LORD TRENT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 222, 20 August 1931, Page 10

LORD TRENT.

ROMANCE OF COMMERCIAL ENGLAND. The life story of Lord Trent is surely one of the greatest romances of commercial England, for it proves that an indomitable will, a master mind and a soul in touch with the infinite can conquer the limitations of a fra.il body, almost incessantly in pain (states an English paper). When Napoleon sneered at the English as a nation of shopkeepers he took no reckoning of men like Jesse Boot, of Nottingham, whose father, an agricultural labourer, earning 12-shillings a week, saved the extra money he made in harvest time to buv books. Then came the little herb shop with its sweet-smelling wares, which Jesse managed after his father’s death, and a long struggle before the first shop sign appeared in his native town Boots’, cash chemists. Three years ago the King and Queen went to Nottingham to open the new University buildings, the park and the site of the Women’s Hall of Residence, which Sir Jesse and Lady Boot gave to the city, at a cost of more than a million pounds. The man who had given so much heard the King’s speech on the bed where he lay crippled by arthritis, and afterwards Iheir Majesties went to take tea with him and the wonderful wife who was the inspiration of all his undertakings. When he was raised to the peerage Sir Jesse took his title from the river which flows through his native town, and in the island of Jersey, where, she was born, Lady Trent has laid the body of her husband to rest. Such an example as Lord Trent s cannot fail to inspire thousands who are suffering from physical infirmities to-rise above them in unselfish, thought for others, though there may not be one in a thousand able and willing to give so royally as he did.