Lords and Dukes And Journalists

February 4, 2002

Paul:

Lord Wellington? I assume you mean the Duke of Wellington. Dukes rank well above lords. In fact, dukes top the hierarchy of the British aristocracy, which has done so much to disprove the theory that intelligence, talent, personality, physical competence, and mental stability are inherited characteristics.

The Iron Duke, as he was not so affectionately known, may or may not have said the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. But he is reliably reported to have described his troops as ``the scum of the earth'' and to have said, concerning those same troops, ``I don't know whether they frighten the enemy, but by God they frighten me.'' I suspect it's a good thing the Duke lived before the era of the fragmentation grenade and the practice of rolling one into the tent of any officer who showed too little regard for the men serving under him.

[Editor's note: for elucidation, see A Wellington Footnote.]

Incidentally, the web site you use as a source for doubting the provenance of the ``playing grounds of Eton'' remark is itself somewhat suspect. The reasoning behind that doubt makes sense. Like so much else the English would have you believe is a tradition older than Hadrian's Wall, the public school myth dates back only to Victoria's reign, or starting about the time of the American Civil War. So the glorification of English public schools was at best just getting under way when the Duke died, in 1852. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did Eton and the like gain their reputation as the crucible in which the character of Britain's youth was forged, along with an obsession with bowel movements and a taste for sodomy.

However, also concerning the Duke, that site says:

J.W. Croker was a politician and journalist who was indeed a contemporary of the Duke of Wellington. He died just five years after him, in 1857. Now, British journalists are justly famous for their ability to report marvelous things from places where they have never actually set foot. But so far none of them has reported anything thirty years after he died.

I suspect the citation refers to Croker's voluminous diaries and letters, publication of which took up much of the nineteenth century, probably continued into the twentieth, and for all I know may still be going on. What Croker lacked in talent, insight, knowledge, integrity, and taste, he made up for in sheer bulk.

Little of his output has survived except for those diaries and correspondence. They're useful to historians of his era, since Croker knew everyone. He was active in the politics of his time -- among his many dubious achievements, he was the man who persuaded what was then formally the Tory party to rename itself the Conservative party. A reasonably objective biography of nineteenth century figures describes him as an ``MP, political manipulator, and propagandist,'' and notes ``he lost political influence later in his career when he became the toady of the man in power.''

The neglect into which much of his prose has fallen is perhaps explained by another of his contemporaries, the historian Lord Macaulay, in his review of one Croker work:

Little has changed in British journalism from Croker's day to our own, expect that now few people bother remarking on the vast distance that separates what appears in most journalism from verifiable fact, generally accepted knowledge, and simple reality.

Pedantically yours,

Larry

There are more Larry King Letters available.