IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 14 October 1922, Page 10

IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

POINTS OF NOTABLE

rEKSONALITIES

Mr. Lloyd George may rightly be re-

garded as a son of the Free Churches

of Wales and a devoted member of the Calvinistic Baptist Church, at Criccieth. Before the burden of his public duties absorbed his time and enrgy he was a member of the executives of the Baptit Union and of the National Free Church Council. At his Criccieth. church he is iust "Brother David Lloyd George/ auu ne is never happier than when singing his favouite Welsh hymns or' taking part in a prayer meeting. And he is almost as much at home at the Welsh church as in London. Not all his Free Church brethren see eye to eye with him in politics, but they are all proud to regard him as a product of the Free Churches, and they honour him for maintaining and glorying in his connection with them. Major-General Sir aeorge T M. Bridges/ wno has been appointel Governor of South Australia, in succession to bir Archibald Weigall, is the hero of the famous exploit in the retreat from Le Chateau, in France, in 1914. During the retreat he was sent to collect 250 stragglers, w,ho were lying on the roadside at St. Quentin in a state of exhaustion. Their officers were unable to move them. General Bridges went to a toy shop and purchased a little j drum, and, with the help of a soldier { who played a march on a penny whistle, he spurred the men. to further effort, and marched them a distance of 28 I miles. General Bridges lost a leg m i the war. | Lord Milner has had a varied political and business life. At the age of 70, he has just been elected chairman of the Rio Tinto Copper Company^ of Spain. He was Governor-General of South Africa at the outbreak of. the Boer War. After the organisation of the Union of South Africa, he received a pressing invitation from the late J. Pierpont Morgan to join the Morgan firm and take charge of the London i end of the business but he preferred political service to a commercial career, I and so declined. He began life as a journalist. He has been. Under-^ecre- ■ tary of Finance in Egypt, chairman I of the Board of Inland Revenue, Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, Governor of the Transvaal and Orange River j Colony, High Commissioner for South j Africa, member of the- War Cabinet ■ without portfolio in 1916, and SecreI tary of State for War in 1918. In 1919 he became Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was created Viscount Milner in 1902. He remained a I bachelor until his sixty-ninth year. • when he married the beautiful and giftI ed widow of Lord Edward Cecil, who; lin her childhood, sat for Sir John * Millais' painting known as "Puss-in ; Boots." . M. Camille Flammarion, who was 1 recently feted at the Sorbonne in ■\ honour of his 80th birthday, has never ' held any official position, though he 1 /.has many times been described as di- ' rector.of the Paris Observatory. But ;, he is in a very special sense France's • ; "Astronomer-Royal," for he began his I astronomical observations at the age of five by watching the eclipsed sun re- ; fleeted in a pail of water, and has done , more to popularise astronomy than any other living astronomer.. For many ; i years he made his observations from j the . balcony of his flat in. the centre ' of Paris, but in 1882 a wealthy admirer ' presented him with a fine mansion, and j grounds at Juvisy, which he converted j into a veritable temple of science: Mile. Nadeja Standoff has the dis-

I twction of being' the first regularly appointed woman secretary on any diplomatic staff in Washington, Mile. , Standoff is the daughter of the Bulgarian Minister to England, and fs not inexperienced in diplomatic manoeuj vres, as she has several times acted as charge d'affaires for Bulgaria in Lonclon an the absence oJ; her father. In fact, she is conatain^ly mentioned m j the Court Hester- as the first' Lady plenipotentiary welcomed to London since the. days when the Roman monastic orders* sent abbesses to Court on special missions. She was secretary,interpreter at the Peace Conference at Genoa. Mile. Stancioff, who is a handsome woman in her early thirties, is a proficient public speaker, and has been, a lecturer' at the Sorbonne. j Poland has a new leader in the per- } son of Di. George Michalski, Polish j Minister of Finance, who consented io ac-ept this post in the Ponikowski • Cabinet on the condition' that his own I programme of reconstruction be authorised by the Diet. His condition waa accepted, and Dr. Michalski enjoys as a I consequence an arbitrary power probably never before possessed by a Minister of Finance. He Is said to be the nearest approach to a dictator extant out of Russia. The new Polish leader ye**-head of the Land Bank or bahcza, which wag tne means of furnishing financial backing to Galician j agriculture before the war. Dr. Michai- | ski s progress toward withdrawing Por • land s huge issue of paper currency , and creating new taxes has been re- , markable. He has accomplished what financial experts declared to be impossible. * The knighthood of Mr. Maurice Low , the Morning Post's correspondent in t America, bestowed for services during the Washington Conference, met with" unreserved approval from all British journalists who went over to that conference. The courtesy with which he placed his great knowledge of American personalities and conditions, acquired in many years' residence in the States, at the service of his visiting colleagues, won him general affection, , and he was equally popular with the | American journalists. He is a brother i of Sir Sidney Low, another distinguish;ed journalist, who edited the St James' Gazette from 1888 to 1897. The House of Commons has received nTtne Very Rev. Ma jar-General J M Simms, D.D., C.8., the new M.P. for North Down, the first member who has i filled the high office of Moderator. Dr. Simms was Moderator in 1919 of the ! General Assembly of the Presbyterian j Church of Ireland. In the war he was ' Principal Presbyterian Chaplain to the j 8.E.F., and impressed all who me¥' him by his suitability for that respon- j sible post. He h3s now followed his : friend, t)te late Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, as representative of North Down. The Queen of the Belgians; has often visited England as a plain citizen, I staying at an hotel, going to the theatre, shopping, and paying "a"" few calls without the world at latge being any the wiser. When her husband ascended the throne it was said that he did so "with his wife and children" ; if this was meant to bring: out the simple and democratic tendencies of Belgium's Royal Family is was eminently tr"e. The Qneen —a Hohenzollevn. but *f a collateral branch of the family t^at had suffered from the a-egression of the Prussian House—is very domesticated, and may be said fo have cultivated the art of plain living and high thinking. j