LONDON TOPICS

Evening Star, Issue 21632, 30 January 1934, Page 11

LONDON TOPICS

[From Oub Coeebsfondent.]

LONDON, December 21. TWO IMPORTANT DEBATES. s Parliament adjourns this week for a month, and the lack of public interest in that fact reflects the eclipse of pre-sent-day politics! Whether this is due to a decline of statesmanship or a tyranify of overmastering circumstances is a point for stddents of history. Men may have grown smaller, or events may have become less manageable, but certainly Parliament nowadays cannot compete with the cinema. Yet two important' debates were staged this week, 1 one in the Commons on disarmament, in which Sir John’ Simon took part and the other on Lord Salisbury’s House of Lords reform plan. This is by no means a diehard plan. All it proposes is to give a. second chamber, composed of 300, instead of 700 peers, power to refer any legislative proposal to the electors, and to add peers to the select committee which certifies money Bills over which the Upper House would still have no control. POLITICS IN IRELAND. The arrest of General O’Duffy, ostensibly for wearing a blue shirt, indi- ■ cates how confidently Mr De Valera’s Government regards itself as top dog in Southern Ireland. _ Under a veneer of almost naive idealism Mr De Valera is an astute politician. Ho is playing, with inexhaustible trump cards, a game of “ heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.” _ The metaphor jnay_ be mixed, but it conveys the situation. He is out to smash the treaty and establish an Irish Republic. If the Whitehall Government ignores -his _ repudiations of treaty agreements, it is a feather in his cap. If, as in the case of the land annuities, London resists the move, it is a nail in the political coffin of Mr De Valera’s opponents. Deep-seated antiBritish sentiment, the heritage of old centuries rehabilitated by the Black and Tan episodes, reacts in either case favourably to’ him and unfavourably to his critics. OUT OF THE GLOOM. There can be no doubt that the Government chose the psychological moment for the announcement of its decision with regard to the new Cunarder. The first phase of the Government’s task is completed. Confidence has been restored, and now comes the encouragement of enterprise. Responsible Ministers are well satisfied from the returns and reports now coming into the Treasury and Board of Trade that the back of the depression has been broken, and a marked revival will set in with the New Year. What is most satisfactory is that the symptoms of renewed activity come most markedly from our heavy basic industries and from %the depressed areas. On all sides. I understand, plans are now being made on the assumption that there will be a big drop in the unemployment figures in the spring. One member of the Government" I know is even ready to forecast that this figure will be reduced below the two million mark before the Budget is introduced. The stimulus provided by resumption of work at Clydebank will, it is believed, supply the visible turning point, as other industrial _ centres that hitherto have been hesitant will embark upon new _ activities. What the Government desires to cultivate is a steady, but not too precipitate revival. It is realised that anything like a boom before world conditions are ready for it is to be discouraged, as it would only tend to be followed by a relapse that would throw the nation back into the danger zone. ANOTHER SCRAP OF PAPER. What time the disarmament movement feebly marks time to avoid cold feet, Germany has triumphantly rearmed herself in defiance of the peace terms. Her military effectives to-day total well over a million without counting ex-service material. A new factor, not present in 1914, is a standing army of highly trained and specialised longservice troops, resembling our own Expeditionary* Force. This impressive personnel does not lack _ up-to-date equipment. In the air, with all her commercial planes readily convertible, Germany is at least as strong as France and Britain combined. If her dummy tanks aro not quite realistic, her trench mortars, banned by the peace terms, only await the fixing of carefully stored barrels. All the bankrupt German munition firms now show thriving bal-ance-sheets. Germany, in brief, has treated the Versailles Treaty as another scrap of paper.

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO NEWFOUNDLAND.

Mr E. C. Grenfell’s criticism of the Government for the financial assistance it is bringing to Newfoundland, has been the cause of a good deal of comment among other members in the Conservative Party. His forebodings, as to the undesirable precedent 11111011 might be created and which might lead us into becoming involved in the liabilities of other dominions running into hundred. o or even thousands of millions' of pounds, was, of course, an obviously argumentative exaggeration. Coming from one of the members for the City of London, however, more importance may be attached to his forebodings than they deserve. The really strange point is that Mr Grenfell should take such alarm over the assistance offered by our Government to our oldest colony, whilst not so long ago he viewed with perfect equanimity the gratuitous acceptance of British -liability for the loans of a foreign Power. When the Austrian Loans Guarantee Bill was before the House of Commons in the summer it was viewed with much misgiving by many' Conservative members. Presumably, however, Mr Grenfell was not among their number. , At any rate, no warning voice was raised from the City of London.

