PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3430, 9 December 1919, Page 69

PERSONAL NOTES.

The brothers Geddes are housed next to each other in Whitehall Gardens, London. Sir Auckland Geddes presides over No. 6, which is the principal building of the offices of the Board of Trade, and Sir Eric has opened next door, No. 7, as the new Ministry of Transport. "Was there ever a greater contrast between two brothers?" asks the Momning- Post. "Yesterday, as one watched Sir Auckland, in his quiet, cultured, pragmatic, professional way, telling the motor manufacturers in so many words that they did not know their own •business, one could not but think of the biurf, bustling brother next door, and how differently he would have handled the same deputation. Sir Eric would hay© _ shouted at them, and waved his arms. Sir Auckland sat all the time he was speaking, and said the most cutting things with all the blandness and finish of an Oxford don." The Minister of Transport takes over a task so great that it has frequently been described as that of a "super-man (says the Daily Mail). Now is the opportunity for Sir Eric Geddes to show us whether he is the super-man required for the job. It is certainly a super-job. At the outset there are problems so plain and so urgent that upon their solution the nation will judge whether Parliament was justified in grant-

ing the large powers to which ho successfully laid -claim. The liberation of our commerce and industry from the chaos resulting from congestion of the docks and railways is the first problem to which he should turn his energies. 'After Mr Bullitt, the man in . the Russian Mission affair, about whom the public wants to know, is Mr Phf|ip Kerr, principal private secretary to the Prime Minister at the. Peace Conference," says the Daily News. "Mr Kerr is cousin and heir presumptive of the Marquiaof Lothian. Immediately after leaving New College, Oxford, he -spent tb',eo years in South Africa, going out in 190 b as one of the young men whom. Lord Milner gathered around, him during the years of reorganisation following the Boer war. Then he edited that remarkable quarterly review' the Round Table, until, with the formation of the Lloyd George Government, he became the most influential member _of the Prime Minister's group of secretaries. Mr Kerr is 37 years old- — "We hope Cambridge University will admit no impediment to Mr Balfour's eleotion as her Chancellor." says the Manchester Guardian. "For it wttl be 'a marriage of true minds.' Mr Balfour may not be woven of hard enough yam for much stretching upon the rack of the tough world of politics, but he i 9, if apy man, such stuff as chancellors of universities are made of, or ought to be. More than most men, he has remained, throughout a non-academio career, a man pleasantly academic, his mind always keeping about'fta certain vesture*— not conventional in politics—of philosophic habit and unworldly contemplativeness, like the Wordsworthian child who comes trailins clouds of a visionary wisdom that does not always help him to get on. Everyone likes Mr Balfour; perhaps those like him most who have been most opposed by him. Mr. Balfour is the ideal. With all the prestige of distinguished experience and all the graces of human intercourse, he combines as muoh learning as sits on a chancellor lightly, and also a knowledge of what learning is, and a love of it." thirty-third year of the British Weekly—a generation in point of time,* says the Westminster Gazette. All this while there has been the same editor —Sir William Robert 6on Nicoll —in command, and he has sow eclipsed the records of nearly every contemporary in length of editorial service to the same journal. The writer had., to do with the very first issue of the British Weekly, issuea with some temerity by the proprietors. Messrs Hodder and Stoughtqn, who had hitherto confined their activities to the publishing of theological and biographical literature and of monthly magazines -like the' Expositor. For several months the fate of the British Weekly hung, in the balance. Dr Nicoll has related how even the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson's essay on 'Books That Have Influenced Me' did not flutter the circulation. Tempted London' was a series of revealing articles that attracted attention, but it is safe to say it was the new genius of J. M. Barrte (writing as Gavin Ogilvy), Dr John Watson (lan Maclaren), and S. R. Crockett that brought the British Weekly into the safe anchorage on the dangerous sea of journalism."