FAMOUS TO GO

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 February 1938, Page 9

FAMOUS TO GO

FROM MADAME TUSSAUD’S. Madame Tussaud’s, like newspapers, suffers from “pressure of space”— more so, in fact, for while a newspaper can add a couple of pages at need Madame cannot add a couple of rooms, says the “Manchester Guardian.” And so from time to time there has to be a removal of ou.t-moded figures to make way for the younger idols of a heartless public. Such a revision is going on at this moment, and the choice of victims for the axe may well fill one with philosophical musings. Palmerston and Bright, whose political duels were applauded by a whole nation seventy or eighty years ago, are to go down together into the melting-pot, and with them Cobden, Bismarck, and yon IVloltke are to disappear from the group in the Grand Hall, which includes the Kaiser, Franz Joseph of Austria, and Ferdinad of Bulgaria, and the three monarchs are to be joined instead by Albert of the Belgians, Foch, Smuts, and Pershing. Grey, however, is to go, and the Labour representation in Madame Tussaud’s is to lose Arthur Henderson and Tom Shaw. Nor are politicians the only people for whom the public have a short memory. One can understand that a generation which knew not Harry Vardon no longer wants to sec his effigy, but who would have thought a few years ago that a dog would bark at the going of D. R. Jardine, R. E. S. Wyatt, W. M. Woodfull, and Mrs Helen Wills Moody? All these, then, are to go, and nho aie to como in and replace them? Miss Jean Batten, Miss Cecilia Colledge, Kemal Ataturk, and General Frajnco. “When half gods go • ..”

This is not the only change that is going to happen at Madame Tussaud’s which, indeed, is making more alterations than it has done at any time since it reopened after the great fire of 1925. The Chajnber of Horrors is felt to be losing its horror, and during this Winter various of the less notable murderers will be gradually replaced by dioramas of torture throughout the agts. Even to-day, when actual horrors scream at us from newsreels and photographs and the printed page, it seems that people want to see horrors in wax.