A. G. Gardiner
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘A. G. Gardiner’
When columnist ‘Alpha of the Plough’ was asked to select his most memorable moment of the Great War, he told the story of HMS Formidable.
Asked which event of the Great War had made the deepest impression on him, columnist ‘Alpha of the Plough’ recalled the fate of HMS Formidable, twice torpedoed by a German U-Boat during night-time exercises off the Devon coast on January 1st, 1915. The Captain, 34 officers and 512 crew died; 157 men were picked up from the water or made it ashore in two boats.
The British Tommy’s fondness for ‘Tipperary’ exasperated some of his countrymen, but ‘Alpha of the Plough’ thought it showed proper English spirit.
‘There are some among us’ sighed Gardiner at the height of the Great War ‘who never will understand the English spirit.’ He was thinking of those who scolded the British Tommy for jostling to his fate with It’s a long way to Tipperary on his lips, while the Kaiser’s men marched in time to a noble Lutheran hymn — didn’t that just say it all? In a way, mused Gardiner, it did.
The mournful owl in her Sussex garden so troubled A. G. Gardiner’s friend that she rarely visited her house in the country.
Journalist A. G. Gardiner, better known by the pen-name of ‘Alpha of the Plough’, lived in the countryside, where he enjoyed the companionship of two familiar voices. One was the merry piping of the robin by day; the other was the hopeless sigh of the owl by night. ‘Where are the songs of spring’ the little fellow seemed to say ‘and the leaves of summer?’ But Gardiner refused to be borne along by Wol’s pessimism.
In the year that Ranjitsinhji put aside his bat to concentrate on being the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, journalist A. G. Gardiner looked back on his dazzling career.
In 1907, Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji Jadeja (1872-1933) triumphantly ascended the throne of Nawanagar (Jamnagar) in India, twenty-three years after the bitter disappointment of seeing a rival displace him. It was not part-time work, so in 1912 Ranji called ‘stumps’ on his spectacular career in English cricket, and A. G. Gardiner of ‘The Star’ bade him an affectionate farewell.
After witnessing a bus conductor’s battle of wills with the London public, journalist Alfred Gardiner felt obliged to give him a little advice.
The conductor of an open-topped bus once told a lady carrying a little dog to take it upstairs, despite the lashing rain. The passengers backed her up, stopped the bus and summoned a constable. The conductor stuck to his position, however, and eventually got his way; but after everyone else had gone home he tried to win a little sympathy from journalist A. G. Gardiner.
On the day that the Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, ‘Alpha of the Plough’ wondered if the country would prove worthy of him.
Like other correspondents for London’s newspaper ‘The Star,’ Alfred Gardiner took a nom-de-plume from astronomy, choosing ‘Alpha of the Plough.’ In this extract, written on November 11th, 1920, he reflected on the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey that same day, and wondered if the people of Britain really understood what had happened.