A BRITISH SPORTSMAN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20450, 3 July 1928, Page 9

A BRITISH SPORTSMAN

TRIBUTE TO LORD LONSDALE. HUGE SUM CONTRIBUTED. / (British Official Wireless.) (United Press Association.) (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright.) RUGBY, July 2. (Received July 2, at 7.25 p.m.) The amount raised by subscription from all parts of the world as a personal tribute to Lord Lonsdale on the fiftieth anniversary of his wedcling, in recognition of his services to British sport, reached the huge and unforeseen total of £350,000. Lord Lonsdale has asked that a committee of trustees should be appointed to use the sum for maintaining a convalescent home for those who have participated in sport and have encountered misfortune.

Of all the picturesque figures in English public life none is more popular with the people of England than Lord Lonsdale, Who has received so signal an honour from sportsmen the world over on ihe occasion of his golden wedding. With his tall hat, his lavender gloves, his gardenia and his long black cigar, Lord Lonsdale is as familiar a figure as Mr Stanley Baldwin. His family seat is in Rutland, and in that quaint little county he hunts with the Cottesmore. The spectacle of Lord Lonsdale’s house-party arriving for the meet is an interesting one. All the coaches and barouches and what-not are coloured yellow, and all the drivers wear yellow livery—“Lonsdale’s Canaries,” the Rutlanders call them—and the cavalcade sweeps down like a scene from a musical comedy. At the racecourse, at the ringside (he is the donor of the Lonsdale Belt), at the annual Coster’s Revel (where he is inevitably kissed in public by the queen of the pearlies), Lord Lonsdale is to be found, and a great sporting occasion without him and his gardenia and his long black cigar would be deemed to be lacking in interest.