RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 15, 12 October 1932, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL

(By

Kickshaws.)

It has been discovered that noisa costa Britain £50,000,000 every year. The old idea that alienee is golden must take a back seat • • •

A Chicago gangster has died of pneumonia. It is understood that thia most unnatural ending is to be made the subject of a special inquiry.

Sensational news from Croatia states that the peasants are drilling. For that matter New Zealand farmers are too.

A Blenheim reader has kindly sent the following extract from “The Marlborough Express.” He wants to know if any North Island family can beat it. Here it is:—The following Hodson family team has been selected to play Messrs. Gosling and Sons’ employees on the first available Saturday:—Fullback, Harry Hodson; three-quarters, Baden Hodson; Frany (“Nanny") Hodson (capt), Arnold Hodson; fiveeighths, Ronga Hodson and Kelvin (Roy) Hodson; half, Herbert Hodson; forwards, James Hodson, Arthur Hodson, Dick Hodson, Horace Hodson, Thomas Hodson, Jack Hodson, Stewart Hodson, and Doug. Hodson; emergencies, Joe Hodson, George Hodson and Noel Hodson.

[Speaking off-hand, the next best in this line we can remember is the Fitzgerald seven-a-side Rugby team which used to take the field in Mid-Canter-bury in pre-war days.)

It is possibly mere coincidence that the centenary of the death of Napoleon’s sqn, King of Rome, has been celebrated at Vienna at the same moment that the last lineal male descendant of Oliver Cromwell passed away in a London poorhouse. We all know the sad story of Napoleon’s descendants. The children of genius often seem to be born to trouble for even Napoleon’s son was a virtual prisoner, a pawn to European diplomacy, when he died at the early age of 21 years. But the story of the descendants of Oliver Cromwell is more remarkable still. A few years after the Protector's death his grandson. Henry, was so penniless that he had to petition the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for work. One of Henry’s sons, by name Thomas, became a grocer’s apprentice at Snow Hill. Thomas’s son Oliver, in his time, earned his living as clerk to St. Thomas’s Hospital. His death in 1821 ended the direct male line of the Protector.

The extinction of the direct mala line deriving from Oliver Cromwell, mentioned above, did not mean the complete extinction of descendants. Cromwell’s younger son Henry carried ou the good name of the Protector's family. He had two daughters. One daughter married the village shoemaker at Soham, Cambridge. The other daughter married the son of a village butcher. The children of these marriages sank even lower than their parents. Some of them kept life in their bodies by begging bread in the street. Several died as paupers. History concentrates' so exclusively on Cromwell the Protector that people forgot he was not the only Cromwell. History, perhaps mercifully, draws the veil over the tragic depths to which this proud family subsequently fell. The naked truth is that the Lords of Hinchlnbrook became gutter-snipes within four generations.

The old lady of 80 years who has been on the move for the last 60 years and whose restlessness has found her a place in the news, has set a pace that no other woman can equal or for that matter many men. New Zealanders are admitted to be great travellers, but so far as can be discovered our best traveller in this Dominion is Dr. MacLaren. He has a record of just under one million miles of incessant travel during the last 30 years in the course of his duties as a mining engineer. Possibly Mr. J. H. Curie, who is not a New Zealander, can beat the octogenarian traveller in the matter of mileage, for this gentleman claims to hold the world record with a total of 1.250,000 miles to his credit. Even so, he has not been 60 years on the job. Mr. Julius Brittlebauk. whose name gives away his country, holds the record for swift travel. ' In a short 12 years, bv strict attention to tourist routes, he has totted up a total of 1,100.000 miles. He has been .12 times round the world, at an outlay of £20.000. Next year he is off again.

The remarkable part about the girl who has lived in a hollow tree in a forest in Asia Minor for 9 years is not her tangled love affairs, but the fact that she has managed to exi§t ou wild fruit and grass for so long. Nevertheless, in this Dominion there are meu who have eked out life on diets just as strange. For a long time there lived in the backblocks of the Waikato an old man whose only sustenance from the derelict farm to which he clung consisted of starlings’ eggs, and, it is alleged, grasshoppers. In season he was not averse to eating a trout caught in the river, or a kouri. Out of season houhous took their place. Certainly he used to smoke manuka leaves rolled up in the leaf of a dilapidated tobacco plant that persisted in growing nearby. Monotonous as this diet must have been, it is. after al), no stranger than that of St. Simeon, the foundation member of al) flag-pole sitters. For this individual sat on rhe end of a pillar 60ft. high for 30 years, until he withered away. It is said that he ate nothing more satisfying than gruel and honey.

We have reason to be thankful in New Zealand that such tremendous convulsions of nature, such as the recent Porto Rico hurricane, are usually confined to tropical regions or the interior of great land masses. Iu the central plains of the United States of America school children are regularly trained in hurricane drill. The need for this was shown when forty years ago a town named Wellington in Kansas was struck by a hurricane which killed hundreds of children and swept all before' It. cutting an avenue 500 feet wide right through rhe centre of tile town. The district of Porto Rico unfortunately stands iu the way of a recognised hurricane route. It Is continually being blown to pieces. Only a year agv> a hurricane sweeping up from the Caribbean Sea did immense damage to San Juan the capital. A year before that a similar disaster had taken its toll of the same area. Out of 10.000 buildings iu the capital city only 400 were left standing Over 4(XM) people were killed and 30.000 were rendered homeless. We in New Zealand hare much for which to be thankful.