RAILWAYMEN’S NEW LEADER. Mr Marchbank, who has been ejected head of the National Union of Railwaymen, a post formerly held by _ our present Minister for the Dominions, Mr J. H. Thomas, is a real Scot. His father was a shepherd in Dumfries, and Mr Marchbank himself followed that poetic calling in'his younger days. Since then he has been in quick succession, for_ he is now only forty-nine, porter, policeman, and shunter, and he hecamepresident of his own union in 1922. He is eminently the level-headed, cautious Scot, but is athletic of habit, shares Mr MacDonald’s passion for walking, has a prodigious memory for facts and figures, and can rattle an R even more realistically than the Prime Minister when broadcasting. _ He should be a power in the trade union world, and it will be important to see how he shapes politically. He can hardly serve the railwaymen better, however, _ than did “ jimmy ” Thomas, despite recent estrangement. AERIAL FELLOWSHIP, Mr Souttar, the London surgeon, who two months ago flew to India, piloted by Captain Stack, to perform an operation on' a Nepalese princess, puts great faith in the international goodfellowship of the air. His plane having only a 400-mile range, thirty landings were made on the Indian journey, and Mr Souttar was, profoundly impressed by the friendly and sympathetic understanding manifested by all the airmen he met. He holds out a vision of air traffic as destroying international antipathies, and realising that broadening of men’s minds envisaged in Tennyson’s ‘ In Memoriam.’ Ho believes the ambitions of Geneva will be eventually achieved through the intercourse of the air, and that flying, so far from creating a new menace and terror to mankind, will take the hatred out of racial landmarks. It is a very inspiring picture, hut it will gather greater conviction as the echoes of London’s Zeppelin bombs fade out. LE GATEAU. Smith-Dorrien’s epic stand at Le Gateau with the Second Corps during the Mons retreat will rank with Nelson’s blind-eye victory. Sir Horace fought Le Gateau against orders, and was recalled home. The official British War History, however, now states that Sir Horace’s action saved the situation at a moment when both French, his commander-in-chipf, and Haig, his confrere in command of the First Corps, were rather badly rattled. Now, on top of this vindication, comes a voice from the tomb. Major-General Bingham, chief of our section of the Inter-Allied Control Commission in Germany after the war, tells us he saw General Yon Kluck, and asked him if he had any message for SmithDorrien, who opposed nim at Le Gateau. Von Kluck said, “ Yes, tell the general, if ho had not stopped and fought as he did at Lc Chateau, I should have turned the flank of the British Army and taken Paris.” That sems pretty conclusive. CHALLENGE TO STEAM. Tt lias been insistently rumoured, since the war, that the big railway

companies are thinking of electrification. And perhaps, in the minds of outsiders, the example of the Southern. Railway, which has developed such an extensive electrification of its system, has lent support to the idea. But I gather that,,so far from this being the case, the L.M.S. and other Northern lines, whatever happens to the G.W., are firmly opposed to electrification. They regard their problems, as entirely different from the Southern’s, whose business is 75 per cent, passenger, and, even in the case of its Lon-don-Brightqn electric line, virtually suburban. The quick acceleration and other advantages of electricity are invaluable for suburban traffic, but for long-distance travel, and above all for heavy goods, the railway experts, I am told, still put their faith in steam. TO THE SEA IN SHIPS.

