In the Public Eye

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 84, 9 April 1938, Page 21

In the Public Eye

General Sir Edmund Ironside was born in 1880 and entered the Royal Artillery in 1899. He served in South Africa and in the European War, winning mention in dispatches, the D.5.0., C.M.G., and X.C.8., as well as Russian and French decorations. From 1922 to 1926 he commanded the Staff College at Camberley, and from 1926 to 1928 commanded the Second Division at Aldershot. From 1928 to 1931 he commanded the Meerut District in India, and from 1931-33 was Lieutenant of the Tower. In 1933-36 he was Quar-termaster-General in India. In 1936 he was appointed to be G.O.C. the Eastern Command. He is half Scottish, and claims to have Viking blood. He stands 6ft 4in and weighs 17 stone, and is immensely broad and strong. He finished the war in command of Canadians, and in 1919 was given the Archangel Command against the Bolsheviks. After Archangel he went to Budapest in charge of the East Hungarian Mission to straighten out things with adjacent Rumania. He did work, too, in Turkey, Persia, Mesopotamia, and India. He was promoted full general in July, 1935, the youngest soldier in modern times to reach that rank, and was the first British officer to land in uniform in France in 1914. He has shone as a Rugby player and a scratch golfer. Professor A. Piccard. Professor Piccard, of Brussels University, who gained fame by his balloon ascents in£o the stratosphere, is now planning to explore the bed of the ocean. , Dr. William Beebe, an American scientist, has already worked at a depth of 3000 feet in a bathysphere attached to a cable. Professor Piccard hopes to reach a depth of 15,000 feet. Explaining his plans, Professor Piccard said he would have a bathysphere unattached to any cable. The bathysphere will be supported in the water by a cylinder containing paraffin. Ballast will be fixed underneath. It will consist of small steel shot, and will be controlled by magnetism. As the bathysphere will be lighter than water, it will be weighted with the ballast for the descent. Professor Piccard thinks that an hour and a'half will be necessary to reach a depth of 15,000 ft. Pressure of the water will keep the bathysphere at this depth, use being made of the ballast when necessary. Exploration could be made with the help of the ocean currents. Fish could be photographed in this region of total darkness with the aid of artificial light. Experiments for a year are contemplated to select the most suitable metal for the sphere and the type and strength of the glass for the windows. The first descent will probably be made in the Lake of Geneva. Later there will be others off the Canary Islands, where the sea has a depth of 18,000 feet. Professor Piccard will be accompanied by a biologist. He will himself act as pilot. The National Fund for Scientific Research'is assisting in the undertaking. Commander A. D. Loktionoff. Tucked quietly away on the back page of the newspaper "Izvestia" recently was an announcement of considerable importance. It simply mentioned that among others at the funeral of the dirigible V-6 victims was the chief of the Red Army Air Corps, Commander Alexander Dimitrivitch Loktionoff (the title "commander" meaning general, which is one of the military titles not restored in the Soviet Union). I "Izvestia" did not say he is the "new" chief, but until then there had been no public announcement of Commander Loktionofl's appointment or the demotion of Marshal Yakoff Ivanovitch Alksnis, who became chief of the Red Air Force in 1933 arid in June, 1937, was nominated Vice Commissar of Defence. .About Marshal Alksnis there is something to be said. On October 30 he was nominated as a candidate for the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) by the city of Mogilev, in White Russia. On November 27, however, the principal White Russian newspaper announced laconically that Mogilev had finally nominated Ivan Ivanovitch Maslennikoff commander of the White Russian border guard, who was duly elected on December 12. Over Marshal Alksnis thenceforth there was a discreet veil of silence, but it is worth mentioning that, after erroneous reports had appeared in the foreign Press about his being included in the group of generals shot last summer, he actually was a member of the special group of judges of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. that on June 11 tried and sentenced to death Marshal Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky and seven other generals for high treason. Commander Loktionoff is one of the relatively young but highly trusted commanding officers whom Joseph Stalin and Defence Commissar Klementy Voroshilov have brought forward in the past ten years. Born in 1893, the son of a poor peasant of Kursk Province, he was drafted into the Tsarist army during the World War and in 1917 was elected vicecommander of his regiment and secretary of the regimental committee. He served with distinction in the Red Army during the civil war and while commanding the Ninth Division Rifle Brigade checked a drive of greatly superior forces of General Wrangel's White army against the Donetz region in 1920, for which he received the Order of the Red Flag and honourable mention in dispatches. In 1921 he joined the Communist Party. He has held important military posts in White Russia and the Ukraine (at Kharkov) and subse-j quently commanded forces in the Central Asian city of Samarkand, which elected him a member of the Supreme Soviet last December. He is a tough, thick-set citizen with a heavy jaw, and bright blue eyes. He knew little previously about aviation, but he is said to be a first-class executive and absolutely devoted to Stalin and Commissar Voroshilov. *

