In the Public Eye

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 142, 16 June 1923, Page 14

In the Public Eye

PbINTS OF NOTABLE PERSONALITIES

Premier Benito Mussolini is the son of a worker, but a scholar and a Socialist, though a very practical one. The general staff of Fascism was drawn from among the more wide-awake members of the Italian Socialist Parties previous to 1918. The men.now in power have emerged from revolutionary circles. Mussolini himself began as a strong rebel, a syndicalist, once almost a Maximalist. His aims are constructive in opposition to the Bolshevist destructive policies. Mussolini is aged 38. He has repeatedly expressed himself as frankly respectful to the Catholic religion.

Apparently another rupture so characteristic of the Balkan States has arrived. The chief figure on the Greek side has been M. Yenizelos, who rose to prominence early in the war, and occupied the centre of the stage, either a victor or victim for several years. Eleutherics Venizelos is 59 years of age, and was born in a small village in the island of Crete, afterwards becoming barrister in the. island. Subsequently he became a member of the Cretan Assembly, took part in a revolution in 1896, and was President of the Cretan National Assembly in 1897.. As Minister for Foreign Affairs he brought about an insurrectionary movement, and was made Prime Minister in, 1905.

M. Raymond Pbincare, who has been Prime Minister and' Minister of Foreign Affairs for France since 1922,. held France with a strong hand all.through the troubled years of the war, and only relinquished supreme power in 1920, when M. Millerand became President. He entered the Ministerial circles in 1893, Minjstre de Instructor Publique, became Ministre dcs Finances in 1894, and was Premier from 1911 to 1913, after which he became President in 1913. M. Poincare has literary as well as political abilities, and has written books and treatises of a varied character. He was made Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1914.

Lord Robert Cecil is described by a writer in an American journal ag "Robert the Dispossessed." All that surrounded him in youth—the Tudor mansion/ the priceless pictures, the rich and sombre tapestries, the minstrels' gallery, the dark panels, the park, bounded by a wall out of whose stones many a village might be built; the lawns, the avenues, the broad and fertile acres—all this has been confiscated. The son of the great Marquis o£ Salisbury, a.Prime Minister who proved,himself more powerful at times than Gladstone, has to start from scratch, a briefless barrister— commonly called Bob—in dusty chambers, and has to try his luck in the Courts like the rest. At Eton he was once a fag, at Oxford he was once a freshman; and in London also he had to face more formidable peers than most peers in the Gilded Chamber, for nowhere is there a fiercer competition than amid juniors who plead before the King's Bench.,

As one'might expect from' a Russian Jew who has lived many years in foreign countries, Trotsky is an excellent linguist, states Mr. I*. H. Bruce Lockhart. His. knowledge of German is almost perfect. He speaks French with considerable; fluency,- and reads and understands English much better than one might imagine from the halting manner in which, he speaks it. As a worker he is well-nigh indefatigable, jind the astounding energy which he has shown during the- past six years has not been one of the..last causes of the Bolshevik success. He ■ is. married and has two children. .'

Dr. Michael Furse,' the giant Bishop of Si. Alban's, is a man of humour and unconventional ■ individuality. J-he "Morning Post" says that Dr.- Furse quickly gave the people of his new diocese an insight into his character by remarking, soon after his appointment: "I couldn't help it, I was simply thrown at you by, a Baptist Prime Minister, and as far as I am concerned I ye got to sit on your chests for the rest of my natural." He was known as "Mike" at college, and that was his nickname as Bishop of Pretoria.

"Birched by a bishop, sent down by the great Jowett, and prayed over by the Lord Chancellor"—that is the summary of his early life, given by Earl Russell, the grandson of Lord John Russell, one of the nfost prominent of the Whig statesmen of the Victorian era. He obtained a divorce from his first wife in Nevada and brought his second wife back to England, where, however, the divorce was not valid; Iri consequence, he was tried for bigamy by his peers in the House of Lords and sentenced to three months in the first division. Earl Russell says that ten years after he served his sentence 1 Mr. Asquith. obtained for him "a free pardon under the Great Seal."

Sir Edward Beau'champ, Bart., who has held the positions of chairman and deputy-chairman o£ Lloyds oh several occasions, went to sea when he was 13 years of age, and served in H.M.S: Princess Royal, a wooden three-decker. He left the set 50 years ago, however, and joined Lloyds in 1873. In 1900 he became its deputy-chairman. He was chairman in 1905 and 1913. When the Government War Eisks Insurance Committee was formed he was appointed a member of that body and continued to be, so throughout the war. During his first term of office' as deputy-chairman of Lloyds's an historic event took place, ■viz., the entertainment' by Lloyd's at the Royal Exchange, of Captain Lambton, the officers 1 and ,crew of H.M.S. Powerful, which had recently returned from South Africa at the conclusion of the Boer War.. This happy function, it maybe added, was the/esult of the suggestion made by Sir Edward (then Mr.) Beauchamp.. .He received his baronetcy in the Coronation Honours in June, 1911.

Josef Holbrooke, the English composer who has achieved great success on the Continent, is indeed a child of the people, and his success is largely due to his rugged determination to follow his own musical inclinations. There is nothing which Holbrooke has not done in the way of music. While quite a small boy he used to deputise for his father, who was the accompanist at Collins s Music Hall on Islington Green, London, but he was discharged for inattention to duty. He would watch the comedians instead of playing the piano! After a somewhat stormy career at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was looked upon as a revolutionary to be sternly suppressed, Holbrooke commenced composing at the. age of fifteen, when ■he wrote a "desctiptive piece" illustrating some verses composed by his father around a frightful railway accident in America. "It 'was concentrated melodrama," Holbrooke said in describing it. "It was never published.. I' was too timid even' to submit it to a publisher. It is knocking about the house somewhere, and when I come across it I don't feel a bit ashamed ot it. 1'