In the Public Eye

Evening Post, Issue 28, 1 August 1936, Page 21

In the Public Eye

LORD HUGH CECIL. It was announced from No. 10 Downing Street recently that the King had approved the appointment of, Lord Hugh Cecil, M.P., as Provost of Eton in succession to the late Dr. Montague Rhodes James, O.M.The Provostship is said to be the highest-paid scholastic appointment in the world, although' the salary'is not officially revealed. The Provost is the highest authority at the college, and presides at all meetings of the. Fellows. Upon him largely falls the care of the college estates and the many financial questions relating; to the college and its buildings. The appointment has come somewhat as a surprise. It is, however, one for which Lord Cecil is fitted, both by his scholarship and by the fact of his being a strong churchman. In the constitution of the college it is stipulated that the Provost shall be a member of the Church of England, at- least thirty years of age, and a master of arts or of some equal degree. His official residence is the Lodge. The Provost is an ecclesiastical dignitary—a fact which is not impaired by his being a layman. As head ol the Foundation he occupies a stall in the chapel corresponding to that of Dean in a Cathedral. . , ■. .. Precedent has been followed in selecting an Old Etonian. • Only once in the past three hundred years has the office been held by a man not educated at Eton. The office of Provost dates back to the foundation of the college by Henry VI in 1440. It was then laid down that the Sovereign should make this appointment, and this practice has been followed ever since. ' The rule that the Provostship should be .filled by a member .of the twin foundation of King's College, Cambridge, which was followed in the case of the late Dr. James, has for long not been strictly observed. The two previous predecessors of the late Provost came from Oxford, Dr. Warre and Dr. Hornby. , Lord Hugh Cecil will take up residence at the college in. September. Not until then will the massive oak doors into the schoolyard, which, in accordance with tradition, have been shut since the death of Mr. James in June be reopened. When a new Provost arrives at Eton he knocks on the gates and is then welcomed by the Fellows, the headmaster, and the King's representatives. Lord Hugh Cecil, who is the fifth sen of the third Marquess of Salisbury, the great Conservative statesman, is sixty-seven. From Eton he went to University College, Oxford, and was later a Fellow of Hertford College. Since 1910 he has been M.P. for Oxford University, and had previously represented Greenwich. He is thus now both M.P. for his old university and Provost of his old college. Mr. W. B. Bankhead. In the twenty years he has been a member of the House of Representatives Mr. William B. Bankhead, the new Speaker of the American House of Representatives, has acquired a reputation for skill and energy which made him one of the leading members of his party. Together with his brother, Senator John Hollis Bankhead, he sponsored the Bankhead Bill, also known as the Cotton Control Act, designed to rehabilitate about 10,000,000 sharecroppers and tenant farmers, Negro and white. He was chairman of the Rules Committee of the House, for a number of years, and on January 2, 1935, he was elected Democratic Floor. Leader. In that office he was frequently forced to make important decisions, and he often was called to confer with President Roosevelt on Budget and other issues. " , ■ • The new Speaker, who is the father of Tallulah Bankhead, the actress, has enjoyed wide prestige since he was first elected Representative from Alabama in 1916. Mr. Bankhead is sixty-four years old. His father was Senator John Hollis Bankhead, of Alabama. Curiously enough, the man who will now occupy the Speaker's chair in the House had originally intended to go on the stage. He ran away from his native town of Moscow, Alabama, and went to Boston when he was in his early twenties, but repeated appeals from his family caused him to change his mind and his career. He heard William Jennings Bryan speak in Boston one day and became much impressed. He then went to New York, where he began to make speeches under the auspices of Tammany Hall, and became closely associated with Governor William Sulzer. In 1900 he became candidate for the Alabama State Legislature, was elected and held office for one year.-Mr. Bankhead had studied law at Georgetown University and was admitted to the Bar in 1895. After his term in the Legislature he was city attorney of Huntsville, Alabama, and was circuit solicitor of the Fourteenth Judicial Circuit from 1910 to 1914. When he took his seat in Congress the first thing he received as a guide to his career was a sound piece of advice from his father, and one that started him up the ladder. It was this: "Learn the rules." He followed the advice and during hectic days when a stubborn minority, and sometimes the fringes of a recalcitrant majority, threatened indefinitely to delay adjournment, the Rules Committee was called upon for all its ingenuity jn keeping open the channel for the flood of emergency legislation that had to be kept flowing through the legislative mill. He was particularly interested in fiscal matters, and as an expert in such problems he had a notable part in framing the emergency legislation necessitated by the depression. The new Speaker is known for his practical. presentation of abstruse subjects and is recognised as an astute politician and an intelligent and tolerant legislator,

