Word: altrincham
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Dates: during 1957-1957
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...months the battle has raged indecisively between the partisans of a pompous past and the champions of a folksier future. With such rebels as Malcolm Muggeridge and Lord Altrincham on the one side demanding that Britain's monarchy bring itself democratically up to date, and the outraged ranks of the old guard on the other demanding that the Queen's critics be drawn and quartered, it has long been obvious that something must give. Last week, a terse, two-sentence announcement from Buckingham Palace tolled the knell of doom for the first innocent victims of the battle...
...they doing the right thing for Prince Charlie?" wondered the Sunday Express, but the question did not seem to get much of a rise out of Britons. Sending Charles to Cheam was not quite the prescription of that young critic of royalty. Lord Altrincham, who "would have liked to have seen him enter a state-run primary school." But it was certainly more democratic than the old royal custom that prescribed for all heirs to the throne a private education under governess and tutors in the palace schoolroom...
...critic of the royal family, Lord Altrincham is both a Tory and a monarchist. Last week an Englishman who is neither joined the argument. Young Playwright John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger was scheduled to open in Manhattan this week and whose sulky bad manners have made him the current darling of London's West End intellectuals, got off an angry outburst in the highbrow monthly Encounter. Describing the royal family as "a ridiculous anachronism" and "the gold filling in a mouthful of decay," Osborne denounced "Queen worship" as "the national swill" and no fit occupation for Socialists...
Other journalists before Altrincham had said harsher things about reigning royalty, but coming from a member of the peerage -well. In point of fact, Lord Altrincham is no more to the manner born than Earl Attlee or dozens of other latter-day lords in Britain's Upper House. His father, a journalist and longtime civil servant, did not get his barony until 1945, ten years before his death. His son (Eton, the Guards) is an earnest and articulate advocate of what he calls the New Toryism...
...quite prepared for what is coming to me," said Altrincham as the storm broke about his head. "I can only hope that when the dust has cleared, the furniture will have shifted a bit." As the week wore on, the letters pouring into his own mailbox gradually turned favorable to Altrincham by a ratio of three to one. Letters to the working-class Daily Mirror were four to one in his favor, and even the middle-class Daily Mail, which at first received a rush of what-a-cad letters, found the mail turning more evenly to the lord...