G eo f f re y A she’s column

A prophet ignored This year, articles and a memorial volume and a National Book League exhibition have recalled G.K. Chesterton. ‘GKC’ tried many kinds of writing —fiction, poetry, essays, history, biography. I suppose he is best known for his Father Brown stories, based on the brilliant notion that an intelligent priest, who had heard thousands of confessions, might be well equipped to solve crimes. But he was also a profound social critic and prophet, and the Centenary gave too little credit to that side of him. In particular almost nothing was said about the movement he launched. Over recent years, in fact, I doubt if anyone has seriously drawn attention to this, except myself at the London School of Non-Violence. Yet it rates more than a glance, and its near effacement from Chesterton’s image shows how a great exposer of modern society can be, in retrospect, cleaned up.

the best opening phrases of any book I know —‘The human race, to which so many of my readers belong’ —followed by a wildly funny and acute chapter on the Art of Prophecy. After which, Chesterton launches into a story of the future. His flamboyant, fantastic, wayward style can be off-putting, and it sometimes obscures the wisdom of what he says. Yet I have told this story in summary to young audiences and they were amazed that anyone could have imagined it so long ago.

Distributism, as he unwillingly called his published in 1904. It begins with one of movement, was a pioneer affirmation that Small is Beautiful. It was a protest against both forms of gigantism, Capitalist and Socialist, in the name of small property and devolution and co-operation and rural rebirth. It was an attempt to re-assert human beings against the systems that cut them down to fit. Distributism denounced the pseudo-battles of Right and Left, and never tried to break into politics. At its peak it was a light-hearted, convivial, do-ityourself affair. An account written before the 1960s described it as the last English movement whose members made up their own songs and sang them.

It never amounted to much. Its biggest success was not in its home country but in Nova Scotia, where a Distributist-inspired project rescued the fishing industry during the Great Depression. It also influenced Ralph Borsodi, later to be a major spokesman of intermediate technology. In England it suffered from several drawbacks, some still familiar to us, others less so. Against Chesterton’s wishes it was a personality cult. Also it was bound up top closely with the Catholic Church, or rather with the ideas of certain Catholic radicals, and ended up neither frankly religious nor frankly secular. It attracted types who slowly destroyed it —feuding sectarians, anti-Semites for whom the whole ‘System’ was a Jewish plot, noisy activists who turned out to be unemployable cranks under the impression that the way to start a community was to build a chapel. After Chesterton’s death in 1936 the movement slewed to the right and petered out.

Distributism will never revive in the form he gave it. But it deserves to be remembered as the protest of a man who saw deeper, much deeper, than such acclaimed prophets as H.G. Wells. And one of his own serio-comic novels, written at an earlier stage when his thoughts were still taking shape, makes a point which remains crucial today.

The Napoleon o f Notting Hill was

1984? The action starts, oddly enough, in 1984. But hardly an Orwellian 1984. England is pictured as not having altered much since Chesterton’s day. It has only become duller and more resigned. A drearily competent bureaucracy is in total control, because no one sees any point in rebelling. Consensus prevails. Everything local, original, eccentric is dead. For practical purposes everybody is much the same as everybody else. The head of state, with a few prerogatives of his own, is a king chosen by lot - a safe method, since the officialdom seems all-powerful anyhow, and as everybody is much alike it makes no difference who reigns.

Then a tiny flaw appears in the system. A new king is picked, Auberon Quin, a civil servant who has managed to retain an impish sense of humour. Just to restore a touch of fun, in a harmless way, he gives the London boroughs sham-medieval charters and civic rituals. He insists on their officials being called by titles like Lord High Provost and dressing up in special costumes. After a first wave of grumbling, this masquerade is tolerated, and the Establishment absorbs it.

But when it has been an accepted part of life for a decade or so, a second and larger flaw appears. A great road is to be built from Hammersmith Broadway to Westbourne Grove. Plannings, negotiations,

and compulsory purchase orders are pushed through, buildings are torn down to make way, and at last everything is ready except that the shopkeepers in one small street in Notting Hill refuse to sell out. They are backed by Notting Hill’s Provost, Adam Wayne, a young fanatic who has taken the royal jokes seriously and proclaims his readiness to ‘die for the sacred mountain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswater’.

Aided by a shopkeeper who plays wargames with model soldiers, Wayne organises his citizens as urban guerrillas. He routs every attempt to dispossess him, finally winning by a stratagem involving the water-tower on Campden Hill (now, alas, pulled down - a sad loss to London mythology). The heroic defence transforms the spirit of England. Local patriotism, local customs, local imagination and independence return. The King himself is won over.

For twenty years the new order flourishes. Notting Hill is honoured as the source of the revolution. But at last its Council turns imperialist and tries to dictate to other boroughs. Wayne is still Provost. He knows that this betrayal of smallness is Notting Hill’s doom, but he is overruled, and forced to lead a hopeless war against Bayswater, North Kensington and Shepherd’s Bush. Old King Auberon joins him in a last stand in Kensington Gardens and both are killed.

Conformist dreariness Today, obviously, things have not turned out quite as they do in this extraordinary novel. Yet a large part o f the evil which we rebel against now is weirdly foreshadowed in it. The conformist dreariness of Chesterton’s 1984 is the dreariness which was closing in during the 1950s and early 60s, and is still very much a threat. The protests have come sooner, and without the same dramatic focus and violence, but with some of the same rallying-cries, the same symptoms.

What the Alternative Society lacks is not its Napoleon (from whom God preserve us) but its Notting Hill. Five years ago it looked as if Notting Hill itself might, in a way, fulfil even that part of the prophecy. However, I don’t think its moving spirits listened to my advice to read Chesterton. With the decline of London the spotlight is shifting, as GKC’s own vision did in his later years, towards the land and counties and holy places of England.

Somewhere, in some particular place, a recognised citadel of the new life will have to emerge. I am not thinking of a village UDI, or of the violence which Chesterton romanticised, but simply of a specific home, a centre, an exemplar. It need not be large, but it must exist, and it can only begin to exist through people in that place being ready to say so. To say not merely “We live differently” , but “We live differently here, and so long as we hold this sacred ground it is something other than the country around it. It is the first soil of re-awakened Albion.” £2