Murray and his father spent the summer of 1936 in Europe. His dad had speaking engagements in England and Scotland, and Murray acted as his secretary and traveling companion. It was the summer before his senior year at UW, and their last chance to spend extended time together. After a last-minute scramble, they got tickets and accommodations and went on to the Olympics in Berlin.
London
Wednesday,
July 8, 1936
Dearest
Rosa,
The road to hell is paved with good
intentions, and my letter desk is littered with letters that I have started to
you at one in the morning and have been unable to get myself going on more than
a paragraph or two. But this time I’m starting in the morning and I’ll go on
until I tell all the things that I have stored up to say. This is, I’m sorry
and really ashamed to say, my first letter since Sunday so I have plenty
to talk about.
In the first place I “discovered” Hyde
park and had an adventure last Sunday night.
Hyde park, as you probably know, is the
safety valve of London. It is the place where people go, mount soap-boxes and
shoot off their faces in any way they like that does not insult decency or
offend the King by name. Lying just on the periphery of the City of London
proper—that middle district with which is connected all the pomp and business
which Old England connotes—the Park is accessible to all, and popular with both
the scatter-brained who want to talk and the more intelligent who want to observe
the phenomena.
Last Sunday evening I visited the park
for the first time to attempt to play the latter part. It was a tremendously
interesting, impressive scene. The Sunday crowd packed the open spaces in the
lawn almost solid. Standing about two feet above the crowd at intervals of
fifteen or twenty feet would be the speakers, haranguing for Communism,
Socialism, Anarchism, the Salvation Army, The Sisters of Charity, The League of
Nations, The Empire Union, Armament, Disarmament, Free Trade.
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| Murray Morgan photo |
The dominating classes of speakers were
the Salvationists and the Communists. Their joint cries of Repent! Repent! for he Gave His Life to Save YOU! and What the Hell Right Have They to all the
Good Things in Life! were curiously mixed, coming out in a jumble which
seemed to typify the jumbled minds of both the speakers and the listeners.
During the years in which speakers have
blown off steam in the Park, certain customs have grown up, traditions have
been established, and rules—unwritten but obeyed in letter and spirit—have been
made. A good speaker is not to be heckled; one who is not so good must be ready
to defend himself verbally at all times. All questions must be answered. In
answering questions, a speaker should be free from heckling until he tries to hedge.
No violence is allowed at all, and it is usually considered unethical for a
debate to spring up in the crowd which diverts the attention from the main
speaker.
It is only natural, too, that such a
wild-eyed gathering as is usually found in the park should have its characters
of special interest and of even less than normal brain power. Such characters
are the subjects of the most heckling, the most abuse, and yet they are the
ones who shining-eyed carry on the work, glorying in their chance to improve
the British nation by letting the masses hear the wisdom of their minds.
The most impressive to me is “Jack” the
red-bearded salvationist. He comes nightly, sets up his stand, and speaks of
Salvation, earnestly and forcefully, almost oblivious to the ridicule of the
crowd. From a distance Jack appears to be the American ideal or prototype of
the Communist. He has long red hair and a flowing red beard, speaks with much
arm waving, and while the sound of his voices carries far, the words are not
distinguishable at a distance.
I went over to hear this giant
attacking the dirty dogs of Capitalism but instead fund him begging the crowd
to “Love one another, all of ye. But of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Repent
and ye shall be happy (You don’t look happy, Jack—from the crowd). Repent as I
did and all your sins shall be forgiven (Maybe we haven’t done what you did
Jack). Rejoice in the Love of God and all will be peace. (Say Jack, Does your
wife sleep with you?) Shut up you. Now, rejoice…”
It was funny, in a way, but it was more
pathetic. That shining-eyed saint really thought that he was helping, and he
did so want to help. And all the time the crowd grows larger and larger as it
does wherever a subject for heckling is found. Finally it would break out
singing hymns just to drown Jack out, but, unperturbed, the red bearded giant
would merely join him in the singing, leading the song with the sweep of his
long forefinger.
