DINNER TABLE TALK

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 19 January 1938, Page 12

DINNER TABLE TALK

j AT GOLF CAPTAINS’ DINNER j [By Air Mail —From Our Own Correspondent] LONDON, 16th December. Some interesting talk occurred at the | Golf Captains’ dinner which has not been reported anywhere. For instance, Sir John Simon told that peach of a story about his visit to Tim Healy in Dublin during Tim’s Lord Lieutenancy. Sir John commented to Mr Healy on the extraordinary number of Generals there appeared to be in the Free State Army. “Ah, sure,” said his Excellency, “their mothers were generals’ before them” We heard, too, how Sir John had refused the Lord Chancellorship, which some of us knew already, and that in his Oxford days, when he and the future Lord Birkenhead were fellow students at Wadham, Sir John player cricket and rugger with the same thoughtful intensity that he now plays golf. It seems that whilst F.E. and Sir John were in the Wadham rugger team, of whch by the way F.E. was captain, it held an unundefeated record. Before F. E. went up to Oxford he also turned out with the Birkenhead Park rugger club, as did also his young brother Harold Smith. Harold was the brighter rugger star.