At the meeting at which a Senior Prefect[1] resigned comments were made which were reported as ‘racist’: these comments are reported in my earlier post.
Following the resignation the Head Girl called a meeting of the Junior Prefects to tell them how things were going to be. At that meeting the ‘racist’ remark was commented on.
Twenty-four hours later the Head Girl wrote to the Junior Prefect who had raised the matter at the Junior Prefects’ meeting to say that she had investigated the remark and found that it was in fact “used in the context that many seamen are foreign and could neither write nor read the English language [of the labels sewn into the sailors’ hats]. [2] This underlines the danger of repeating words that you haven’t personally heard spoken and are passed on out of context. I hope you will make sure that, if you have passed this on to anyone, you will now correct it.”
I had heard the remark reported on by two people who were present when it was spoken and reported it as racist. Now the Head Girl says it wasn’t like that. So whom to believe?
Well, I wouldn’t presume to suggest who is more credible, but at the Junior Prefects’ meeting the Head Girl said that I had refused to meet her to discuss conciliation over the editorship of the newsletter: she said I had offered only one date which was inconvenient for her. The truth is that I had “sought the advice of the diocesan chaplain who thought the best course of action would be to meet the diocesan president in person, the chaplain acting as a mediator, and I telephoned the diocesan president to suggest this. She, however, declined this conciliatory suggestion and was adamant that she would ‘raise the problem’ at” the next meeting of the Trustees. [source: personal contemporaneous notes].
I repeat from an earlier post: ...Orwell's Ministry of Truth lives on: its purpose was to rewrite history and change the facts to fit party doctrine... to maintain power the party must seem eternally right and strong.
Whom to believe? You might very possibly have an opinion: I couldn’t possibly comment.
[1] Frankly I’m increasingly tired of terms like president and the like, so let the reader here make the necessary translation.
[2] According to another of my correspondents, most modern sailors do in fact read and write English – the lingua franca of transport organisations worldwide – and even if they didn’t, the Mothers’ Union logo has a high recognition coefficient. So even if the remark wasn’t in fact racist, it was uninformed and wrong.
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