Another of the interesting studies is
“Tom,” a crazy old coot with a cockney accent and an unchanged voice despite
his sixty-odd years. Every Sunday, I am told, he sets up his stand and tells
how he has written letters to the various heads of the government telling them
how to run their business, and how they have done it. He also offers to sell to
the crowd the letters they have written in reply.
He was my first experience in the park,
and I almost died laughing at him. Evidently several members of the gathering
had heard him before and knew his lines as well as he did. Consequently, just
when he would start to shout in emphasis, about three of the crowd would raise
their voices to a steamwhistle pitch and make a chorus of “And this is the
letter that I got in reply from the old man himself.”
Tom would nod, thank them, and then ask
if anyone wanted to buy this sacred sheet, typed, quite evidently, on the same
machine as all the others he had been trying to sell. He must be a marvelous
man, hon. He had a personal letter from George Washington thanking him for the
way he had told the Americans of defeating the British. He had one from the
doctors who had saved the King from death seven years ago, thanking him for his
advice. He had one from everyone worth mentioning except Theodore Roosevelt—but
he said he didn’t agree with the New Deal!
...
I was in the crowd listening to Jack,
when I noticed a really pretty girl standing right in front of me with her
mother. I talked to the mother a little bit about Hyde Park, and could not help
hearing the girl argue that she wanted to stay in the park and hear some more
talks, while the mother was protesting that it was time to go home. Eventually
the two left but it was not long before the girl came back to the crowd
herself. I noticed her, gave her a mental congratulation for out-arguing her
mother who, by the way, should never have permitted herself to be out-argued
since the park is inhabited mainly by streetwalkers on Sunday night, or rather,
the women are of that class—the men have hardly taken up the “oldest
profession.” But anyway, this girl came back.
When the meeting broke up, almost
everyone started heading for the group over to our left, and I went too. The
girl was about twenty yards to my right. Looking in that direction, I saw some
guy come up to her, take her by the arm. She whirled and started to talk very
fast, jerking away, so I figured that Mama had been right and should not have
left her daughter alone in the park. I breezed over, took her by the arm, and
said with a wink which she evidently caught on to, “Got company, Mabel?”
“No, this fellow thought he wanted to
walk with me.”
I took another look at the guy,
slightly larger than I was and about as tough-looking as they come. With my
knees playing Chop-Sticks and my heart shaking hands with my tonsils (which
oughta come out), I put on the toughest accent I could and yodeled without my
voice cracking:
“Ya better get da hell outten here,
see. Scram, mugg.”
To my relief and grateful astonishment
the guy scrammed, probably because the bobbies would not have relished seeing a
couple of the boys mixing it up in the park. Sooo, I walked with the girl over
to the next big group and then she thanked me, said she’d tell her mother what
a kind fellow I was, and wound up with a most cordial invitation for me to
“Scram, mugg.” It was a good laugh and after a few minutes I did pull out.
Adventure?
I have had several other trips down to
the Park since, but the most exciting and amusing thing that happened to me
occurred when I entered in the only argument that I really got interested in.
Some fellow who called himself a “Christian Communist” was belaboring the
Catholic Church as never having done a good thing it its entire existence, a
fault which his religion did not have. I broke in to ask him if he could
imagine Christ so bitterly attacking everything and everybody connected with
another religion that did not agree with his and if he could say that his
religion made him better than any catholic that ever lived. I also explained
that I was not a Catholic and had never been connected with that church.
As he so often did when arguing he
tried to change the subject. He said: “Why do you have to ask your question in
that affected American accent. I’ve lived in America for several months and can
tell when someone is trying to pretend to be something he is not. Aren’t you
proud of your English tongue, or why do you affect Americanisms?"
I congratulated him on his living in
America and then told him I was born there, had lived there all my life.
He then started to bawl me out for
trying to evade the question by a dialogue on accents! And was continuing on
that till a high-pitched voice yelled from somewhere: “I sy. Yow blinkin well
started him hon haccents yowr blinkin self.”
…
I miss you every minute, hon, but I’m
not going to write about it anymore as it makes the feeling too acute and it
makes the receiver feel it too—I know how I feel when I get your letters.
By the time that you get this letter, hon, there won’t be much more than a month before I’ll be home and it will be well over a month since I’ve gone. So keep counting the days with me. …
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