TRAGIC DEATH

Evening Post, Issue 2, 2 July 1932, Page 21

TRAGIC DEATH

M. ALBERT THOMAS

GREAT FRENCH SOCIALIST

(From "The- Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, 13th May.

M. Albert Thomas, Director of the International : Labour Bureau, and French Socialist leader, was taken suddenly ill in a cafe in Paris. . He was taken to the Beaujon Hospital, and died a few minutes after entering. It was in the same hospital that President Doumer passed away less than 24 hours earlier. M. Thomas '■■ was 53 years of age. His name had been mentioned as the successor to Sir Brie Drummond as chief of the League of Nations Secretariat.

M. Thomas had returned from Geneva to vote in the elections. He visited the Paris> branch of.-the Labour Office and was on his way home when apparently he felt ill. He called at a well-known cafe in the vicinity of the Gare Saint Lazare, and gave an order for a cordial. He then went to the cloakroom. As.he did not return, the manager became anxious and went to see what had happened. He found his customer on the floor unconscious. After vain attempts to revive him, .the manager .had him. taken to hospital. The extraordinary fact about M. Thomas's death, which is attributed to heart failure, was that nobody knew him. at the hospital. It was only hours

after the death of this "unknown casualty," when-the administrative.formalities were being undertaken, that a police commissary searching the dead man's clothes found, to his surprise, a diplomatic passport and various papers in M. Thomas's name.