Lammas morning was warm and still. The bread queue at the East Bank had formed at its usual length by first honk and was behaving exactly as it has behaved all week. The principal index, taken on the second honk and confirmed at the third, stands at twelve crusts to the hour. That is one crust above the previous peak of eleven, which this paper recorded on the thirteenth of April. It is also the figure for the third working day running. The pond, as it does on such mornings, was paying the matter a kind of attention that stops short of action.
The Travelling Drake is back. His return was anticipated in yesterday’s column, and confirmed when he presented at the Clerk’s office a little before the second honk. He has filed a letter. We reproduce it in the form the Letters column allows, and we read it closely before saying anything further of our own.
Sir, On the matter of bread, on which I addressed this gazette in your number of the nineteenth of April past, the position is the position it then was, only worse. The gazette is, on this morning of all mornings, the one party at this pond from which a public address on the matter can reasonably be expected. I demand, with such formality as the matter and the date allow, and with such reluctance as my long custom of relying on the gazette’s good offices makes possible, the firmer editorial action this paper undertook in April to consider, and has not since considered. The figures are now of a kind which neither this paper, in its considered judgment, nor I, in my unconsidered one, can permit to pass under the present heading any longer.
A TRAVELLING DRAKE
We take the rebuke. We take it in the broader sense. This paper did, in April, hold the question of a firmer position open. It did not since return to the question with the seriousness the season has by now earned. On this Lammas morning, it is minded to. The Drake’s first letter, in our number of the nineteenth of April, put the rate at fourteen crusts to the hour at the southern approach to the East Bank, in the quarter-hour before dusk on a Thursday in mid-April. We accepted that figure at the time in its broad spirit. We noted it for such firmer editorial line as we might, in due consideration, be moved to take. His second letter observes that the consideration was never taken. He is right.
The Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked Friday afternoon for a line, declined to comment. The Clerk’s exact words, which we record and do not gloss, were that the matter was “under consideration of the kind which does not at this stage accommodate a public position.” Fair enough. When the Subcommittee has a position, we will record it with the same calm. The Clerk of the Exchequer, approached at his office at the third honk Friday and again at the first honk Saturday, was unavailable for the usual reason. We have now, by such count as we have managed this quarter, called on him five times. He has been in on three. He has had a position on none.
Here is what we think. The pressure on the East Bank is a failure of distribution, not of supply. In the spring we were inclined to call it supply. We were wrong. The distinction is the kind institutions are happy to leave alone, because no one has demanded otherwise. Twelve to the hour is a demand. We would be failing the office our own name implies if we did not, at last, say where we stand.
So we stand here. The rate of twelve crusts to the hour is not, we are now persuaded, a function of bread failing to reach the pond. Nor is it any general scarcity of the sort the late frost once produced. The bread arrives, by our own observation, in much the quantity it arrives in an ordinary season. What has happened is narrower. The East Bank has become, by habit and by convenience, the one place the pond’s morning bread is handed out. No party has been willing to raise the question in public, and so the habit has held. The queue there, on a given morning this season, runs longer than it can clear before the bread sinks below the condition the older drakes are prepared to call bread. The figure that follows, twelve and rising, is therefore a figure of the queue. It is not, in any meaningful sense, a figure of the bread.
The remedy lies, on every available sign, beyond the competence of any party formally chartered to attempt it. It would be a redistribution of feeding hours across the pond’s several stations. We would not ordinarily presume to recommend such a thing, and we recommend it now only with the deference of a paper that has kept to editorial restraint for most of its short life. The South Shore, the Old Willow, and the North Bank approach are all underused at the morning hour. The East Bank is overused at the same hour. A redistribution would not change the quantum of bread reaching the pond. It would, by every reasonable expectation of our own correspondents, move the figure of crusts to the hour by a margin enough to settle the index back into its seasonal range. We commend the matter to the Subcommittee at its earliest convenience.
We do not undertake to repeat this with any frequency. The formula by which this column has committed itself has been deployed, by such records as we keep, once before. It is not meant for the regular supply of opinion, nor for the comfort of any reader who would prefer us to be a paper of softer temperament. We reserve it for the occasions on which our own restraint can no longer in good conscience hold. This Lammas morning is one. The position has been taken.
The Travelling Drake has done what no correspondent in our recording history has done, which is to elicit an editorial position by the patience of asking twice. He was seen at the second honk Saturday near the lower reeds, in conversation, we infer, with no party in particular. We extend him such acknowledgement as the page permits, and assume the Subcommittee will receive this column at its earliest convenience and address it as the agenda allows.
This paper has held to a single position, on a single matter, on a single Lammas morning of a single season. That this is the second such occasion and not the first, we record with the seriousness it deserves. Whether there is ever a third, on some future morning at this pond, we neither anticipate nor, in the judgment this occasion has at last made our own, decline.
We regret the inconvenience. The position is recorded.