But these trifling domestic disturbances aside, about the most surprising news of that June morning revealed that only two transatlantic telephone calls had thus far been placed from the entire city of Manchester during the first six months of the year. Not that interest in North American matters was by any means slight: many in England were captivated that summer by the news of Miss Amelia Earhart, a lady from Kansas who was waiting none too patiently at an aerodrome in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a doggedly persistent bank of fog to clear away. When it finally did so, she was flown in a small aircraft across the ocean to an airfield near Cardiff in south Wales, a 3,000-mile journey that propelled her to fame as the first woman aviatrix—the word was brand new, having first appeared in a newspaper only nine months before—ever to make a crossing of the Atlantic. (If she had admirers in Manchester it may well have turned out—history does not record— that some of them telephoned the news of her arrival to friends far away, thereby reversing the city's curious and brief reputation for isolationism.)
If these were rather carefree and prosperous times, for very many they were also cultured and learned times besides. Since the story that follows concerns the crafting of a monumental intellectual enterprise, it is perhaps worth recalling just how very well educated people in fact were in those days—or at least to recall how very well educated the educated classes were, for this (like it or not) is a tale of a leisured undertaking that is necessarily and intimately involved with the complexities of British social stratification. The project whose completion was celebrated on this Derby Day was one that had taken much time and much learning—and many will say that it was undertaken, and completed, and duly celebrated, mainly because people, or people of a certain kind in the Britain of the day, were quite simply possessed of much time and much learning, and in far greater abundance than many like people possess it today.
Items from the newspapers of the time hint at the almost incidental, quite casual cleverness of the cleverest of the reading public. An illustration of the kind of thing appears that day in the `Telegrams in Brief ' section of The Times, in which it reports, without explanation or adornment, that:
Further hostilities are reported between the Zaranik tribe and the forces of the Zaidi Imam Yahya of Sana'. The Zaranik attacked a Zaidi detachment at Mansuria, near Hodeida, and have been plundering caravans trading with Sana'.
No further details are offered to suggest where all this fighting was (Yemen, one imagines), nor of the identities of the parties to the feud. The newspaper's editor presumes that readers, quite simply, had sufficient education to know.
And by and large, newspaper editors in London were probably right in making assumptions like these. The English establishment of the day may be rightly derided at this remove as having been class-ridden and imperialist, bombastic and blimpish, racist and insouciant—but it was marked undeniably also by a sweeping erudition and confidence, and it was peopled by men and women who felt they were able to know all, to understand much, and in consequence to radiate the wisdom of deep learning. It is worth pointing this out simply because it was such people—such remarkable, polymathic, cultured, fascinated, wise, and leisured people—who were primarily involved in the creation of the mighty endeavour that the following account celebrates.
On that idyllic and blissfully warm Derby Day evening, two magnificent social events were due to be staged, at the beating heart of the nation's social life. Up in London—it was always Up, except for those who lived in Oxford, who regarded going everywhere else as Going Down—Prince George's older brother, Edward, the very Prince of Wales who would in time become king and then abandon his throne for his love of a Baltimore divorcée— would preside that evening over one of them, the year's official Derby Ball held at the Mayfair Hotel.
This was a very grand dance indeed—a party that would attract only the great and the good, the nation's A list, men and women from the very finest of the county families all kitted out in the fullest of full fig, with all available medals and miniatures and sashes and Orders to be worn with flash and abandon, and with the unassailable wealth of the landed classes on shameless show. The Earl of Derby's great race (which, it turned out, the rank outsider Felstead did indeed win, to the amusement of the attending King and Queen, to the bookies' great chagrin, to some punters' great joy, and to the humiliation of a crestfallen Times racing correspondent, who had predicted quite otherwise) was the grandest fête staged each year for those able to afford what was still called `the sport of kings': those who attended the ball that followed the race whirled like stately dervishes until three, when dawn came up in all its brief midsummer eagerness.
But it was the other event of that Wednesday that more particularly concerns this story. It was a dinner, and it was as formal in its own way as the ball in Mayfair, except that it took place not among the fashionable demi-monde of the West End but in the more cerebrally active neighbourhood of the City of London. Specifically, it began at eight o'clock sharp, in Philip Hardwick's grand faux-Palladian palace just by St Paul's Cathedral, and known as the Goldsmiths' Hall.
On this very site those who worked in and with gold—for centuries known as members of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, the fifth most senior of the twelve original livery companies of London—had practised the mysteries of their craft since the fourteenth century. The hall was then employed, as it still is today, as the London Office of Assay, where precious metals are measured for their purity and value. Its grandest room is the Livery Hall, which seats 200 among pillars and portraits and beneath a vast array of chandeliers and tracery. And it was there, on 6 June 1928, that the company's Prime Warden, the renowned crystallographer Professor Sir William Jackson Pope, formally staged the celebration that both begins and ends this story.
It was a dinner for 150—all of them men, one feels slightly shamed to note today—each one of whom was monumentally distinguished in achievement and standing. If the Derby Ball attracted the nation's richest and most glittering, then the Goldsmiths' Hall that evening attracted the nation's brightest and most wise—a stellar gathering of intellect, rarely either assembled or able to be assembled since.
There were two bishops, three vice-chancellors, a dozen peers of the realm (including the Earls of Birkenhead, Elgin, Harrowby, and Crawford & Balcarres, the Viscount Devonport, the Lords Aldenham, Blanesburgh, Cecil, Percy, Queenborough, Wargrave, and Warrington of Clyffe), 27 knights of the realm (among them Sir Ernest Rutherford, splitter of atoms; Sir Arthur QuillerCouch, Cornishman and editor—under the pseudonym `Q'—of the then best-known of poetry anthologies; Sir Henry Newbolt, whose imperially minded, patriotically inspired poetry was known to every jingoist in the land; Sir Gerald Lenox-Conyngham, inventor, Triangulator and Surveyor of India, and first-ever Cambridge Reader in Geodesy; Sir Owen Seaman, the noted satirist, Punch editor and parodist who also `set great store by social activities, shot and swam well and had been Captain of Clare boats'; and Sir Charles Oman, who, despite being `in no sense a thinker', held the Chichele Chair in History at Oxford, was a worldrenowned numismatist, and wrote screeds of fascinations about Domesday Book).
As if these ennobled and honoured figures were not sufficient, there were also twenty professors (one of them, listed simply as J. R. Tolkien, would go on—with an additional initial R—to worldwide fame as the fantasist inventor of Hobbits and Gollum and the Lord of the Rings), any number of generals and colonels and half-colonels, as well as printers, headmasters, college presidents and deans and wardens in monstrous abundance. There were also eight of the capital's leading journalists. Those newspapermen on one side of the central table found themselves sitting sandwiched between Sir Archibald Garrod, the nation's leading authority on diseases of the joints, and a Great War historian (and biographer of Wellington) named C. R. M. F. Cruttwell. On the far side, their colleagues were book-ended by Brigadier-General Sir Harold Hartley, CBE, MC, FRS, a chemical engineer who in 1928 predicted that the world's population in 2000 would be three billion (it turned out in fact to become twice that), and by one F. S. Boas, an expert on Elizabethan manuscripts. One supposes the newspapermen probably talked mostly among themselves.