FAMOUS INCIDENT

Evening Star, Issue 23124, 25 November 1938, Page 11

FAMOUS INCIDENT

LLOYD GEORGE AND TESCHEN Teschen, the district in South-eastern Silesia which the Poles claim from Czechoslovakia, has been a bone ot contention for over 1,000 years, says a writer in the ‘ Daily Telegraph and Morning Post.’ - But whereas Poland and Bohemia were "struggling for Teschen in tho ninth century, the British public first became actively aware of its existence in 1919, when Mr Lloyd George confessed that its whereabouts had been one of the geography lessons he learned at the Peace Conference. _ The Teschen question, he said in the House on April 16 of that year, was one of several u one never heard which have almost imperilled the peace of Europe.” “ I should like to put each member of this House under an examination. I am certain that I could not have passed it before I went to the Peace Conference. How many members have heard of *Tescheu ? I do not inind ing that I had never heard of it.” The laughter which greeted this rhetorical question was loudest among tho coal-owning M.P.s’. Teschen, as a district rich in coke and gas coal, was better known to them that Mr Lloyd George had suspected. Nor, I imagine, would historically- 1 minded M.P.s have failed if Teschen had been a set phject in Mr Lloyd George’s examination paper. In the later history of Maria Theresa and Frederick 11., Teschen loomed large. It was the peace signed there in 1779 which put an end to the Empress’s plan to annex Bavaria as compensatoin for her earlier failure to recover Silesia. Teschen did not disappear from the news until well over a year after Mr Lloyd George’s speech. It had been planned in 1919 to hold a plebiscite there. The arrival of the plebiscite commissioners in January, 1920, was, however, the signal for such serious rioting that they appealed to the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris. In the following July the conference gave up the plebiscite plaivand prevailed upon the Czechs ' and Poles to agree to a partition.