Pomp

Budget Day was always a solemn occasion for a nation of shopkeepers. Now, with the budget become an instrument of social and economic policy affecting every Briton's standard of life, Budget Day is more solemn than ever.

On Budget Day last week a large crowd gathered in the big, circular lobby adjoining the Chamber. Over the hubbub in the lobby came a sharp, shouted command from a guard: "Hats off, strangers." Everyone stood stone still. There was a long minute of silence as the Speaker's procession approached. (In such a moment at a recent session, a Member tried to get the attention of Laborite Neil MacLean, called sotto voce, "Neil . . . Neil." Six women, they say, knelt.) Brigadier Sir Charles Howard, the Serjeant at Arms (who insists that his title be spelled that way), wearing knee breeches and black silk stockings, bore on his right shoulder the five-foot, knob-headed gilded mace which is the House of Commons' symbol of authority. Then, stiff and staring straight ahead, came the Speaker, handsome Colonel Clifton Brown. His grey wig reached to the shoulders of his long black gown, the train of which was carried by a bearer.

The Birds & the Flowers. The Honorable Members drifted in behind the procession to hear the solemn reading of the budget by big (6 ft. 3 in.) Hugh Dalton. Hearty Hugh Dalton had played to the hilt a role in another solemn custom of Budget Week. By British tradition a Chancellor of the Exchequer about to produce a budget is treated like a pregnant woman. He relaxes in the peaceful countryside, awaiting the great moment. The press lavishes solicitude, photographs him smiling bravely through his ordeal. Editorialists who have lambasted him unmercifully for months before the Great Event (and will flay him even more heartily after it) permit him this week of peaceful gestation; only a bounder or a cad would kick a Chancellor of the Exchequer in this condition.

Publicity-doting Hugh Dalton snuggled cosily into this rite. At his cottage in Wiltshire he posed with an armful of pussywillows. He walked the woods--"Before a budget I always seek out the trees." He listened to chirping birds, and he gathered violets and brought them to his office at 11 Downing Street. There, in his final hours of travail, he sat at a desk "overlooking the forsythia and almond blossoms in the garden of No. 10," reported London's Evening News.

Thus was Britain prepared, with customary sweetness and light, for Hugh Dalton's birthing. But no Briton was wholly prepared for the shock of what he delivered (see below).

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