Only a sailor knows the daunting horrors of such a winter storm as the one that has just swept our shores. A gale at sea is never a comfortable experience, even to luxury passengers aboard a floating grand hotel. In a small croft, “a seasick weary barque,” as Romeo puts it, when the raging wind is razor-edged with a cold that cuts through the stoutest peajackets and numbs the strongest -hands, it is literally dreadful. The finest prose description of a storm is in R.L.S.’s ‘ Wrecker.’ He imagines, amid the uproar of the wind in the trembling rigring, a demoniac voice that dominates the fury, and howls for its groaning prey. “ God bless,” apostrophises R.L.S., “ every man who swung a hammer on that tiny but stout hull. It was not for wages alone ho worked, but to save men’s lives.” Comfortable citizens ashore, when the winter gale shakes the roof, may well salute in humble admiration our seamen, our lifeboatmen, and also those sturdy fellows who swing hammers in shipyards. SWISS CENTAUR. Mr Francois Tschiffely, whose marriage to Miss Violet Marquesita takes place in London this week, is one of the toughest guys, as they say m America, in the literary world. He has been a soccer pro., a booth boxer, and a cow puncher, and his ride from Buenos Ayres to New York, a distance or 10,000 miles completed over river and ravine in thirty months, has won unstinted eulogy from so sound a judge of a centaur as Mr Cunnmghame Graham, who asserts that. no finer feat lias ever been performed by a horseman. Mr Tschiffely has written a most readable book on his equine Odyssey, and it is among the literary best sellers. But he hawked it up and down America in vain for ten months looking for a publisher, and in the end found one in this country. Mr Tschiffely and his bride intend to settle in England. The future Mrs Tschiffely was the charming young actress who played Lucy in _ ‘ The Beggar’s Opera ’ at Hammersmith. POCKET DUSE. Much embittered wit has been diree. ted against our alleged conviction, as a play-going nation, that foreign acting must necessarily hold some mystic compelling quality denied the Britisher. But it does happen to be strictly true that Elizabeth Bergner, the young German actress who has taken London by storm in Margaret Kennedy’s ‘ Escape Me Never,’ is simply incomparable. I can think of no young English stage contemporary who, histrionically, and in that particular role, could begin to look at her. And quite a number of them, bless their generous hearts, have told me so explicitly. In her lack of conventional good looks, and her conquest by sheer force of personality, in the irresistible grace that is of the spirit, Elizabeth Bergner is a sort of Teutonic pocket-edition of Eleonora Duse. Her genius burns with the same flame of pure intensity which is not of the footlights, and that only the divine spark can kindle. ' THEY ’AVEN’T AN ’ORSE. In her fascinating autobiography Mary Anderson Navarro relates how one day, in London, getting into her hansom, she remarked to the driver: “This is real winter weather, isn’t it?” To which conventionally jejune interrPgatiou the cabby replied: “I give you my word, ma’am, I ain’t seon a butterfly all clay!” It is quite impossible to imagine any modern London taxinian, hunched concentratively over his steering wheel, rising to such pretty heights of Cockney wit. Is there something in the omnipotent overlordship of mechanism, even as applied to transport, that deadens the sense of hum-

our? Even though some of the old growler Jehus were a trifle morose and gloomy on their off days, it was always a joy to have dealings with the typical Edwardian hansom driver. But there! It must be easier to crack jokes with a sky-rockettiug whip than a surly carburettor. MEWS. Some people may lament the reforming zeal which has made the L.C.C. put its official ban on London’s mews. It has been decided that “ mews,” a name still applied to a number of quaint old back streets at the West End, is out of date. And it is true enough that the present-day mews are no longer reservations for wealthy people’s horses aud grooms, but quite smart and by no means cheap residential quarters for Bright Young People. It is a distinction to have a mews address, and the architecture of these old places lends enchantment to the cocktail view. Now the L.C.C. is abolishing them, and they will become mere roads with ordinary names. That the plural of “ mew ” has long been applied to stable yards or coachhouses has no more dictionary authority than the fact that the Royal Mews at Charing Cross were the habitat of the royal hawkes for centuries before they became stables. AWAY BACK.

I find authentic examples of links with the remote past a most fascinating study. One gentleman boasts that his grandmother was .born in 1777, and that, as he kissed her on her hundredth birthday in 1877, he and Bonnie Prince Charlie, who saluted her as a baby in Italy, have kissed _ the same person. Then there is President Hindenburg, who, as a small boy, talked to an aged gardener who was once a young recruit in the army of Frederick the Great. Even stranger than these sufficiently remarkable instances of how a very long fife or two can link up history is the case of a living grandnephew of Admiral Hollis, vhose grandaunt, the admiral’s widow, was the mother of Brigadier-general Crabbe Thus she had a husband who fought with Keppel against the French in 1778, and a son who was with the Brigade of Guards in the Boer War. Whether the world is old or young seems to depend on whether you consider it geologically or historically. MUFFS! I fancy there were not quite so many women this time at either the ’Varsity rugger or Soccer match last veek. Most of those who did attend at the Twickenham battleground wore '.hick tweed suits with still thicker tivoed topcoats, the fur-lined variety of which seems to be ousting the fur coat proper. Nearly all came prepared for the worst to the extent of donning foot muffs. I overheard one briefly bright, but bitter little duologue. A fanatical Oxonian, seated just behind me with a very charming lady, was not at all satisfied with the Dark Blue forwards. “ Oxford,” ho ejaculated impatiently, “don’t, seem to have; half the devil of the Cambridge pick.” The pretty lady made the mild suggestion: “But haven’t they passed some resolution about not fighting?” Then it was I realised the precise meuiing of the Biblical phrase about the gnashing of teeth.