LONDON TOPICS

Evening Star, Issue 21012, 28 January 1932, Page 9

LONDON TOPICS

GERMANY'S PLIGHT [From Our Correspondent.] December 10. , The plight of Germany may well concern everybody. Without an extension of her debt moratorium, which expires in February, Germany must experience another and probably worse currency collapse. At the same time, as though to ensure against sympathetic assistance from outside, Herr Hitler, whose toothbrush moustache epitomises and vulgarises all that formerly went with Prussian Junkerism, brags to the world at largo that his Steel Hats will soon hold the reins of power in Berlin. The prospect is not heartening. If the mark crashes, down will come other currencies. If Herr Hitler performs his Mussolini act Bolshevism will probably sweep Germany. Neither event will at all help in the post-war recovery of haggard Europe. There are some lamentable exceptions to the general rule of sturdy patriotism with which this country has faced its embarrassments. I have been amazed during the past few days by the number of people who repeated a stupid city canard. This is to the effect that a most famous financial magnate, whose name is almost a household word nowadays, has stated his belief that in 1933 we shall look back on the present years as “ boom ” ones. Not only did this authority never say anything of the sort, but, had he held that opinion, he would he the last to give utterance to it. The effect of a statement like that, widely repeated up and down the country,' might be most injurious to everything we hope to achieve. This is, even less than the 1914-18 period, no time for pessimists or defeatists. 1 A big city authority has given file a diagnosis of the slump. For two centuries this country controlled the world’s credit operations and developed as an instinct a special adaptable finance psychology. This task has now temporarily passed into the hands of severely logical French and overwhelmingly cute American amateurs who lack the instinct to take long views, and, with the world bursting with raw materials and manufactured goods, are busily engaged, not in promoting commerce, but in “ sitting on its tokens.” Till those gold tokens are freely released again we shall have the grotesque anomaly of virtual_ famine amidst surplus abundance. My informant predicts that, as in the war, we shall eventually come out on top, but only after a desperately hard struggle. FRENCH NAVAL POLICY, If France persists in her intention of capital ship construction the projected Disarmament Conference is foredoomed to failure. The pursuance of a policy which means starting a new lap in the matter of armoured shipbuilding will completely upset _ international naval equilibrium. It is true that France is at liberty, under the terras of the Washington Agreement, to build up to 70,000 tons of capital ships. For the last few years she had virtually declared a “ holiday ” in the matter of the larger type of warcraft, devoting her resources to > the provision of large fleets of submarines and small cruisers as a set-off against the Italian shipbuilding programme. Her present attitude is to construct two 25,000-ton battle cruisers in response to the new German Preussen class, and, according to all accounts, these two powerful warships are to be laid down forthwith at the Brest and Lorient dockyards. Both France and Italy, it will bo remembered, were not signatories to the London Treaty. 1 COAL PROBLEM. There have been many rumours that at long last the problem of turning coal economically into oil fuel was solved. Some of these projects have petered out, probably owing to failure to comply with the stern commercial needs of such a solution. But now there is another report, which we must sincerely trust will not prove a false alarm, about a method devised by a distinguished university professor of chemistry. By his system it is an expert estimate that treatment of only 15 per cent, of our annual coal output would yield 20.000,000 tons of fuel oil suitable for Admiralty needs and 100,000,000 gal of motor oil. I hear that steps are actually being taken to give a practical test to this project, which might do so much to help our industrial recovery at this moment. YOUNG DOCTOR INGRAM.

