- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
from "The Oxford History of the British Army" (2003) By David G. Chandler, Ian Frederick, & William Beckett
Colonel Blimp: a character invented by David Low (1891-1893), cartoonist and caricaturist, pictured as a rotund pompous ex-officer voicing a rooted hatred of new ideas. Hence blimp, a person of this type. Also blimpery, blimpishness, blimpism, behaviour or speech characteristic of a blimp; blimpian, blimpish, typical of a blimp.
* * *
David Low met Horatio Blimp in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. The cartoonist had decided to invent a 'character' typifying the prevailing tendency towards what he called dogmatic doubleness. ("Look at those foreign agitators sapping the Constitution! We need a dictator like Mussolini.") Ruminating on a name--Goodle? Boak? Snood? Glimmer?--he hit upon Blimp.
The associations were perfect. A blimp was a gas-bag with the fuselage of an aeroplane slung experimentally underneath, and later, with equal felicity, a barrage balloon. His name was settled. What of his occupation? There were a number of inviting possibilities. Lord Blimp? Bishop Blimp? Dr Blimp? Turning these over in his mind, Low overheard a conversation between "two pink sweating chaps of military bearing close by. [...]" Something clicked. "In the newspapers that morning some colonel or other had written to protest against the mechanization of cavalry, insisting that even if horses had to go, the uniform and trappings must remain inviolate and troops must continue to wear their spurs in their tanks. Ha! I thought. The attitude of mind! The perfect chiaroscuro! Colonel Blimp, of course!"
His name somehow defined his expostulations, with their invariable choleric preface.
"Gad, sir Yeats-Brown is right. Wars are necessary--otherwise how can heroes defend their countries?"
"Gad, sir, Churchill is right. The Govt. has evidently made an irrevocable decision to be guided by circumstances with a firm hand."
"Gad, sir, Lord Rothermere is right. We must have a bigger Army to protect the Navy, and a bigger Navy to protect the Army. Only then can we fight the French and the Italians and the Abyssinians and keep the war from spreading."
Blimp was at once distinctive and ubiquitous. In appearance as in attitude, he had the great advantage of being instantly recognizable to almost everyone. His posture and physique--the ox-headed Saxon strain, as Robert Graves put it--his wagging finger, his walrus moustache, his habitual bath towel: all this was quintessential Blimp. As his creator [David Low] explained:
The need for defence of My Country is ever before Blimp. Let it not be imagined that "My Country" carries any narrow proprietoral, or even territorial, implication; for it would be inadequate and unjust to picture Blimp defending to the death our Turkish bath merely, or limited to preventing with drawn sword enemies from diverting the course of the Thames.
Neither take it that the people who inhabit the lands over which the flag of Blimp and me proudly floats are "My Country". The Colonel greatly admires, as we all do, an ideal British working-man whose most notable characterics are Sturdy Independence coupled with Unquestioning Obedience; but in the world of reality the truth must be told that to Blimp the British working-man in bulk is an almost intolerable nuisance, with his everlasting grumbles about under-nourishment and his inconvenient yearnings for selfish improvement. Any display of Sturdy Independence in that quarter and Blimp calls the police.[...]
[...] So the blimp class was born. It is a constant reference in the writings of George Orwell, who preferred the term blimpocracy and used it like a truncheon ("the huge blimpocracy which monopolizes official and military power and has an instinctive hatred of intelligence"). In 1940 it was a question of unblimping. Orwell wrote in his diary: "Under the stress of emergency, we shall unblimp if we have time, but time is all." [...]
- - from "The Oxford History of the British Army" (2003)