Miss Margaret Bondfleld, the only woman who has been a member of the British Cabinet, retired on March 19 from the position of chief woman officer of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers which she has held since the merging of the National Federation of Women Workers in the General Workers' Union in 1920. Miss Bondfield was also the first and only "woman chairman of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, but did not become president of tne congress because during the year she took office in the first Labour Government. As Labour adviser she attended the first International Labour Conference at Washington in 1919 and for several years was present at later conferences at Geneva. A trade unionist for 46 years, Miss Bondfield has occupied official union positions for 42 years. She became assistant secretary of the Shop Assistants' Union in 1897, and held that position for ten years. She succeeded Miss Mary Mac Arthur in the administration of the National Federation of Women Workers. In the first Labour Government in 1924 Miss Bondfield was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour. In the second Labour Government in 1929 she was Minister of Labour and became a Privy Councillor. Miss Bondfield was born in a humble cottage at Chard, Somerset, in 1873, one of a family of 11, and at the age of 13 she was teaching infants in a board school. A year or two later she became an apprentice in an outfitter's shop at Brighton, and for 11 years was a shop assistant in London and elsewhere. She was so impressed with the evils of the "living-in" system that she began a campaign against it. For several years she had to share a room with a girl suffering from consumption. On the premises of her employer, where the assistants lived, there were no bath facilities. In recollections of her shop career, Miss Bondfield has stated: "The conditions under which we worked, even in the West End, were deplorable, the hours being from 7.30 a.m. to 8 p.m., with only, a half-day off once a week. 'Late shop' kept open untillO or 11 o'clock on one or two nights. At one time I worked for a firm the head of which was a prominent church member. He' insisted that the shutters should be put up" by 11.50 on Saturday night to avoid the accusation of Sunday labour." Miss Bondfield represented Northampton in the 1923-24 Parliament and Wallsend fr6m 1926 to 1931. She is the Labour candidate for Reading, and will in future give more of her time to political work. This month she is going to the United States for a long visit. "I hope (she said) to do something for the Labour and trade union movements there, and to help to cement Anglo-American relations." Mr. A. Weinstein.' The watchword'of America's big business men is "Weinstein says -." Mr. Alexander Weinstein, pale-faced and spectacled, recently explained how he became doctor of industry to America's largest companies. An eager, straight-from-the-shoulder talker, Weinstein was in London on his first holiday since he started gingering up big business after the war. • He says: "Most business failures are avoidable. They result from causes that could be foreseen or controlled." That is where he comes in. "My qualifications are an understanding of folks and plain, ordinary horsesense," he said. "I believe in efficiency, but not in efficiency experts. When I diagnose a factory's health I get the boys together. I don't just sit around and look professional; I'm terribly undignified. "I say, 'Boys, you know this job better than me. What are we doing wrong?' They've been watching what's wrong, afraid to say. I never fail to get constructive ideas. I get the men working with me —far better than the extra efficiency you can drive out of them. Understanding, that's the secret." When strikes were closing factories all over America, Mr. Weinstein finished his last job of revitalising a £5,000,000 company. A labour union gave him a dinner, the first trustee in bankruptcy American labour has ever honoured in such a way. He had saved jobs for 5000 men. He is proud of that dinner, says it shows what can be done with "understanding and plain horse-s^ense.' Dr. E. Benes. The attention of the world today is concentrated upon the Czechs and their President, Dr. Edouard Benes. The world wonders whether this (geographically) little State, and its keeneyed, sharp-nosed, intelligent, responsible President, can trump Hitler's ace in Middle Europe. The Czechs are a closely-knit, cultural, economic, and military unit, having, as was pointed out in the House of Commons recently, a larger army than England has today, and the largest arsenal in Europe. It inherited at the end of the war threequarters of the industry of the old Austrian empire, and nearly all -the mineral wealth and other industrial resources. Since the war it has built soundly; avoided foreign loans, credits, and excessive imports; kept a favourable trade balance, kept the Budget in order, instituted land reforms, built schools for free education, and was physically untouched by battle in the last war. Benes, who is 53, was born of peasant stock, poor, self-educated, a doctor of philosophy, a realist rather than an idealist, and a dynamo of energy who habitually works.ls hours a day. He has been Foreign Minister since 1919, and knows most of the underground passages of international politics in Europe, having been a prewar rebel and a spy. As early as 1934' he'realised the menace to Czechoslovakia of Nazi encirclement, and took steps to meet it. He made the alliance with France, welded Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia into the Little Entente, and signed a pact of • j mutual assistance with the Soviet, mak--1 ing his capital, Prague, a link between ! France and the Soviet, and an air base ■ at which both French and Soviet planes ■ could land. He knows, also, his in--1 ternal problem, ,the German minority of 3,300,000 in a country of 14,000,000. j