LONDON TOPICS

Evening Star, Issue 19520, 30 March 1927, Page 2

LONDON TOPICS

WAR BLUNDERS DISCUSSED UNEMPLOYMENT PROBLEMS [From Our Correspondent.] February 17. _ Judging by the popular interest in Mr Churcnill’s'latest volume,-the Great War is not the stale topic Fleet Street imagines. Mr Churchill indicts the Allied strategy for three blunders. He thinks the men uselessly thrown away on the Somme might have won victory years sooner in Gallipoli. Incidentally the same might be said ol our million casualties in holding the Ypres salient for a mere boast. Churchill also suggests plainly that failure to run a risk at Jutland and smash the German Fleet dragged the fighting out by over a year. But his chief point is the premature disclosure of our tanks. He even sought an interview with Lord Oxford,' though then opposed to him, to plead that action might be delayed until, with an adequate number of these formidable novelties, we might break up and overrun the whole German positions on the western front. On all these points Mr Churchill has behind him the weight of expert opinion. Our only consolation is that the Germans lost certain victory by even bigger blunders. Mr Churchill points out that, had the unrestricted U-boat warfare been delayed only a few weeks Russia’s revolutionary collapse would have made it unnecessary. America would not then have come into the war, and Germany could almost inevitably have dictated peace terms. But he goes beyond this, and contends that, but for Ludendort’s wastage of German forces released from the eastern front after Moscow, Germany could have held the Meuse, or Rhino with an impregnable line, and compelled the Allies to accept an agreed peace. Mr Churchill reveals for the first time how grave was the mutiny in the French army after Neville’s fiasco, and how the Russians then in Franco had to be shot down by artillery. The same malevolent tongue that now slanders us in China spread the story that these Russians had been “sent in exchange for munitions!” PROBLEM OF UNEMPLOYMENT.

Lord Blanesburgh’s Unemployment Insurance Committee has done other wise things besides formulating a unanimous report. It realises that the essential thing is “to get rid 01, unemployment,” and its suggestions to that end include greater use of employment exchanges, a co-operative systematic effort by all our industries to survey their position, better and perhaps longer education of young people, occupational training for the workless, relaxation of hard-and-fast trade union conditions, the necessity for prolonged industrial peace, aud an inquiry into the recruitment and discharge of labor in industry. The committee recommends compulsory unemployment insurance, covering the widest gamut, as a permanent part of our social legislation, but under its proposals extended benefit, as apart from standard, would disappear, with increased contributions, and an actuarial inquiry every five Years. Also it urges stricter attention to conditions under which relief is obtainable. The general effect of these recommendations would be to place unemployment relief on a sounder and less wasteful basis. No doubt the Labor extremists will raise a howl, but the report affords a plain path for the Government A' MUCH-OPPOSED BILL. Few parliamentary private Bills have raised so much opposition as that presented by the Beecham’s Estates, Ltd., asking permission to remove Covent Garden Market to the site of the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury. People in every walk of life are opposing it. Medical men nave written to the Minister oi Health, Bloomsbury residents and lovers of beautiful architecture and open spaces have written to the Home Secretary, and now thirty prominent men, including several peers, are io present a strong protest to Parliament in the form of letter i’hii vvill open a*' campaign in the lobby against the measure. With the London County Council and six London boroughs and organisations like the influential London Society, with all its affiliated bodies, the National Farmers’ Union, and the tenants of Covent Garden themselves throwing their whole weight ‘ against it, the Bill would seem to have little chance. The fight for the famous Foundling Hospital and its gioumls and Brunswick and Mecklenburg squares, which are included in the Foundling will to a large extent determine the fate of other Jbeautiful London squares now threatened by vandal builders. THE TOCH EMMAS. The death of Sir William Stokes, inventor of the famous gun called after him, must have caused even Marshal Hindenhurg a reminiscent twinge. Because the Stokes mortar, which superseded all those weird \nuseum fireworks known to the front-line trenches in the earlier days of the war, played no insiderable part in smashing the Himlenburg lane. The tank, the Lewis gun, the Stokes mortar, and the Mills bomb were the four decisive Army weapons, and perhaps the Stokes mortar’s renown is not so great as it deserves to be. It was the only effective tu quoque to the terrible minenwerfer, solved the problem of the Genua i pill box (which it cracked like a nut), and stopped many a promising advance being disastrously held up Yet the Tech Emmas were never popular in the trenches. They were such magnols fpr the German batteries I recall a little Ypres “stunt” in 1916, when one Stokes battery by a mistake opened fire four minutes before the time IN eel fo.r our barrage. Before the barrage started, such was the efficiency of the German gunners, all four Siokes guns and their crews were “ out.” A MIRACLE.

