LONDON CLUB GOSSIP

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIII, 13 February 1929, Page 2

LONDON CLUB GOSSIP

(By a Clubman) The opening of Piccadilly-circus Tube Station, after three years of work by a small army of men in remarkable circumstances, servos us a reminder of the fact that there is a London as wonderful underground as there is above ground. It was not found there, it did not happen haphazardly, and it did not, like Topsy,'grow. It is a city built by human hands, just as much as the city which we all know in o'Ur walks and rides from north to south and east to west. No other city in the world possesses such a labyrinth of below-ground thoroughfares, for the service and convenience of millions of its inhabitants and visitors. And every toot of the streets, with every foot of the mile upon mile of underground sewers, gas mains, oleotric mains, and the like, is carefully mapped, so I hat in boring or excavating engineers will know where they are and whither they arc going. The average Londoner imagines that London has only one river—the Thames. He is ignorant of the fact that it has two others —the Fleet and the Wallbrook, the waters of which still purl or rush beneath some of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Farringdoii street to Ludgalo circus runs in line with, the Fleet. If you were allowed to descend a manhole in the Circus, vou would find the old river, which gave Fleet street its name, despatching its waters, now quietly, or now tearinglv in times of heavy rainstorms, to the Thames, a few hundred yards away. IN EARLY TELEGRAPH DAYS

It was at King’s College, London, which has just celebrated its centenary, that Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the first instruments for the telegraph nearly one hundred years ago. In the early" days of telegraphy people were disposed to regard the system as a new toy, as a joke. In Edinburgh a Post Office official was speaking of the wonders of the new system. To convince his 'audiqrice of its merits, he announced that lie would send to London a telegran) asking what the weather was, and would read the reply. The wire was duly despatched, but at that moment (be wire between Edinburgh ami London broke down, and the message could not be sent. Realising thai the reputation of the system was at stake, an enterprising official decided to “arrange” matters." After a reasonable interval he sent a reply to the lecturer, as though from London, describing the weather in Edinburgh! Faced by the difficulty of transmitting a Greek quotation in the original, from a Speech by <£>ir Henry Campbell-Ban-nerman, a telegraphist struggled to adapt the Morse code to the Greek characters, with the result that what the speaker had. called “the. wise words of Sophocles” appeared as “hoity-toity.” There was a man who was surprised to receive a wire stating that his wife had had a child, and that all precautions were being taken against her having another. Actually, wliat his wife had was not a child, but a chill.

THE M.C.C.

The M.C.C.—the Marylebone Cricket Club—whose English team is distinguishing itself by its achievements on the cricket fields" “down under,” is the most famous sport organisation in the world. The club lias been in existence for nearly 150 years. It was in 1787 that members of the White Conduit Club commenced to play at Lord’s ground in Dorset square, and that- they gave the name of Marylebone to their club. The year following the club revised the rules of cricket, and since then the M.C.C. lias generally been accepted as cricket’s controlling body. The headquarters of the club, in St. John’s Wood, continues to bear the name of Lord, after the ground on which the first members played in 1787. So greatly is membership of the M.C.C. valued that non-players, whose names cannot appear on the' waiting-list until they are 14 years old, are sometimes obliged to wait for election 30 years :

LONG ODDS

I read in my “daily” that there is a. desire by one or two Parliamentarians for tli'e Government to legalise such newspaper competitions as those which w'ere recently held to be illegal by High Court- judges. The movement, I should say, has little chance of success. Newspapers, regarded as a whole, do not desire guessing competitions, and I expect that even those which promoted the now suppressed competitions are ' gratified that they have ceased to be, so irksome and bewildering must have been the weekly, avalanches of coupons. Perhaps the only person who regrets the discontinuance of the avalanches is the Post-master-General. whose organisation was required to handle millions of competition envelopes every week. When £20,000 or so were offered as a prize for forecasting successfully the results of twenty-four football matches, shoals of competitors were inevitable. Not one competitor probably stayed t.o calculate that the chances of success were 282,429,536,481 to 1, and that to ensure the £20,000 prize it would have been necessary io spend nearly £3,000,000!

AN ENERGETIC BISHOP

I remember when Dr. George Forrest Browne was nominated hv Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Temple to he the first Bishop of Stepney. That was in 1895. From London Bishop Browne was translated to Bristol, where he served as Bishop for seventeen years. To-day Dr. Browne lives in Kensington, where" he has just celebrated his 95th birthday. “Curiously good health,” as he terms it, does Dr. Browne enjoy. He attributes it to his continued suppleness—and that ithanks to physical jerks and long daily walks —and cheerful optimism.” “’When things look black at night turn on the light,” said Dr. Paget, then Bishop of Oxford, to Dr. Browne, and he has never forgotten the axiom.’ To live long, says the Bishop, one must be of healthy stock and must live in the country. One of Dr. Browne’s hobbies was angling. On the Tay he recalls an all-night tussle with a salmon, which, caught by another shortly afterwards, weighed’ 741 b.