£5,000 For a Dinner Talk

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 112, 2 August 1927, Page 14

£5,000 For a Dinner Talk

What G.B.S. Refused

Mr. George Bernard Shaw was olfered £5,000 by an American hostas if he would “cross the Atlantic, dire with her, talk a little to her guests, and catch the next boat home.” This was revealed by Sir Gerald du Maurier at a public meeting at tie King’s Theatre, Hammersmith, recently, in support of the Cecil Houses, Women’s Public Dodging House Funi Mr. Shaw nodded assent when asked by Sir Gerald to corroborate the story“l am addressing you here in the character of an old relic of the Victorian age,” Mr. Shaw told the mee:ing. “The Victorian age succeeded n one of the most amazing and grotesque enterprises ever tried by mankind. They were a romantic people. The though that woman was a human being w.ts intolerable to them. They set up a convention that women were angei. “My secret, as a dramatic author, the secret of that extraordinary knowledge of women which enchants the whole world, is that I have always assumed that woman is not a special creation, but that she is a human b»ing, very much like myself. “It is due very largely to the Vi:torian idea of treating a woman as a special creation that we have the extraordinary state of society which neglects to provide for women what u provided for man as a matter of course. “Lord Rowton provided lodgin?houses for men, but similar provisJ l )!! was not made for women. Mrs. Chesterton wants you to make it. “I am an old man. I am more thus 70 years of age. I am in the concition of Macbeth. Another millijn starving women are nothing to me. “I was some little while ago in tfcat curious stage when I had a sort of sad feeling when my old friends ax contemporaries began to drop arouse me. Nowadays I have got complete over that and exult whenever another one of them goes down.”