The Bishop of London has just' entered his thirty-fifth year of episcopal dignity and labour. 'lt was on St. Andrew’s Day, 1897, that Dr Ingram was consecrated Bishop Suffragan of Stepney. He is now the sole surviving bishop of the English dioceses of the Anglican Church whose appointment dates back to the nineteenth century and the reign of Queen Victoria. Though now seventy-three years old, Dr Ingram is still, more admirably than facetiously, known to his friends as “ Young Dr Ingram.” Ho seems as energetic and healthy, now as in the days when, as head of Oxford House at Bethnal Green, he preached every Sunday afternoon in Victoria Park. He has toured the world, played tennis, with President Roosevelt, golf with Mr . Bennett, the Canadian Premier, and neither his back-hand stroke nor his drive shows signs of Anno Domini yet. NEW MACHINE-GUN CORPS. The War Office is considering the reconstruction of the Machine-gun Corps, which’served such useful purpose in the war that soldiers are still perplexed why it was abolished. The comparatively recent reorganisation of our infantry battalions into one ma-chine-gun and three rifle companies has not proved so satisfactory as was expected, and it is now proposed to reform the M.G.C., divided into separate battalions, one of which will form part of each infantry brigade. This, it is claimed, will considerably simplify the present system of infantry training, and possibly enable some reduction of present strength to be made. The change would be concurrent with the scheme, which the Imperial General Staff has under examination, for cutting down the peace establishments of the army at Home. In that connection it is not unlikely that the Grenadier and Coldstream Guards will lose their third battalions, thus bringing them into line with the Scots, and leaving the Irish and Welsh at one battalion each. REGIMENT’S LONG TREK. There seems to be an impression that the march of 224 miles by the Loyal Regiment, now in progress between Razmak and Nowshera across the North-west Frontier Province, is the longest peace march undertaken by British troops. This is not so, though it is the longest undertaken for some years. The Ist Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, marched in 1926, in'nineteen days from Razmak to Rawal Pindi, a distance of 262 miles, and the 2nd Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders, did 530-odd mjles from Ambala to

