RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

SIDELIGHTS ON CURRENT EVENTS LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Cosmos.) It is reported that a scientist haa discovered a new species of mosquito. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the new species of mosquito discovered the scientist. • • • Before we start making a fresh lot of New Year resolutions, we had better look back to see how the 1929 t » • Oscar Asche once slept on the Thames Embankment and picked up odd coppers by fetching cabs for theatregoers. After telling how a “toff” gave him, three coppers for calling a cab on a rainy night, Mr. Asche says: “I got another job, I remember, which netted another bob. As I walked away I vowed I would never go down the Strand again until I was in management at either the Adelphi. or the Vaudeville. And the next time I did was in joint management with Otho Stuart at the Adelphi.” • * * Caruso, perhaps the greatest tenox the world ever knew, died in August, 1921, but very few know that he is t* this day the object of an unusual cult. A little group of the great singer’s disciples, every three years visit Caruso’s tomb at Naples with the object of clothing the embalmed corpse in a new suit. At each of these visits the body is exhumed and its'garments completely renewed according to the fashion of the moment. At present it is dressed in a frock coat. • * • Not many people know, perhaps, that ; Oscar Asche, who toured the world a j few years .ago with “Chu Chin Chow” and “Cairo,” is, by birth at least, an Australian. “Chu Chin Chow,” half of which was written in Manchester on wet days, and owed its origination to a suggestion from his wife, Lily Brayton, that he should write a pantomime, took from the public between £3,000,000 and £3,500,000. Frederick Norton had half the author’s royalties'for writing the music, and Oscar Asche sold half his own prospective share to his'Wife for £5OO to pay off his bank overdraft. Th* fact that he was still able ta make £200,000 personally was due to an agreement which nobody expected to be worth anything, that instead of receiving the fee he demanded as producer he should have 20 per cent, of all takings in excess of £l5OO a week if “Chu Chiu Chow” played to £50,000 in 20 weeks or less. A great deal of the money he made was lost in elaborate farming operations,

Recently the cables reported sensational cases of poisoning in Hungary. There is probably even now in course cf decision the trial of thirty-two Hungarian women on charges of a lon® series of murders, of which passion and greed are alleged to have been the motives. According to the accusations it is seventeen years since the first of these crimes was conceived. The accused in this case was then a young wife, and her accomplice the old midwife of a small Hungarian village near to the Rumanian frontier. In another three years and one day the case would have been barred by the statute of limitations. It is alleged that the midwife, Fazekas, her first crime not having come to light, was so encouraged that she became more and more daring and took money from other women for advice as to the best means of being rid of their husbands. In addition, she took up another most profitable business —that of baby farming and birth prevention.

At the beginning of 1929 the ten. yearly census was taken in Hungary and the authorities, examining ths statistics, were struck by the fact that at Nagyrev, Fazekas’s village, which in 1919 had a population of 1700, the birth rate exceeded the death rate by 36 only, instead of at least 340, and it should have been on the basis of 20 per cent., the average in the surrounding country. Investigation revealed the disappearance of young and middleaged men who in the natural course should have made old bones.

When, in June last, a wealthy peasant of 40 years died after a short illness, and gossip started about his overbright eves, which grew day by day more brilliant till death, the Coroner intervened and ordered exhumation and an inquest. In tho body was found enough arsenic to kill ten persons. Two women friends, Hoyba and Sebestyen, were arrested, but were released for lack of evidence. A police officer continued investigation on bis own account, and a few days later the women were placed together in a room where they thought they were alone. They started immediately to quarrel, and the police officer, under the bed, soon heard a story which, it is alleged, not only provided evidence against themselves, but against many other women- Hoyba has pleaded guilty to killing her second husband, a man of substantial means, with arsenic, which she obtained from a fly paper. Following the depositions of these two women, over 100 graves have been reopened and in every corpse exhumed the authorities states that arsenic has been found. The old midwife, Fazekas, committed suicide when the police knocked at her door. The majority of the women aro charged with having poisoned their husbands in order to marry other men or to inherit their husband’s property. Some are accused of poisoning fathers and other relatives* to obtain money.

Robert Graves, the English writer and poet, whose. daring war book, "Good-bye to All That,” is creating a sensation, is one of the foremost tiguies in British literary circles of the times. He has an interesting ancestry. He is the son of Alfred Graves, one of the Founders of the Folk Song Society and of the Irish and Welsh Folk Song Societies, and the originator of the London Educational Councils, who has himself published a long string of books from 1872 to date. His mother was the daughter of Heinrich Ritter, von Ranke, Professor of Medicine at the University of Munich. Robert Graves, who is only 34, was educated at Charterhouse, and St. John’s College, Oxford. After serving in France with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, he accepted the position of Professor of English Literature in the Egyptian University in 1926. His publications are nine books ’ of poetry and nine of prose, since 1915, including “Lawrence and the Arabs,’* “The Future of Swearing,” and “Th* Future of Humour.” Graves, who has been classed with Rupert Brooke as one of the young poets of the war. is a close friend of Aircraftsman Shaw, alias Private Ross, alias Colonel Mwrence, of Arabia.