And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks. With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It is precisely because all these things are really covered by that word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a story."*
[* G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 15, 1925.]
For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. The British Broadcasting Company holds in England a monopoly and is to a considerable extent under Government control. It is possible to forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of 10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set.
In an article called "The Unseen Catastrophe" (January 28, 1928) Gilbert wrote:
Suppose you had told some of the old Whigs, let alone Liberals, that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all others; and that as this was to be given to the King, all printing would henceforth be government printing. They would be roaring like rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with the whole new invention of wireless. Suppose it were proposed that the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new revolution. Yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . There is really no protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of those who govern. . . . On that sort of thing at least, we are all Socialists now. It is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. It was prevented by a swift, sweeping and intolerant State monopoly; a monster suddenly swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one snap of its gigantic jaws. That is what I mean by saying, "We cannot see the monsters that overcome us." But I suppose that even Jonah, when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale.
In the autumn of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series of radio talks for the B.B.C. Every one seems agreed that he was an extraordinary success. Letters from Broadcasting House are full of such remarks as: "You do it admirably," "quite superb at the microphone." In one his work is called "unique." Radio was now added to all his other activities during the four years he still had to live. Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of the most varying kinds all over England: from the King's Garden Party to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the past to the present."
Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens' Introductions and the Collected Poems were republished in 1933. Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.
That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics. She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances—she kept Gilbert out of debt.'"
Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield, Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding habits of women."
The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests. Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a convent—best of all a school—and in this hope they bequeathed it to the Church.