The diners were well looked after by the Goldsmiths: they feasted on caviar and smoked salmon, clear turtle soup, saddle of lamb or quail, Muscat salad, York ham, asparagus, chilled fruit mousse, and Italian biscuits. The wine list was fairly impressive too: the men began with a Vino de Pasto sherry, then took a 1917 Pommery & Greno champagne and a 1900 Grafenberg-Auslese hock, then a very much more popular wine than now; they next drank a 1907 Chateau Margaux with their lamb (or a Grand Musigny of 1911 if they preferred the quail); and they finished with either Fine Old East India Madeira or, carefully decanted by the Livery Hall footmen, an 1896 Crofts port.
And it was with one of these two latter ancient and fortified wines that the diners were to raise their glasses for the toasts—for indeed, it was the toasts, rather than the dinner, for which they were all attending.
There were four of them. The first two were formalities only— toastmasters appeared from behind the arras to propose that the Church and His Majesty the King be offered the salutations of the assembled, and in short order thereafter similar good wishes were offered to Her Majesty the Queen, the Prince of Wales (by then presumably dancing his Derby evening away a mile away at the Mayfair Hotel), and the other members of the royal family. It was then announced that, royalty having been suitably recognized, those who wished might now smoke.
And then, as glasses were clinked, cigars were lit and lucifers put away, chairs pushed back from the long tables, and a hush was demanded, so from the centre of the high table rose the slightly less than commanding figure of the celebration dinner's most celebrated guest, the Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin, PC, MP, the nation's three-term Conservative Prime Minister.
Perhaps no political leader or statesman in British history could have been better suited to the task that lay at hand. Baldwin, the calm, taciturn, steady, unadventurous, pipe-smoking son of a Worcestershire ironmaster, a figure of elaborated ordinariness— and a cousin of Rudyard Kipling—was both extraordinarily wellread (though his history degree from Cambridge was modest) and inextinguishably proud of being a sturdily provincial Englishman. `I speak', he once wrote, `not as the man in the street, but as the man in the field-path, a much simpler person, steeped in tradition and impervious to new ideas.'
A colleague assessed Baldwin rather more acutely, in writing specifically of how this then 61-year-old politician saw his role as the nation's elected leader.
Above all he must be patriotic; a lover of his fellow-countrymen, of his country's history, of its institutions, its ancient monarchy, its great parliamentary traditions, its fairness, its tolerance.
All these things were innate in his own disposition. But he steeped himself in them, as the part which it was his duty to play as Prime Minister, and they became more deeply ingrained in consequence.
It was thus in part Stanley Baldwin the actor—a man whose radio-ideal voice was said to be `delightfully modulated' and who was known for taking the greatest of care in selecting the words he spoke—who rose before his quietening audience. He was to deliver a speech which, if by no means the most important of his long career, must surely have been one of the most pleasurable, both to utter and to hear. He was there for no less a task than to propose a formal Toast of Gratitude and Admiration to the Editors and Staff of what was to be formally and unforgettably called The Oxford English Dictionary—for the twelve mighty tombstone-sized volumes were now, and after 70 long years of terrible labour, fully and finally complete. The first two sets had been made and formally presented: one had gone to King George V, the other to the American President, Calvin Coolidge. Downing Street had been obliged to purchase its own official set for Mr Baldwin—and rarely, he later said, did a day go by when he did not consult it.
In 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text, and at long, long last, all 414,825 words that the then Editor-in-Chief, Professor Sir William Craigie—this Derby Day newly knighted, and newly blessed with an honorary degree (which Oxford had bestowed on him the day before) and now positively beaming with pride from his place to the Prime Minister's left—all the words which Sir William and his colleagues had amassed and catalogued and listed and annotated and which were thus far in their sum reckoned to make up all that was then known of the English language, had now been fully and properly defined, their preferred and variant and obsolete spellings all listed, their etymologies all recorded, their pronunciations suggested, required, or demanded.
There were in addition no fewer than 1,827,306 illustrative quotations listed—selected from five million offered by thousands of volunteer readers and literary woolgatherers—that showed just how and when the uses and senses and meanings of all of these words had begun and evolved and then, in the nature of the English language, had steadily and ineluctably reshaped and reworked themselves. These were essentiaclass="underline" the millions of words from these quotations offer up countless examples of exactly how the language worked over the centuries of its employment, and by their use they mark the OED out as the finest dictionary ever made in any language, and made, as it happens, of the language that is the most important in the world, and probably will be for all time.
And the work that was unveiled during that glittering Goldsmiths' summer evening was not simply magnificent in its unrelenting scholarship: it was almost unbelievably big—fat, heavy, shelf-bendingly huge—as a monument to the labour of those who fashioned it. A total of 227,779,589 letters and numbers, occupying fully 178 miles of type, had over the 70 years just now ended been corralled into place between the thick blue or red morocco covers of the first editions of this unanswerably monumental book.
Dr Craigie and his staff—and the memories of many who had not lived to see their project finished, not the least of these being the great James Murray and Henry Bradley, whose names will deservedly be rather more intimately connected than is Craigie's with the making of the Dictionary—were all there to bask in their rightly earned glory, and to accept the gratitude of a grateful nation. And Mr Baldwin, more fully aware than most of the special significance of his task, rose to the occasion with an eloquence quite suited to the moment. It was a long speech—though read today, so many decades after its delivery, it seems fresh and interesting and not at all tedious—and there is much to savour in it. Most of all, its closing paragraphs.
Lord Oxford once said that if he were cast on a desert island, and could only choose one author for company, he would have the forty volumes of Balzac.
I choose the Dictionary every time. Like Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, I should pray for the four winds to breathe upon those words, that they might emerge and stand upon their feet an exceeding great army. Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book. I could live with your Dictionary, Dr Craigie. I choose it, and I think that my choice would be justified. It is a work of endless fascination. It is true that I have not read it—perhaps I never shall—but that does not mean that I do not often go to it.