The Eagle 1943 (Easter)

THE EAGLE rA :A4agazine SUPPORTED BY MEMBERS OF Sf John's College at,ITch. Ooll.lAb. • . Oe.mb. v 0 L U M E LII, Nos. 227 & 228 PRINTED AT THE' UNIVERSITY PRESS FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY MCMXLIII CONTENTS PAGE Portugal and the War 109 The annual Subscription is 4s. Life Subscription £5. Five Poem . 120 years' Subscription £I. The present double number contains Crete, 1941 121 matter covering the period from the Lent Term 1941 to the Ghost Hunting at Borley Rectory 121 Easter Term 1943 . Its price is fixed at 4s. Young England-A Cambridge Movement 125 Subscribers are requested to leave their addresses at the Poem . 128 College Office, and to give notice of any change. They are An Incident 129 also requested to give notice if they do not wish to continue to subscribe. Johniana 130 Book Reviews 130 ·Contributions for the next number should be sent at an College Chronicle: early date to the Editors of The Eagle, clo The College L.M.B.C. 136 Office, St John's College. Rugby Football 142 The Editors will welcome assistance in making the Chronicle Association Football 145 The Hockey Club 149 as complete a record as possible 6f the car,eers of members The Lawn Tennis Club 151 of the College. Eton Fives Club 152 The Athletic Club 152 The Squash Club 153 The Musical Society 155 The Adams Society . 157 WAR SERVICE The Classical Society 159 The Theological Society 161 The Editors would also be glad to receive notice of any The Natural Science Club 162 ' military or technical war appointments held by past or present The Law Society 164 members of the College, with the date of the appointment, The Chess Club 165 in order that a complete record may be made. The Medical Society 167 The College Savings Group 168 Notices should be sent to Mr G. W. Rawlinson at the College College Notes 169 Office. Obituary: Sir J oseph Larmor 186 Terrot Reaveley Glover 191 Francis Henry Colson 197 Herbert Leonard OIDey Garrett 200 Frank James AlIen 201 209 Roll of Honour 212 The Library 212 College Awards Portraits: facing p. 186 Sir Joseph Larmor 191 Terrot Reaveley Glover " 108 THE EAGLE THE EA·GLE Natural Sciences. George, J. K. D., Wellington College, for History. Molland, R., Devon port High Sc hool, for Hist ory. Owen, G., Pock �� lington Sc hool, for Hi story. Godwin, W. H., Lycee Fran�ais de Londres, for Modern Languages. Denman, G. R., Harrow County Sc hool, for VOL. LII June 1943 NOS.}227 & 228 Modern Languages. �� Exhibitions: Lewis, D., King Edward VI Sc hool, Birmingham, for Mathematics. Barraclough, P., CardiffHigh Sc hool, for Natural Sciences. Spence, ," M. P., St Paul's Sc hool, for Natural Sciences. Hale, J. R., Eastbourne Co llege, for History. Fry, P. J. M., Christ's Hospital, for Modern Lang uages. Cradock, P., Alderman Wraith's Sc hool, Spennymoor, for English. ,: . " I PORTUGAL AND THE WAR'1 By GILBERT H. PHELPS (This article received early in 1943) HEN was you are actually living there you are inclined to laugh Wat the romantic colourings with which the journalists decorate their articles on Portugal. In their brief visits spent mostly in the best hotels in Estoril or in the Casino, or in the York Bar at Lisbon-they can indeed learn only a small part of the truth. In retrospect, however, one feels that some at least of the melodrama was justified, and that life in neutral Portugal in war-time is almost as Picture Post or The Daily Mirror would lead us to believe. If in the midst of war you are suddenly whisked away on a cold, dark September morning, with the sirens wailing, and if at the close of the same day you stand in the Rossio-Lisbon's central square- with lights streaming from cafes and restaurants, and neon lights blazing-and notably the advertisements for the German Bayer products-then you will have experienced as abrupt a transition as can be imagined. And if after two hectic years you suddenly return to England, to find it substantially much the same, your impressions of Portugal are necessarily chaotic. To register one's experience in a series of dis connected impressions will perhaps give the truest possible picture of Portugal in the Second World War. The vivid sunshine and the sharply contrasted shadows; the pre cipitous cobbled streets, the yellow and strawberry colourings of the old houses, and the sudden vistas over the broad Tagus, give to Lisbon an appearance of unreality as if one was looking at a gaudy picture post-card. The brightly lighted streets and shops somehow re CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY W. LEWIS, M.A., AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS inforce this impression. It is as if 'the lights of Europe' had in ELl! 8 110 THE EAGLE PORTUGAL AND ·THE WAR III