NIGHT CLUBS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4458, 17 October 1933, Page 7

NIGHT CLUBS

EARL OF KINNOULL. RENOUNCES COCKTAIL PARTIES FOR POLITICS. London, September 12. George Harley Hay, fourteenth Earl of Kinnoull, and son-in-law of the late Mrs. Kate Meyrick, recently talked to a Daily Express representative about his new outlook on life. He is best known to the public through his marriage into the famous night club family. Recently he began to take life seriously. Lord Kinnoull is now Junior Whip of the Labour Party. He has become a London County Council candidate for Clapham, and has renounced cocktail parties and racing motor cars for social and political work. All this has happened because he suddenly realised, to use his own words, that "it is no good going on playing the fool all your life." "My youth may have been misspent, but I do not altogether regret it," Lord Kinnoull said. "Every man has to make a fool of himself at some time of his life, and it is much better to get it over while you are young. "What has sobered me up? Well, age, marriage, a child, and a growing sense of responsibility." Lord Kinnoull is now 31, but he talks as if he were a veteran in years. "I go to a night club now only two or three times a year," he said, "and when I look on the faces of the people there, and see them going hysterical with amusement over pointless or stupid jokes, I wonder what pleasure I can ever have got out of such places. "Mind you, my experience of night club life was good for me. It brought me into contact with life, and has made me understand and sympathise with human weaknesses. His Firsi Marriage. "At the time of my first marriage —to Miss Hamilton-Fellowes, you know —I had not sense of responsibility. There was plenty of money in those days. I amused myself driving racing motor cars. Then our marriage bust up and I went bankrupt. When my affairs began to sort themselves out and I married my present wife I began to realise I should have a serious object in life. Then a child came along, and that, again, made a great difference. "So now I help my wife in the flower shop—l usually go to Covent Garden first thing every morning to do the buying—and for the rest I attend to my job in the House of Lords and go about the country making political speeches. "It was six years after I came of age before I took my seat in the Lords. And then I sat with the Tories. I voted against the Government twice, and discovered that my sympathies had always been decidedly Left Wing, and so I went over to Labour. I do not believe in hereditary titles. I think the House of Lords should be abolished; it is ridiculous that people like myself should be able to vote in an Upper House because we happen to be born peers. "My wife sympathises with my political work, but she is not as Left Wing as I am. We are often arguing about what she calls my extreme views. She is all in favour of Labour, but she does not believe in nationalisation or abolishing competition or anything like that. "Unemployment is the subject in which I am most keenly interested. I can sympathise with the bottom dog because I myself have often been in the position of not knowing where I would be able to sleep. I have never actually starved or been destitute, but I would have been if I had not had friends to whom I could go. A Necessary Evil. "As a legislator I regard night clubs as a necessary evil. But they should be decently conducted by decent people. I would not allow them to be run by a rotten lot of foreigners. But totalisator clubs and afternoon drink clubs are a far greater evil. A man who goes to a night club may wake up with a thick head in the morning, but he can go to his work all the same. The other kind must have cost any number of men their jobs. "I made a speech in the Lords attacking the totalisator clubs and for days afterwards I could not go into a public house without the landlord congratulating me for standing up against unfair competition to the trade."