BARON AND DUKE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 146, 12 August 1911, Page 7

BARON AND DUKE.

If the remarks made by Baron do Forest about the Duke of Bedford's London estates (reported in a cable message on Tuesday) load to an action for libel, the proceedings should be highly interesting (says the Christchurch “Press”). Not that we assume the Baron to be correct, but the Duke is such a prominent man, and the great landlords of London have I)e2ii the subjects** of so much discussion of recent years, that a law suit on the point would be a matter of unusual public interest. Some time ago the Duke, referring to the decaying fortunes of his neighbours in the country 7, remarked: “1 should be as badly olf as they arc, if it were not that providentially I own a few lodg-ing-houses in Bloomsbury.” The “few lodging houses in Bloomsbury” cover 200 acres in London, and stretch from the Strand to St. Pancras. They include squares and streets surrounding Euston station and the British Museum, and Covent Garden, which was the Convent Garden of the Abbey of Westminster, and at the dissolution of the rnonastries was given to John, Earl of Bedford. The Bloomsbury .'/.slate came inlo i he;,,ByuligU family fiom the sister and heiress oi the last Earl of Southampton, who married Lord Russell, the "Whig martyr of 1683. Mr G. W. E. Hassell rightly observes that the groundlandlords of London ‘‘‘have good reason to hold their ancestors in devout remembrance, and to praise the fathers that begat them.”