to Kruschchev as a 'shooting lord', leading Kruschchev to believe he was about to be executed.
Things took a turn for the worse after lunch, with the interpreter even more trollied. Krushchev's first sentence was translated as 'He says he is pleased to be here but if we are pleased to have him is another matter'. When Krushchev said that Britain and Russia had much in common, the interpreter added 'don't you believe it, we haven't got 8 million prisoners in Siberia!'. More followed in a similar vein, before the interpreter was ushered out of the room. Strict instructions were given by the foreign secretary that Eden should never hear about it.
Another point of note is how attitude to divorcees have changed. Eden was the first (and still the only) divorced Prime Minister. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the egregious Geoffrey Fisher, said,
'It is a distressing thing that Anthony Eden should wish to remarry. As to the divorce itself I am sure there is no moral error on the part of Anthony Eden, it was a flat refusal by his wife to be married to a politician or live in England. Thus the stigma which attaches to Anthony Eden is not, so to speak, in the ordinary sense of a moral stigma, but if one may put it like that, an ecclesiastical stigma of departure from a true understanding of what the Church Law requires'(my italics). The Church Times ran a leader drawing comparisons with the Abdication and declaring how far public standards had fallen since 1936. The Manchester Guardian retaliated saying that the leader 'will rather make most of us gld that we do belong to a "pagan generation".
posted by Matthew @ 8/26/2004 09:22:00 PM
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