Why were the metric zealots so hate-filled?

ALL my life, I have had to watch people rip up and tear down beautiful things in a strange search for a gleaming new Utopia. Yet it has always ended in desolation, a vista of treeless wildernesses and cracked concrete, like a giant car park.

I have lived to see many of the bright, shiny, ugly new things that they built crumble and peel, and be demolished in their turn, having lasted less than a quarter as long as the structures they replaced.

In my childhood, they had a great frenzy for destroying hedges. This would apparently make things more efficient. Wherever they could find a harmonious, handsome old town centre, they delighted in smashing it up and spoiling it with something ugly and new.

Railway branch lines were closed — and then actively obliterated in case they were opened again. hundreds of ancient grammar schools were wrecked and replaced by comprehensive schools. It would be easier to unscramble an egg than to put them back as they once were.

All these things were mistakes. Everybody now knows they were mistakes. But the fascinating thing about them was the zealous fury with which they were done.

Almost anyone who tried to stand in the way had about as much chance as the poor man who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. The poet John Betjeman saved a few good things, but far too few.

Then came the changes in our coinage and measures — and the hissing, blind rage and contempt you meet if you try to suggest there was anything good about what was lost.

In the past week, on social media, I have been ridiculed, sworn at and generally scorned for saying that I hope the Government will do as it promises and stop trying to suppress our lovely customary weights and measures.

The smuggest programme on the BBC, Radio 4’s More Or Less, yesterday devoted several minutes to an ignorant, giggling mockery of customary measures.

As we know, this frenzy led 20 years ago to the criminal prosecutions of traders who dared to sell goods by the pound to customers who liked buying them by the pound. Criminal prosecution? In what sort of country is this a crime?

For years I mourned their loss, feeling something good and rather beautiful had gone out of the world. I could not quite work out why it mattered.

I was told spitefully that I was ‘obsessed’ with a trivial matter. Why should I prefer a yard to a metre or a pint to a litre? Silly old fool. But then it came to me. The wiping out of these familiar things was not my obsession. It was the obsession of those doing the destruction.

The metric and decimal systems were part of the French Revolution, and a particularly nasty bit of it. The Paris rabble-rousers wished to wipe out all the landmarks of life before they took over so that nobody could remember, or wonder, if times had in fact once been better.

It was a cruel process. They killed anyone who got in their way, slicing off their heads or drowning them by the hundreds. They desecrated churches, sometimes getting prostitutes to dance on their altars. They abolished the old French counties, replacing them with numbered ‘departments’. They even declared that the world had begun again, renumbered the years and tried to decimalise time.

This failed. But only because people hated ten-day weeks in which they got even less rest than before, and because the laws of the universe, which govern the rotation of the Earth and the orbits of the planets, cannot be neatly measured in tens.

Britain and the U.S. were spared this revolution, because they were so free and had the rule of law. Noisy zealots wanted to force metres and litres on them, but failed because nobody wanted them. In general, metric measurements arrived in most countries either because they were conquered by a foreign power, which imposed them, or because some sort of revolution brought them into use.

The Bolsheviks — even while they were busy murdering and imprisoning thousands of opponents, abolishing religion and fighting a giant civil war — still found time to metricate Russia. They didn’t think it was trivial.

Almost the only exception to this were the Commonwealth countries, which adopted the metre because they wanted to be different from the mother country. But once again it is all about politics.

I don’t want to stop anyone using metric measures if they want to. I am not like my opponents, who hate the measures I love and want them to be buried in a museum.

I simply wish to end the effort to stamp out something that I regard as poetic, polished in use like the old tools I inherited from my father and grandfather, and above all else, being based on the human body rather than on some invented bureaucratic scale.

YOU will find them in the Bible and in poetry from William Shakespeare to Robert Frost. Their invented metric replacements, inserted in literature or verse, look and sound ugly and out of place, like a botched repair job. Frost’s lovely lines about ‘miles to go before I sleep’ fall flat when converted into kilometres. And imagine a horse race without furlongs.

There is absolutely no reason why both systems should not co-exist, now that electronic machines can convert them in an instant. My bathroom scales can tell me how fat I am in stones and pounds (which I understand and respond to) or, at the flick of a switch, tell me how fat I am in kilograms (which mean nothing to me, but might to you).

The secret of good government is to leave men alone. Let me keep my pounds and ounces, chains and furlongs, pints and gallons. And you can keep your litres, metres and kilograms.