But the best thing that ever happened with a Stokes mortar on the western front was iust before our big push' at Ypres in July, 1917. Headquarters had the wind up sky high about a German aeroplane that flew low ever our front lines almost regularly each morning just after dawn. Hectic orders came through that the thing must be stopped. But somehow our own airmen never showed up at tbo right moment, and not a bullet of the thousands aimed at it by infantry marksmen hit the intruder, who was keeping too low for artillery fire to reach him. Tiien a bright young gentleman, recently transferred from his battalion to be O.C. Tech Emmas, conceived the madlv brilliant idea of “ having a pot at it ” with a Stokes mortar. Ho might as well have gone after wood cock with an elephant gun. He made the scared gunner cut his time fuse down to zero, running frightful risks of “ a premature,” and by the biggest fluke of tbo war blew that Gerry aero plane to utter smithereens. He got the M.C. and a severe wigging, and was henceforth “the Trench Mortar King.” CHANCES FOR RANKERS.

Efforts, to democratise the Army are gradually being extended in practical scope. Great success has attended the latest innovation whereby _ suitable selected n.c.o.’s became eligible as Sandhurst cadets, and obtained commissions in due course in the regular Army. That began three years ago, and is working well. But under the original scheme such commissions were not extended to such technical branches of the Army as the artillery, engineers, or signals, all of which were held to necessitate too severe an examination test for rankers. But the War Office now recognises that exceptional brains may exist under a n.c.o. s hat, which would' be valuable in the -Army’s most expert services, and fix vacancies

a year are- now to be offered at the Woolwich Royal Academy for suitable rankers. This extension' is governed by the same conditions as the Sandhurst cadetship. Character and leadership are essential qualifications. The first ranker cadets will be admitted to “the shop ” next year.. So many generals graduate thence, in proportion to other branches of the Army, that the change opens up romantic possibilities. THE BLUE PLANE. We have often heard stories of millionaires, suddenly remembering that they had an engagement in the. city, who stopped into the blue train at Nice, came to London, had their halfhour’s interview, and then went back without wasting so much as five minutes on the way. One reads of these people,' but one never has the good fortune to meet them. Yet doubtless it happens. Why notP It will not be long, however, before such sensational travel becomes more convincing than over. There is going to be a blue train in the air. Tne most luxurious air liners imaginable are going to ply continuously between Paris and Nice, and there is to be a London connection. All you have to do is to step into an airplane at Croydon at 7.15 in the morning. You will find yourself in Paris before 10. And the “Blue Plane” will.be waiting. By half-past 3 you will be soaring above Marseilles, and 6 o’clock will find the . leisured millionaire at Nice just in time to change,for dinner. BY JEHU! Motor enthusiasts keep bithely trying to get things speeded up nearer to the heart’s desire of 70 ' h.p. car drivers. One novel suggestion, boldly put forth, but hardly likely to figure m the Government’s Motor Bill, is just a drastic project for making horse traffic illegal in London. That the horse-drawn vehicle .on the London main streets is getting sadly obsolescent, despite reports of some business firms reverting from petrol to oats for economic reasons, is only too true. Also is it correct that these survivals from the Dark Ages seriously impede the flow of faster traffic, and, paradoxically enough, by that very fact much increase the risks of the London streets both to motors and pedestrians. But we have not yet, I fancy, quite reached the Martian stage of dooming the horse to urban extinction. The most that is likely just yet is an edict relegating Jehu to the outer stream of traffic nearest the pavements. And even that has its palpable difficulties and dangers. THE SAVELE. Piccadilly is now undergoing its Moscow, In these times the metaphor has its double entendre. Down are coming the haughty old mansions and the exclusive old clubs beneath the housebreaker’s sordid pick, and up go the brand-new hotels and swagger shop flats. It is damnable, but it is Kismet. And the unkindest cut of all, worse in its way than even the demolition of the Duke of Devonshire’s old town palace, is the exit of. the Sayile Club. That institution will continue elsewhere, but its distinctive old home of which Muirhead Bone preserves a wonderful nightscapo in his brother’s ‘London Perambulator’ is to vanish. It will be absorbed into the Park Lane Hotel. The Savile is perhaps London’s bestclub. It has a better vintage of real celebrities than the At hen mum, and the members talk to each other. They run a table d’hote. Its home, 107 Piccadilly, is late eighteenth century, was the house of Baron Rothschild, who made a fortune over Waterloo, and on its steps, shortly after that “ affair of pickets,” Blucher bowed to cheering Londoners, dressed and whiskered like the back numbers of ‘Punch.’