OTHER CORRESPONDENCE

General Sir Richard Dannatt KCB CBE MC ADC Gen
Chief of the General Staff
5th Floor, Zone M,
Main Building, Whithall, London
SW1A 2HB

1st November 2006

CGS/DO

Mr I Bruton-Simmonds
40 Defiance Walk
Woolwich Dockyard
London
SE18 5QL

Dear Mr Bruton-Simmonds,
Thank you for your recent letter concerning the standard of English within the armed forces and society in general. Copies of your book “Mend Your English” are held in the library at Sandhurst and I am pleased that you consider the accuracy of our armed forces’ English to be better than within the media.
Thank you for your interest- and thank you for keeping us up to the mark!

Yours sincerely,
Richard Dannatt

The Annual Register of World Events Year by Year
Established in 1758 (Published by Longman Group Limited)
18 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5BJ.

7th December 1982

Dear Mr. Bruton-Simmonds,

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of your address to the Kamuzu Academy in Malawi. I could comment at length, with much applause, but will confine myself, disjointedly, to two anecdotes and a couple of general points.

In the bar of the Gymkhana Club in New Delhi in 1942 we were discussing war aims. To the question ‘what are the essentials of democracy?’ I answered ‘freedom of speech and association, respect for minorities, and some means whereby the popular will can secure changes in policy and personnel in government.’ I stick by that.

Recently I read a biography of Matthew Arnold, a great Victorian figure and a fine poet who had a fascinating life. Yet the book was both dull and very badly written, so much so that I suspected that the author, one Park, was a foreigner. The blurb told me that he is a lecturer in English at a provincial university!

Lexicographers are a dead loss in the cause of maintaining the standard of language. They are cataloguers, not critics, not judges but record-keepers. One might as well ask a statistician to propound economic policy.

The BBC will never meet the cost of the kind of monitoring system that you call for, even if it wanted to have it, which it does not. So why not organise a wide circle of unpaid volunteers who would regularly report to the BBC errors of English grammar and word-use they had heard? The Corporation would be bound eventually to take notice.

With regards,

Yours sincerely,

Harry Hodson.

Editor: H. V. Hodson