Happiest Day of the Year

Bates reports on commemorations of 'a seal in San Francisco, a golfer in Ireland, a grape festival in Neuchatel, a day of liberation in France, [and] a wedding in Switzerland' that show 'a capacity for joy and celebration that we, in the British workhouse, have lost'.

He bemoans that the English have become 'a people of gloom'. Quoting the much-parodied ballad 'Christmas Day in the Workhouse' (by George Robert Simms) he claims that 'we are, indeed, in the workhouse, and it is once again Christmas Day' — the one great festival left in England, 'the one day you dare dance on the table and give thanks'.

Of note is a personal reminiscence of being honoured by 'my native county town' as someone 'distinguished in the Arts'; however, to prove the point of his essay, he mentions that 'there rose up at once, in the local Press' a writer who 'declared that artists were worthless fellows, that art led to a "Bohemian way of life", and that what was needed instead, in these hard days, was more brawn and less art, more work and less play, by all'.

Another Christmas essay called 'This Peculiar Englishness', was published in the same journal one year before.

In The Field (London, December 24, 1949, pp. 919-920, attached).