A MAID IN MAYFAIR

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1930, Page 4 (Supplement)

A MAID IN MAYFAIR

COCKTAILS AND ROCKING CHAIRS. ! RETURN OF THE WALTZ. (From Onr London Lady Correspondent.) King George, is not tlie only sovereign who makes stamp collecting one of his hobbies. King Fuad, of Egypt, is also an enthusiastic collector, and while King George is reputed to have the finest collection of British stamps, including many Trial issues, and stamps in which errors were detected before they were officially issued, so King Fuad aspires to get together a unique collection of the stamps of his own country. Tlie specimens he has got together of Egypt, the Sudan and the neighbouring Arabian States, would be the envy of any museum, and recently his agent in London purchased a very fine collection of Egyptian stamps from a private collector at a cost of between three and four thousand pounds, the collection including many specimens which even King Fuad had previously been unable to obtain. LADY BIRKENHEAD'S PAGEANT. Lady Birkenhead has already staged one very successful and picturesque pageant in aid of her favourite charity • —the City of London Maternity Hospital. It took old Londoners back to the days when Hyde Park was very much more the centre of fashion and social life than it is to-day. Now Lady Birkenhead has a second pageant in course of preparation, this one being based on thg best known of the pictures at the Italian Exhibition. The Duchess of Westminster, now on her honeymoon, played a prominent part in the Hyde Park scenes, but she is not, of course, available to impersonate an Italian portrait. But Lady Diana Cooper, looking radiant after her holiday abroad, has promised to help. Lady Cynthia Asquith is to be a Madonna, and Lady Pamela Smith, Lady Birkenhead's younger girl, is to be Anthea. DINNER TO WOMEN M.P.'S. The dinner to women Members of Parliament was fixed for March 6. The little group of women M.P.'s i« a very varied one, and it is always, great fun to see LacLy Astor with Miss Ellen Wilkinson and the Duchess of Atholl being charmto Miss Megan Lloyd George, when fchev ->.te all guests of honours of some v. omen's association. Their political differences of opinion are always sunk on sl'cr.a occasions, of course, but those who a:rc> slightly in touch with what (v.wr ■*%. at Westminster can sometimes detect, in an apparently innocent re.oua?k, a double entendre % which is piquant and amusing. One discovers at functions of this kind how domestically inclined the women M.P.'s are. They are at their best, and their most earnest, when their subject bears on the welfare of women and children. ROCKING CHAIRS. Hocking chairs are becoming fashionable again. If one makes a call on a smart young hostfess about cocktail time, she and her friends as likely as not will be in rocking chairs in tlie fashion of fifty years ago. The rocker is said to be most soothing to modernnerves, the possession of which is again rather smart. The 1930 rocking chair differs very little in design from its Victorian predecessor. It is made of plain wood, and has the regulation seat of American cloth, but the wood is usually painted a gay colour. I sat in one today that had been painted a brilliant yellow, and had a seat of .scarlet-Ameri-can cloth. . GRANDMOTHER AND GRANDDAUGHTER. Lady Oxford is feeling very sad about the - departure of her small granddaughter, Priscilla Bibesco, from London. She has just gone South with her mother, Princess Bibesco, and both at Sutton Courtney and at Lady Oxford's London house in Bedford Square, theie is a decided blank. . The two have been inseparable when the little Prtscilla has been in England. She is a most bewitching and attractive child, and her precocity is not the. precocity which irritates and annoys. Her intelligent observations on men and things have always been accepted as quite ordinary bits of conversation, and she has been with her mother and grandmother and with grown-up people generally so much that she has absorbed a good deal of the salon atmosphere in which her relatives pass their time. Lady Oxford has taken her about a great deal since she was a tiny child, and they used to go to the seaside together. BELLES' SECOND REIGN. The revived fashion for waltzing, a feature of this season's dancing, has brought back into the ballroom, many women who thought their dancing days over. The middle-aged woman, who has retained grace and the fashionable slimness through advancing years, is more in demand as a partner than her young daughter. The modern waltz is not a Hesitation or a Boston, but a real oldfashioned swinging waltz danced to the "Blue Danube." Very few of the young •nrls can waltz, because their sense of rhythm has usually been ruined by a surfeit of jazz. When the keen dancing man wants a waltz partner, he looks for her in the bridge room, and secures a lady who used to be a "Belle of the Bail" in the pre-war days when Belles reigned. GAMPS AGAIN. The autocrats of the umbrella trade anticipate much less difficulty than -those of the Rue de la Paix in carrying out . an elongation of fashion. Whether or not long skirts become the vogue, we are °oing to have longer umbrellas. The reicn of the "dumpty" is over. .For five or six years the ladies have earned their umbrellas under the arm, but the umbrella a la mode is to be walking length. I am told the, smartest are made with very thin metal tubes, and can be rolled to the slimmest silhouette. They have crook handles, long, thin ferrules, and the ends of the ribs are gilt. It is hard to say whether this change is merely to conform to the longer skirt, or because umbrella manufacturers shrewdly suspect, now that fur coats are within the reach of middle-class incomes, that many ladies will object to maltreating their new sartorial acquisition by carrying a dumpty under the arm.