Notable Commendations

The Society does not pursue outcomes. The Society pursues correctness, and notes that outcomes have, on a small number of occasions, followed of their own accord. The incidents below are recorded in the archive under the heading “Commendations”, with a Curator’s note observing that in each case the Fellow concerned was attending to the prose, and that the service to the nation was incidental.

The Typographical Arrest (1943) — Mr Arthur Pendelton (#00281)

In the winter of 1943, London blacked-out and thick with wartime suspicion, Mr Arthur Pendelton was taking a solitary pint of mild at The Blackfriar. At the adjacent table, a man in the uniform of a Royal Artillery Major was quietly drafting a letter. Pendelton, whose lifelong inability to ignore the handwriting of others is well documented in the Society’s records, glanced over the Major’s shoulder. The Major’s English was flawless. His uniform was impeccable. His opening quotation marks, however, were drawn low, resting upon the baseline, in the German manner — rather than as the raised inverted commas of English practice.

Pendelton stood, walked calmly into the damp street, and informed a passing constable that the man at the window table was a threat to the realm.

The “Major”, on seeing the constable approach with Mr Pendelton behind, concluded that his cover was compromised, overturned the table, and attempted to draw a pistol from his greatcoat, before being brought down by three off-duty sappers. He was subsequently identified as an Abwehr officer who had evaded detection for two years. His English was perfect. His muscle memory for punctuation had betrayed him.

Two weeks later, the War Office presented Pendelton with a framed commendation for service to “King, Country and the War Effort”. Pendelton returned it to MI5 by registered post the following morning, with a covering letter: “The King and the Country are distinct entities; the War Effort is the third item in the list. You have failed to employ the Oxford comma. Insert the punctuation, or keep your medal. I did not help secure this nation to see its syntax degraded by its own intelligence services.”

No corrected certificate was received. The Society regards this as MI5’s loss.

(Mr Pendelton appears once further in the Society’s records, in the matter of the Umbrella Stand Fracas of 1954. The Society notes that his vigilance did not diminish with peace.)

The Proprietary Syntax Affair (1984) — Mr Wallace Gudgeon (#00401)

The Society holds that a failure of grammar is, in the end, a failure of character. The doctrine was vindicated in 1984 by Mr Wallace Gudgeon, a retired actuary who devoted his evenings to the reading of municipal budget reports, solely for the purpose of correspondence regarding their formatting.

In April of that year, reviewing the West Riding Municipal Expenditure Report, Gudgeon noted that the Council Treasurer had written the entire four-hundred-page document in the appropriate bureaucratic passive — “Funds were allocated for the maintenance of the library” — except where the report touched the paving and concrete contracts, at which points the prose shifted, abruptly, to the first-person active: “I allocated funds for the paving of the High Street.”

Gudgeon was appalled. He drafted a six-page letter to the Fraud Squad of the West Yorkshire Constabulary. He did not accuse the Treasurer of theft. He accused the Treasurer of “suspiciously proprietary syntax”, observing that the shift to the first person indicated an assumption of personal ownership over public funds: “He is writing as though it is his own money. This is an unacceptable level of narrative intimacy for a civil servant.”

A detective inspector looked into the contracts, largely, by his own later account, to see what manner of man produces a six-page complaint about pronouns. The investigation found that the Treasurer had embezzled £4.2 million through a network of phantom concrete suppliers. He was sentenced to eight years.

The prosecution invited Gudgeon to attend the trial as the discovering witness. He declined by telegram, informing the judge that he had no interest in the town’s concrete, and had intervened only because the Treasurer’s movement between the active and the passive voice had given him a migraine.

The Society’s formal commendation, recorded at the 1984 AGM and still read to new Fellows, states: “Mr Gudgeon has demonstrated that where one audits the grammar, the criminal discloses himself. The Society does not pursue thieves. The Society pursues bad prose, and permits the authorities to deal with what falls out of it.”

The Orbital Question (2011) — Mr Silas Vance (#00411)

Mr Silas Vance was not an engineer. He held no qualification in astrophysics. He was, however, exact on the subject of the International System of Units, and in the autumn of 2011 he watched, with mounting irritation, a promotional film concerning the launch of a British–American meteorological satellite. At the fourteenth minute, the American chief engineer stated to the camera that the thruster sequence would initiate at twelve thousand five hundred pounds-force; behind him, legibly, a whiteboard prepared by the British payload team gave the same figure in newtons.

Vance telephoned the agency’s public outreach office. He did not telephone to warn them that their international teams appeared to be working in different systems of measurement. He telephoned to complain that the film lacked stylistic consistency: that a production permitting its principal speaker to dictate in Imperial while its set-dressing resolved the scene in metric had failed to enforce a unified style guide, and that the broadcast should be withdrawn until corrected.

The complaint was forwarded to the engineering floor as an example of eccentric public feedback. It was read; a silence is reported to have followed; and the launch was scrubbed with twelve hours to spare, the navigation software having been found to feed Imperial values to thrusters expecting metric ones — the numbers matching, the measurements diverging by a factor of four and a half.

The agency’s letter of thanks described Mr Vance’s intervention as “potentially mission-saving”. Mr Vance’s reply confirmed receipt, noted that the letter’s second paragraph contained a dangling participle, and asked whether the film had yet been taken down. It had not. The matter remains on List II.

The Peculiar Case of Mr Bartholomew Scroll (1888–1972)

Not a commendation; a cautionary instance of the Society’s standards applied without fear, favour, or common sense, which the Society records in the same folder on the principle that rigour should be seen whole.

The Society’s bylaws stipulate that Full Fellowship may be granted only to an applicant who has “attained their twenty-first birthday”. Mr Bartholomew Scroll was born on the 29th of February, 1888. He first petitioned for Fellowship in 1909, at the biological age of twenty-one; the Society rejected the petition, noting that, the year 1900 not having been a leap year, Mr Scroll had at that date attained only five birthdays. He was legally, biologically, and intellectually a man. Chronologically, the Society classified him as a small child.

Mr Scroll submitted sixty-three subsequent annual petitions. All were denied. He was admitted, in 1951, to the newly created Junior Fellowship (the qualification being twelve birthdays, of which he then had fifteen), and was for years a fixture at the children’s table of the Annual Dinner — a stooped, greying gentleman taking weak squash under the eye of a nanny, debating the subjunctive.

Mr Scroll died in 1968, having attained twenty birthdays. His widow’s petition for a posthumous waiver of the final birthday was warmly but firmly denied, on the grounds that death does not accelerate the calendar. Mrs Scroll thereupon joined the Society as a Full Fellow in her own right, maintained four years of unblemished standing, and at the EGM of the 29th of February, 1972, tabled a motion: her late husband had now, by the simple operation of dates, attained his twenty-first birthday, and the bylaws contained a chronological requirement only — no requirement of respiration.

The motion was carried, 14–2. Mr Bartholomew Scroll was elevated to Full Fellowship.

Four minutes later, the Treasurer, noting Mr Scroll’s failure to present himself to pay the adult subscription, moved that he be struck from the Register. The motion was carried, 16–0. The minutes record that Mrs Scroll voted in favour: in four years of Fellowship she had developed a pedantry of such quality that she declined to let sentiment cloud a point of order. Her husband had been made a Full Fellow; that he was expelled four minutes later was, in her recorded words, “procedural justice, correctly administered”.

The Society regards the Scroll case as closed, and as one of its finest hours, though it has never been able to say which party’s.

Fellowship of the kind held by Messrs Pendelton, Gudgeon, and Vance — and, for four minutes, by Mr Scroll — is conferred on application and examination. The Society does not promise that it will save a satellite. The Society notes only that it has.