King’s Police Station

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 153, 1 July 1938, Page 12

King’s Police Station

—— . j FILMING ‘ ‘ THE CITADEL ’' ° INCREASE OF BAD SPEECH LONDON, Juno 11. New Zealand visitors to London who have walked all the way down the Mall to see Buckingham Palace havo not failed to notice the immaculate guardsmen on sentry duty when eventually they have arrived at the main gates. What they have probably been less ready to notice is tho unobtrusive policeman watching the inside of the arch. It is his duty to see that the T centre gate is used only by members of the Royal Family. This is one of the important points that a band of more than a dozen f policemen have to watch in turn. They are under the charge of an inspector, and their station is at Wellington Arch, on Constitution Hill. Private motorists F often attempt to “crash’' the Palace gates, but to tho credit of the alert men in blue none has yet succeeded. The quarters at Wellington Arch, familiarly known as tho King's Police Station, are shortly to be modernised. _ The cost is estimated at £ISOO. T Swordsmiths Still at Work The King recently presented a set of Royal swords to tho Tower of London, = an incident which prompted the query as to whether swordsmiths are still to _ be found in London. A search led to G Chiswick, where a firm founded in 1772 is still forging first-class weapons. Many k of the craftsmen have been there xor years, and their fathers before them. Swords, it seems, are as carefully J made to-day as ever they were, and the various processes by which a rough ™ bar of steel finally emerges as a polished blade are the elaborate work of hand C and eye which still cannot be so perfectly done by machinery. P 1 One of these swordsmiths remembers forging Queen Victoria's Jubilee sword, p Kitchener's sword, a State sword for y King Edward VII. presented to him _ by an Indian potentate —it cost £IO,OOO —and even an executioner's sword for China. Cameramen in Wales r b An item of interest in the world of ! r£ entertainment is the news that the first. ! d shots have been taken at Denham of , h Cronin’s “The Citadel." Robert Donat fy and Rosalind Russell aro leading, and di there are 105 other parts. The casting has been a tremendous task. No chances have been taken and -* the difficulty of finding the right actors ci and actresses has been multiplied by P the necessity for so many of tho charac- q ters being able to speak with a Welsh *~ accent. Tho Welsh actor, Ben Williams, who will play the part of a steel puddler, has been engaged to supervise Welsh accents for the duration of production. Cameramen are now in the Rhondda Valley securing pictures of Welsh seen- ! P cry and the entire company will go on location to South Wales before tiie film e . is finished. j To ensure the medical detail being s: as accurate as possible a doctor has ' £ been engaged to instruct Robert Donat s< how to act in such scenes as that in 11 which he has to perform an amputation at the bottom of a coal mine. “English as She Is Spoke" Secondary school teachers meeting in conference in London recently had some “ caustic things to say about the increase of bad speech in England. Their complaints included the lament lb people are becoming more and more difficult <•■ to hear, that enunciation is growing h worse, that words are mouthed, swai- 11 lowed, gabbled, but not pronounced. It was also lamented that public speakers are beeming dependent on the microphone. Mr H. St. John Rumsey, who has been Speech Therapist at Guy’s Hospital for the past 15 years, declared that a quarter of his time is spent in teach- c< ing what could be dono in schools. He advocates that every school should have its own speech “expert." “Mothers who talk badly themselves ® frequently bring children of 10 or 12 years of age to me because they cannot get them to make themselves understood," he says. “They simply won’t pronounce. Very often they will hardly r speak at all. Usually, of course, they are spoiled children who have been tied ® too long to their mothers' apron strings. I point out to the mothers that if they = will insist oil treating their children as if they were Pekinese lapdogs they 1 can't expect them to talk."