THE MAHARAJAH OF MYSORE Preparations were recently being made at a London hotel to receive a visitor who entertains on such a scale that he has to maintain a fleet of eighty motor-cars. He is the Maharajah of Mysore, one of the largest native States in India. The Maharajah was on his way to England in the liner Ranpura, accompanied by a retinue of thirty servants. With him, too, was the family goddess, a small golden image called Chamundeswari. Accommodation was being prepared for the principal members of the party; at the Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane. Orders have been received at the hotel for a large sitting-room to be stripped of its furniture and made ready for the goddess. ... It will be a temple on a small scale. The Maharajah, a devout Hindu belonging to the Kshattriya, or the military caste, will use this room for religious rites to be performed by priests travelling with him. This wealthy ruler of 6,500,000 people, controller of annual revenues amounting to £2,500,000, is forbidden by his religion to eat any kind of meat. And he shuns eggs, fish, and fowl. He will subsist entirely on vegetables during his two and a half months' stay in England. A part of the hotel kitchens will be set aside for the exclusive use of his two cooks. This will be his first visit to England. An official'of the Mysore offices in London declared that the Maharajah seeks escape from the burden of grief placed upon him by the death of his mother and his favourite sister. This official said: "How he will find entertainment I do not know. He has no liking for theatres and cinemas. In fact, he would rather entertain than be entertained." Banquets will give little pleasure to the Maharajah, for added to His scrupulous observance of Hindu food laws he neither smokes nor drinks. Water from the holy Ganges is the only beverage he will take at home, In London he will drink' water after it has been blessed by his spiritual advisers. Herr A. Hitler. As a ruler of a great European Power, Herr Hitler is the oddest, figure on the Continent today, but even as a humble individual he would still be ,a curious character, says the "Magazine Digest." With a limited mind, slight formal education, a remarkable memory for print, uncanny powers as an orator, and a face inappropriate to fame,, in fifteen years he planned, manoeuvred, and achieved an incredible career, which was personal to him and/has now become intimate with the lives of 65,000,000 German people. His brain is instinctive, hot logical, and ■ has a feminine quota which, as a man of action, he has mobilised. Lacking the faculty of creating new public ideologies, as a fanatic he has developed his unusual capacity for adapting those of others. Being self-taught, his mental processes are mysterious; he is missionary-mind-ed; his thinking is emotional, his conclusions material. He has been studious with strange results; he says'he regards liberalism as a form of tyranny, hatred and attack as part of man's civic virtues, and equality of men as immoral and against nature. Since he is a concentrated, introspective dogmatist, he' is uninformed by exterior criticism. On the other hand, he is a masterly and natural advertiser, a phenomenal propagandist within his limits, the greatest-mob orator in German annals, one of the most intensive organisers in European history.. He. believes in intolerance as a pragmatic principle. Hitler accepts violence as a detail of state, he says mercy is not his affair with men, yet he is kind to dumb animals. He becomes sick if he sees blood, yet he is unafraid of being killed or killing. He has mystical tendencies, no common sense, and Wagner>an taste for heroics and death. He was born loaded with vanities, and has developed megalomania as his final decoration. He is garrulous; in interviews, the interviewer often fails to get a word in edgewise. Momentarily influenced by colder, harder minds, he is ultimately convinced only by himself. His moods change often, his opinions never. Since the age of twenty, they have been mainly antiSemitic, anti-Communist, anti-suffrage, and Pan-German. He has a fine library of 6000 volumes, yet he never reads; books would do him no good— his mind is made up. Alternately polarised by indolence and furious energy, he can outwork his colleagues in a crisis. He has the mediumistic time sense of the imminent, which is special to dictators. His disordered nervous system gives him a psychic superiority over the healthy and plodding. By his intimates .his fits of weeping are undenied and unexplained, and give none of them an advantage over him. At such moments, the neurasthenia of the Fuhrer, with tears on his cheeks, but life and death in his hands, is too serious to be trifled with. Hitler is a born spellbinder of the emotional type, who produces in crowds the excitement he produces in himself. From the first, Hitler was the kind of public speaker who, when heckled, could find an explanation quick as lightning and make it sound like thunder. Though he makes few gestures, his oratory used to wilt his collar, unglue his forelock, glaze his eyes; he was like a man hypnotised, repeating himself into a frenzy. Today, his goal gained, he is calmer on the speaker's tribune; his voice, restored by an operation from its former screaming and croaking, is now a pleasant, barking, baritone. His accent and vocabulary are still inelegant Austrian. Though his sentences are sometimes 'too involved to make grammatical sense, his meaning is always clear. . : . >?>--*-*^Nn Where most newcomer autocrats have rushed into power by a coup d'etat, Hitler rose slowly to Reichsfuhrer by fifteen years of lecturing. He and his Nazi Party mounted less on their actions, or even on the troubles of the country, than :on the lungs of propaganda. Success hasn't silenced him. Adolf Hitler still talks more than any other man in Europe.