EARL OF SUFFOLK.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19046, 17 December 1923, Page 8

EARL OF SUFFOLK.

EXPERIENCES A S - A SAILOR. LEANINGS TOWARDS LABOUR. (From Our Own Correspondent.! SYDNEY, December 6. The Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, an earldom dating back ;to the. Tudort, is one of nine , cadets on the sailing - ship Mount 'Stewart, an old-time clipper, which has arrived in Sydney from Liverpool. . The. earl is a ohubby-chcokod lad of 17 summers, and signed on as a cadet for one trip. When he returns to England he will go to Oxford He is known on the ship as Charles Howard, and receives no distinction. H* has to take his turn with the other boys m the routine jobs on the ship. ' “I’ve knocked round a bit, you know,” the earl told an interviewer. “I was' at Osborne, but I didn’t make much of that, so .1 went to Radley, near Oxford, and then to Italy and France.” Next, qujte simply, it seems, he decided in favour of signing on the Mount Stewart before the mast. So the ancestral estate was left behind, and blisters .quickly d<>veloped on the aristocratic hands. The stop was taken, he said, partly because ho was “fed up with the Conservative rot,” and partly because he has a habit of “doing things like this.” Some of his youthful companions—they are the sons of doctors, lawyers, and other professional men on the other side—and all but one, like the earl, having their first taste of salthorso and salt water—then too'., up the cudgels on boh.ilf of their shipmatu . “A good sailor—should think he waf Tli© skipper or mates have only got to suggest a hand aloft, and ho on© of the first into the rigging,” they stated. Then the earl became reminiscent. He considered that he was being unduly though not untruly praised. “Oh. I don’t mind it now, but I can tell, you frankly that on the first occasion I looked at the deck from the royal yard—somewhere in the English Channel —I felt more than dizzy.” Ho then explained how it soon became second nature, as it does to all young seafarers. to creep like a fly at thqgo giddy heights when the seas were making the old clipper pitch and toss like a plaything at their mercy. “The chaps aboard are an extraordinarily nice crowd,” ho said. “Awfully nice. I. shouldn’t think you could gel a better lot of ship’s apprentices. They are all gentlemen, and very well educated. The officers are the same.” “I have worked harder in one day here than I had worked during the rest of my life,” he added. But he candidly admitted that ho was a “lazy blighter,” and while ho said that the experience was the finest thing he could have had, he made no hypocritical pretence that he was keen on' the life. His intentions, ho said, were to enter the university after hi? return to England, and then go and “raise Cain” on his estate. He thought of becoming a journalist until he was told how bard they had to work. Ho insists upon being called a democrat. He has distinct leanings towards Labour “I believe Labour. will be the salvation of England,” ho said. “If the Conservatives would only get a move on they would be all right. But they won’t move. It is in this strain that he talks. He says he is quite willing to give his views on anv question whatever if they are-worth hearing, which he. doubts. There is no doubt about his being a humorist, sav his mates, and they know him well. .Shins and the sea are all right, but. I ike the lights of London. This voyage will about me up for all the salt water knowledge I want. But we’re here now, and I am noimr to Manly. It’s not so much the breakers, but I want to see all the girls out in their Sunday best.” While ho gives Ins views and plans away, his mates King in ‘heir bunks give him plenty of bickering But he can well hold his own. He can stand any amount of chaff and according to his mates it the easiest-going chap in the world, this breezy youth, England’s premier earl.