Peter Bauer and the English Class System‪.‬

It's a great pleasure to be here and a great pleasure to be among a group of people who, like myself, count themselves as not simply admirers of Peter Bauer but also as old friends of his. We regret his passing and can still summon up many happy memories of the time that we spent with him. Now, it may seem odd to begin a talk about Peter by talking about Clement Richard Attlee, the leader of the postwar British Labour government and, throughout much of his political life, the butt of many jokes about his own irrelevance: "Ah empty taxi drove up outside 10 Downing Street ... Mr. Attlee got out," "Mr. Attlee, a modest man with a lot to be modest about," and so on. But, when he reached the end of his life, he wrote a really amusing limerick of his own career, which goes as follows: