Sixty Five years Ago, Today....

GBS

Shaw is dead. The great dark gates of death that have been locked against him for so long swung open for a moment at dawn yesterday and the lean derisive Sage looked over his shoulder for a final twinkling trice - and was gone.
GBS, who has said most things worth saying in the past century and who has had the world by the ears and tail for longer than any writer in history, finally learned the most difficult and most simple of tricks - how to die.The frozen field-mouse stiff and cold under the hedgerow knew it before him ; the fledgling in the cats paw understood it and the poor weighted mongrel in the canal beat him to it in having an earlier glimpse of the last sombre secret of how to leave this life.
Only this glittering Jack Frost of a man, whose contemporaries began to die at the turn of the century and who has pierced and exposed most of the follies and foibles of mankind had not, until the birth of yesterday, achieved that final shattering achievement, the ending of life, and in this case the ultimate awesome passing of George Bernard Shaw.
The mould is broken. There was none like him before him, none like him when he was alive - and there will be none to match him now he has gone. Shaw in love seems almost grotesque - though there is much evidence that in his time many women did not think it so. How for instance could any girl in his arms deal with this sort of stuff? :
'When you loved me I gave you the whole suns and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul. We possessed all the universe together - and you ask me to give you my scanty wages as well!'
Mr Churchill, who know a golden intellect and a diamond-bright pen when he sees one, has paid his profound respects GBS. But he has also recorded his censure at some of the gaucheries of the sage in his antics.
'If truth must be told, our our British island has not had much help in its trouble from Mr Bernard Shaw. When nations are fighting for life, when the palace in which the Jester dwells not uncomfortably is itself assailed, and everyone from prince to groom is fighting on the battlements, the Jesters jokes echo through deserted halls, and his witticisms, distributed evenly between friend and foe, jar the ears of hurrying messengers, and mourning women and wounded men. The titter ill accords with the tocsin*, or the motley with the bandages.'
GBS died after a fall when reaching out to prune an old and dying bough with secateurs. The symbolism would not have been lost on him. he was almost certainly a happy man for a very long long time. But even on that he had the last paradoxical word. Said Mr Shaw 'A life time of happiness? No man could bear it : it would be hell on earth.'

Daily Mirror Columnist Sir William Connor, who wrote under the name Cassandra on the death of George Bernard Shaw, November 3rd 1950. 

*funeral bell