JUBILEE HONORS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 810, 9 September 1887, Page 10

JUBILEE HONORS.

The honors and decorations given away on the occasion of the Jubilee were unexpectedly few, and the selection of recipients wps astounding for its lack of reason and imagination. An absolutely obscure Scotch peer (Lord Strathmore) and an absolutely obscure Irish peer (Lord Galway) were given English peerages. An English baron (Londesborough), who is more of a notoriety than celebrity, is made an earl. It was in his house at Scarborough that the Prince of Wales caught typhoid fever sixteen years ago. He is a wealthy man, and is well known as a driver of a four-in-hand and a first-nighter, and by his feverish pursuit of acquaintanceship amongst the small fry of the dramatic world. Sir John St. Aubyn, a silent member, of old family ; Sir William Armstrong, the gunrnaker ; and a Mr Fellowes, whose son married Lord Randolph’s sister, get baronies ; as do also Mr Sclater-Booth, Sir James McGarrel Hogg, and Mr Henry Eaton, of Coventry. It was of Mr Sclater-Booth that Lord Randolph once said in debate that he observed that political mediocrities generally boasted of “double-barrelled names.” Sir James McGarel Hogg is the eldest son of a poor Ulster boy, educated by a benevolent widow and sent early to Calcutta, where he amassed a great fortune at the bar, and, coming home, became a director of the East India Company, and was twice its chairman. The present baronet’s paternal wealth has been vastly increased by a bequest from an old Mr McGarel, who, at an advanced age, married Sir James’ youthful sister. The marriage caused a sensation at the time, as the crowd expressed its indignation at this marriage of May and December with such violence as almost to constitute a riot. Sir James is chairman of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Mr Henry Eaton’s peerage caused a small sensation in its way, as, from the manner in which the Cockney newsboys shouted it, the great majority of Londoners were under the impression that Lord Salisbury had become lunatic and conferred a peerage on Mr Henniker Heaton ! Mr Eaton’s or “Heaton’s” real claim to a peerage is that, when the affairs of the Duke and Duchess of Teck came to a crisis four years ago, he stepped into the breach and gave thumping prices for some of their pictures. He is a well-known figure in the London streets, as he drives one of the best-appointed coaches in London, wearing the glossiest of hats, into the under-brim of which an eyeglass is screwed. > Of the thirteen baronets the only one who is widely known Is Sir Algernon Borthwick, M.P., the proprietor and director of the Morning Post. He is himself a clever speaker and writer, and has an immense knowledge of foreign politics, but it is his wife who has made his position in the world for him. She is a niece ©f the statesman Lord Clarendon, a step daughter of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a sister in law of Sir William Harcourt, and a sister of Sir T. V. Lister, the Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office. She is one of the busiest and most energetic women in London society, and has a house in Piccadilly of great splendor, where she organises parties to which all the great ones of the hour are glad to go. A few years ago Sir Algernon Borthwick reduced his paper ftom 3d to, Id, and the effect was to double his fortune. It is the stupidest paper, politically, in London, but it has the monopoly of a certain class of “attenuated personalities” relating to the aristocracy, and when the snobocracy found that it could get this for a penny, I regret to say that about 100,000 of them discarded the superbly-managed Standard for Sir Algernon Borthwick’s newsless sheet. Atnong the K.C.B.’s are a few men of real worth and fame, such as Charles Newton, late of the British Museum, the great authority on Greek and Roman antiquities.—Argus’ London correspondent.