Landi Kotal, at the extreme end of the Khyber Pass, in 1922. In pre-war days both mounted and unmounted soldiers moved long distances by road. Fifty years ago a march of nearly 1,000 miles was undertaken by the 17th Foot (now the Leicesters), and artillery units have frequently moved 500 to 1,000 miles by road, carrying their tents and requirements by pack-mules. These are now, of course, taken by motor lorry whenever possible. LORD FISHER’S COUP, An event worth remembering took place seventeen years ago this week. Not only was the Falkland Islands naval battle a marvellous instance of the late Admiral Lord Fisher’s sheer genius, but without it we should most likely be now paying swingeing tribute to the Kaiser Wilhelm. With the German Pacific Fleet loose in the Atlantic, we might have been scuppered completely. The instant he was recalled to the Admiralty, Lord Fisher’s eager brain worked out the coup. He waved all obstacles aside. The avenging battlecruiser steamed from this country to her dramatic rendezvous with dockyard mechanics still at work aboard her. Things were timed to the hour. When the German Admiral was told a British battle-cruiser was in the bay he knew his fate and that of his fleet was sealed irrevocably, A FAMOUS SCHOOLMASTER, ' Dr Thomas James Macnamara ' was such a breezy, strenuous' fellow that his death in a London nursing homo, even though he was in the seventies, came as rather a shock. The son of a sergeant of the Old 47th, now the Loyal North Lancashire, and born in barracks at Montreal, Dr Macnamara was sixteen years a _ schoolmaster in Devonshire before taking over the editorship of _ the ‘ Schoolmaster.’,, _ That chair led indirectly to a seat in the House of Commons, where Dr Macnamara often contended that we were wasting our money on an elementary system of education which left off just when it was taking root. Mr Lloyd George took a fancy to him, and he gained front bench rank, culminating in an Admiralty appointment during the war which drew a letter of enthusiastic praise from his chief, the late Earl of Balfour. Apart from education and politics, Dr Macnamara’s chief preoccupations were fishing and golfing. He once besought me. almost with tears inhis qyes, not to ‘put off” taking up golf till too late to acquire a natural swing. THE MIGHTY ATOM.* After years of patient scientific endeavour the atom has at last been exploded. This feat seemed well-nigh impossible, and when first mooted caused a great sensation. One well-known London newspaper assured its readers it would be like igniting one grain in a powder barrel. The exploding of an atom would cause the whole universe to go off with one monumental bang. Nervous people demanded police intervention to restrain the cold-blooded physicists. Now Dr R. A. Millikan, one of America’s most distinguished scientists, quietly tells a New York reporter, as he walks off the Aquitania, that the atom has actually been smashed, though it took a three-million electric voltage to do it. And so far from precipitating the Day of Judgment, it has not even affected the pound. WORRYING. An old Fleet street friend gave me an admirable example to-day how human nature often meets trouble more than halfway. A few weeks ago two letters crossed in the post. One was written by him to a married daughter out in Newchang, which is in the very centre of the present disturbances in the Far East.. That letter was full of anxious inquiries as to the daughter s welfare and even safety. The other letter, which was from that daughter to him, was written when the British pound was slumping, a d when everybody was talking of national bankruptcy and starving dole queues. In it the writer expressed anxious solicitude about her father’s security in London, and said how sorry she was he could not be with her at Newchang in complete safety. NEW FORM OF ’FLU. A record number of appendicitis cases in London just now is making medical experts speculate whether this is a new manifestation of our bid enemy the influenza epidemic. That dread malady, with which doctors and laboratory researchers have so far grappled in vain, is periodically prevalent, and seems to take a new manifestation each visit. The present appendicitis vogue is said to originate in an internal chill which centres eventually in the appendix, though what occurs in the case of the large number of people who that exotic organ I cannot say. The experts say the best prc mtative is to avoid getting run down, keep out or draughts, and take plenty of exercise and moderate meals. Which really is not much better than telling us that the way to avoid colds is not to get them. LITERARY STIMULANT. I have heard it claimed that the Thursday Club, which meets once a month at Foyle’s Aft Gallery for book talks over a cup of ■tea, and whose founder members include Marjorie Bowen, Ursula Bloom, Joan Temple, Mrs Champion de Crespigny, and Nellie Tom-Gallon, has set a distinguished precedent in the matter of innocuous literary stimulant. The wine of Omar and the good fellowship of taverns, it is suggested, has been hitherto regarded as essential to all such foregathermgs of bright brains and brilliant wits, and the substitution of the Johnsonian drink is explained by the predominance of feminine membership. But I happen to know that, long years before the Thursday Club was dreamt of, a coterie of most scintillating male intellects rose to Parnassian heights over tea and toast m an A.B.C. shop, their weekly rendezvous. The presiding genius or the thrilling group was A. R. Orage, editor of the ‘ New Age,’ and it likewise included the then unknown Michael Arlen, who wrote under Jus Armenian name that I have never been able to remember, much loss pronounce, and who was given his first real chance in the pages of that unique weekly. And there was W. R. Titterton, who had a genius for indicting spontaneous odes to charming waitresses on the margin of the menu, and ” Jacob Tonson, the nom-de-guerre under which the late Arnold Bennett contributed delightful causeries, gratis, to the periodical in which George Bernard Shaw, among other influential people, took a practical interest, and which helped to set so many young litterateurs on their feet. MAN FROM OLDHAM. But for the activities of the 8.8. C., probably few people in this country would know the name of Mr William Walton. Yet this twenty-nine-year-old musician, a prodigy of that humdrum Lancashire town, Oldham, is acclaimed by reputed musical experts as the most promising genius of the century in the musical world. He was an infant wonder, and sang serious oratorios before he could quite talk. He was ten when he left Oldham to become a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Tall and blonde, he has quite a simple, unaffected manner, as becomes a Lancastrian, and does most of his composing work abroad. It was, I believe, the

8.8. C. who egged him On to writ* ‘Belshazzar’s Feast,’ with its twa brass band accompaniments to orchestra and chorus. SOUTH AFRICA HOUSE. When it reaches completion London will add the new South' Africa house in Trafalgar square to its list of metropolitan show palaces. Amongst other; things, the fine building will have some interesting carving. Over the portico will figure the historic s.s. De Goeda Hoop, the vessel of the first Governor; of South 4frica, modelled on the design displayed on the wall of the castle at Cape Town. On the front of the building will be the four stars of tha Southern Cross. At the entrance to the exhibition hall, I believe, there may. be a winged springbok, which is the traditional emblem of the South African Union. Our Rugger fans may attach a special and sporting significance to the latter sculpture. It might be quite a good idea, too, to have a lifelike statue of Mr Osier, the genial captain of the present Springbok RuggeU team, selling the dummy!