GOING ABROAD

Southland Times, Issue 23345, 1 November 1937, Page 8

GOING ABROAD

CABINET MINISTERS

So far it is believed that only one Minister will be spending his holiday abroad and that, curiously enough, the Lord Chancellor, who used to be more or less immobilized by his custody of the Great Seal, says The Manchester Guardian. It was very different in the Victorian era, Lord Salisbury had a house on the Riviera and another near Dieppe. His daughter writes of her parents: “Both were happier abroad. The sense of irresponsiblity and freedom from convention appealed to Lady Salisbury; the greater possibility of seclusion to her husband.” This matter of seclusion added point to Salisbury’s enjoyment of a story of one of his departures for France. Someone asked a French attache who had been seeing him off whether the destination was a lively place. He replied that it was not very lively as a rule, but that now that Lord Salisbury and Lord Roberts had gone there “no doubt the demimonde would flock to it.” Gladstone enjoyed those cruises which anticipated a modern craze and got himself into hot water with the Queen at least once for landing on foreign soil without having asked her permission. Balfour spent a good deal of time abroad, which was one of the complaints against him in the “8.M.G.” campaign. Sir George Trevelyan in his “Macaulay’' wrote of the stream of politicians going off to Paris as soon as Parliament rose (they had done the same when Fox was young, but chiefly to replenis 1 their wardrobes). Grant Duff has a comical tale of members of a Victorian Ministry discovered prostrate in the cabin of a Channel steamer on the day after the Houses rose by a too hearty Tory who announced his intention of “asking a question.”