On the importance of keeping historians distracted and the art of the wiffler

 Generally I feel I am the sort of chap who can get on with most folk. I can nod sagely while coves discuss the merits of the Fordson Model F tractor, compared to the Model N. I can endure sales of works and even hazard favourable comments about the Wives of Henry VIII, as viewed through the medium of crochet, to the extent of making encouraging remarks about the rendering of Katherine Howard’s detachable head to the tot who fashioned it. I can even stoically endure the opinions of taxi drivers viz the reason the government lavishes money on trains but keeps the roads ill-funded is to prevent people from travelling to the countryside to see things that would disturb them. I rather fancy the drivers compete to see what is the most outlandish view they can pass to the entrapped public and award a small prize on a daily basis. I do, however, find Hedlington, the Club’s Historian, a somewhat trying fellow.

The first vexation is that he will never give a simple answer to a question. Ask him about when the War of Jenkin’s Ear was and he will discourse at great length about the Colonial question, nascent free trade and the role of the emerging sense of national self before getting round to the interesting point about knife wielding Iberians chasing after plucky English merchant seamen. He also seems to the delight in the poo-pooing of treasured national beliefs. Apparently King Alfred was not a duffer when it came to cooking; the English people, as a whole, were not just impatiently hanging around for Thomas Cranmer to come along to make them Anglicans and Victorian factories were not that bad really, after all. When faced with popular representations of the past he also will loudly point out inconsistencies – for exampling exhorting us, usually prefaced with a derisive snort, to see the fact a cove on film has RFC buttons in 1918 after the RAF had been created, seeing this observation as somehow a triumph against the forces of universal wrongness, rather than pure bad manners.

I will give him his due; he is prepared to change his mind when new evidence is presented. Always seemed an odd thing that most historians get a bit sniffy about revisionism. Bit like maintaining it was Douglas Fairbanks in The Adventures of Robin Hood, then discovering it was Basil Rathbone all the time. A fellow should just fess up if he was wrong and apologise. Trouble is I can’t keep up. Is Field Marshall Haig a bloody bungler or military genius this week and is it acceptable to say Chamberlain was a short-sighted blighter or the cunning politico who prevented Hitler getting that war he wanted over the Sudetenland and helped build up the national defences just in time. Suppose it keeps them able to produce new books I can give to my nephew for Christmas and allows them appear of the wireless explaining how no one spotted the obvious flaw in what had been written before.

Trouble is the likes of Hedlington is they do take the whole blessed business far too seriously. A few of us had begun to wonder what would have happened if Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car had had a reverse gear. Chances are that that Princip fellow would have missed and all the actions which lead to the terrible events of the 4th August 1914, when Derbyshire collapsed twice against Essex, their minds on other things, would have never happened. I maintain that Douglas and Tremlin were a very useful opening pair and were quiet capable of taking 19 wickets between them in a day – Baggallay spoiling it all by being run out, while Sutton is firmly of the opinion it was events in Belgium that led them to be all out for 31 in the first innings.

Hedlington had a face like thunder and said History was not to be trifled with and such idle counter-factual speculation of ‘what ifs’ was nothing but a parlour game. I’ve always rather liked parlour games and after all, Boffins do this sort of thing all the time with thought experiments – maintaining the universe is made up of bits of string or that most of the stuff the cosmos is made from has been, as it were, lost down the back of the settee and can’t be seen and so is called Daft Matter. He wasn’t having any of it and a certain atmosphere pervaded the club for the rest of the day.

The gloom was not to be born but as I have learnt when faced with a strongly held enemy position, be it a Hunnish redoubt or the unreasoned opposition of Mrs The Hon Sec to some pet project, subtlety is often the best weapon to be deployed. As a youth I was a ‘wiffler’. Don’t seem to get many of them these days but the object of wiffling was this. A group of fellows would go into a library and in twenty minutes the winner would be one who could find the book which had the biggest space in time between being withdrawn by one borrower and the next. Books which had never been withdrawn or had only left the library once didn’t count. True wiffling never disturbed the peace of staff or browsers but I do confess the whoop of joy I gave in the Long Buckby Municipal branch when discovering a thirty seven year gap in demand for ‘Essays and Sermons of the Revd. Andrew Stevens during his time as Chaplin Home for Retired Gentle folk, Worthing’  nearly got me banned.

I approached Hedlington and suggested that it was about time a History of the Club was written, one of them red bounded and gold lettering jobs you give to visitors – what with the club being a bit short of the kind of folk craft the poor blighters normally receive when visiting a place for the first time and are gathering dust in drawing rooms wherever diplomats reside. He was as near to ecstatic as I have ever seen him. If I know my man, and I do, it may never be completed but if it is, its total disregard to the common interests of mankind in general and the reading public in particularly will see it so stuffed with footnotes, extensive irrelevant quotes and so lacking pictures and racy anecdotes as to be a wifflers dream. This may have brought us peace for a time.