actual fact gone out one by one, leaving Portugal forgotte n on the , actors and painters throng the Chave d'Ouro or the Cafe far western edge of a darkened Europe. ovelists � ugalia, with their glasses of black coffee in front of them, their The sense of unreality is further heightened ort by the close uneasy proximity and ck trilby hats perched on their heads, leaning over the little of new and old. It is difficult to bla decide whethe pped tables as if their lives depended on it. Portugal is really being ' modernized' r arble-to arguing by the war, or whethe m r she is the intelligentsia of Portugal, even the anti-clerical section of patiently waiting for the strange cosmopolitan But irruption to subs leaving ide seem less 'modern' in their outlook than the intelligentsia of the her to her old, traditional way of life. ' it Spain is a country ntral European countries for example, equally backward econo of sudden enough contrasts. But c� Madrid Or of Yugo-Slav Barcelona have been sufficiently mically though these may be. In Lisbon I met a group 'Europeanized' to be consi great modern dered dents on their way home after a year in England (they arrived, cities. Lisbon, in spite of its smart stu shops, and its fin Avenida da Liberdade e incidentally just before the German invasion of their country). We stretching from the Rossio to the foot of the we spoke the huge, ornate statue in memory met like fellow-explorers in a strange land. Somehow of the Marques de Pombal, someh still remains ow 'same language', and conversation was much easier. 'old-fashioned', wearing its twentieth-century man it is almost impossible to sleep. The nerisms with an awkward air. In some districts of Lisbon blare Modern cars trams shriek and clatter up and down the narrow streets, taxis may stream at break-neck speed up and down the Avenida, continuously, and in parks and on roof tops the citizens sit until the but in the side streets peasants sit perched on heavily-laden donkeys; small hours of the morning listening to the 'fados'-the queer, the fish-wives clatter up and down the narrow passageways, with wailing love songs derived directly from Brazil in the middle of the their wooden slippers clicking on the cobbles, carrying their traditional long, flat baskets last century, but probably with very distant Portuguese I on their heads. Or the poultry-women cry their origins. These fados are quite short, and scores of them are sung wares while the live hens cluck noisily in the curious portable hen e:oops carried one after the other; as the last wailing note dies away the audience on their heads. It might be a scene from eighteenth 1 I century London. clap excitedly and a new number begins immediately. You are particularly unfortunate if you live near the market in Even in the Avenida you meet peasants and farmers from the from midnight provinces in Lisbon. The peasants arrive with their bullock-carts their long woollen hats of green and red like old fa until dawn, queueing up outside the market gates in order to get a shioned night-caps; and fat, prosperous farmers from the district market across the good position when the day's business begins. If you pass the Tagus-the Alemtejo as it is called-in their traditional ........ stiff at these times you have to take care not to trip up over the bullocks, black broad-brimmed hats (often replaced now by ridiculous or their owners little black trilbys) unharnessed from their shafts, and placidly dozing, and the curious long great-coat, with its wide curled up in their blankets on the pavements whatever the weather skirt, numerous capes and fur collar. Carts Ten years snatching a few hours' sleep before the market gates open. ago no respectable woman would appear in the streets of Lisbon unchaperoned. continue to arrive all night, and the noise from these primitive Even now no self-respecting Portuguese woman waggons as they lumber over the cobble-stones is deafening. If will appear, even in the company of her family, in any of Lisbon . the large cafes. is old-fashioned, it is certainly not quiet. A bare head was until recently the hall-mark of the . As you move away from Lisbon and Oporto, the twentieth century prostitute. When the ultra-smart refugees from Paris and the Riviera IS r began to apidly left behind. Coimbra, the seat of the ancient university, crowd into Lisbon after the fall of France, the Portuguese and the third largest town in Portugal, is a quiet backwater of a place. were profoundly shocked. Man The y Portuguese teachers can remember in their student days riding Portuguese men are great talkers, and good-humouredly to and from the university on donkeys across an almost trackless admit it.

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