Indoor Sportsmanship

The keenest, most widespread quotation hunt in the history of a nation of ardent quotation pullers and hunters raged last week all over the British Empire. King George started it by winding up his globe-circling Christmas Day broadcast to his peoples thus:

"I feel we may all find a message of encouragement in the lines which in my closing words I should like to read to you:

"I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year: 'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown,' and he replied, 'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.'

"May that Almighty hand guide and uphold us all."

Promptly in Ottawa bookish Canadian Governor General Baron Tweedsmuir and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, both adept quotation spotters, expressed themselves as "most interested in the authorship of the quotation," but stumped. Cried Canadian Parliamentary Librarian Francis Hardy: "I have looked in every known work of appropriate reference without finding it."

George Bernard Shaw, rung up by London papers, admitted himself baffled, chirped: "Hold on a moment while I ask a friend who ought to know." The friend did not. Neither did H. G. Wells: "I have never heard the quotation before." Said learned Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge since 1912: "I had no idea of its origin."

That even His Majesty had no idea who wrote what he quoted presently appeared. A royal secretary at Sandringham explained that "somebody" had pointed out the quotation to the King when it appeared in a letter to the London Times at the start of the war, but this letter did not say who authored the lines, and George VI simply used them without further research. The London Times readily turned up the letter, but it was only a casual epistle from a Mrs. J. C. M. Allen, of Clifton. Bristol, who said last week that she copied the lines from a 1938 Christmas card sent her by a Miss Dorothy Glover, also of Bristol. Miss Glover said her card was based on lines scribbled by her late father, Dr. Richard Glover, on the back of a post card. It appeared that Dr. Glover, onetime President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain took down the lines after he heard them recited by a Mme Katherine Gerrish. now a teacher of singing. She was quite unable last week to remember where she got them.

As this indoor sport continued. His Majesty's puzzled Poet Laureate, famed John Masefield, whose yearly stipend is -L-127 ($508), kept mum as a Cornish oyster, but Mrs. Masefield admitted: "My husband has been approached on the subject, and the quotation in his opinion is the work of a modern poet writing in Biblical style. From the style he thought it might possibly be written by G. K. Chesterton. He went to considerable trouble to try to trace the words, but without success." Sir Edward Denison Ross, the eminent British expert on Oriental literature, guessed that the words must come from an unpublished work, because "they are so good" that if they had been published the author would certainly be known.

The hunt narrowed down when an anonymous telephone call to the British Broadcasting Corp. put the finger on a Miss Minnie L. Haskins. Every effort was promptly made to get in touch with Minnie, for by this time BBC officials were being harried by an avalanche of queries from baffled quotation hunters who included such savants as Harold Idris Bell, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and the Very Reverend Walter Robert Matthews, Dean of St. Paul's.

Minnie was finally located in Crowborough, Sussex by the London Daily Telegraph & Morning Post. She proved to be a grey-haired spinster who recently taught in the Social Science Department of the London School of Economics. According to the Telegraph, Minnie some 25 years ago published privately in aid of an Indian charity a book of verses called The Desert, and the lines quoted by His Majesty are in her verse God Knows. After further inquiring, the BBC challenged the Telegraph's, God Knows theory, went on the air with an announcement that the lines occur not in any verse but in the prose introduction to The Desert--of which nobody seemed able to find a copy.

"My recollection of the circumstances in which the lines were written are vague," said Miss Haskins primly. 'T didn't hear the King's actual broadcast Christmas Day but I heard the quotation read in a summary of the speech. I thought the words sounded familiar and began to ponder where I had heard them before. Suddenly it dawned on me that they were from my little book."

Meanwhile, even the official German radio had taken a clumsy crack at quotation spotting. Bellowed Nazi Broadcaster Hans Fritsche, apropos of His Majesty's address: "An unholy cause cannot be transformed into a holy one simply by disguising it behind a quotation from the Bible!"

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