Kemal Pasha Smokes 150 Cigarettes a Day

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 419, 30 July 1928, Page 14

Kemal Pasha Smokes 150 Cigarettes a Day

LIKES HORSES AND DANCING

somebody what President Moustapha Kemal Pasha, Turkey’s lord of battle, progress, independence, likes best in all the world—next, of course, to his country which he rescued from the dust-bin of the fallen Ottoman empire—and your informant will reply “Horses.” Ask what he likes next best and you will be told “more horses.” You won’t be able to ask him yourself, not if you are a newspaper correspondent, for the ghazi (“conqueror”) is as shy of the Press as J. P. Morgan and as uninterviewed as his famed northern neighbour, Joseph Stalin. There is tacit proof of his passion for horses, however, in the bronze equestrian statues of himself which are sprinkled over the dusty, windblown capital city which he and his cohorts have created out of the isolated, mountain - guarded village of Angora. Has Large Farm More proof, too, is found in the well-stocked stables of his 1,000-acre farm, where a score of Arab and English horses await their master’s daily visit. The news gatherer who waits around long enough may even catch a glimpse of the stalwart ghazi in English riding outfit, his fair head bare, galloping over his farm on the horse recently sent to him by President Doumergue of Prance, for Kemal is riding again this spring, for the first time in two years—a sporting denial in challenge to the rumours that rumble abroad of his failing health. It may have been due to these same rumours that the gendarme-patrolled, police-guarded gates of the presidential mansion at Tchan-Kaya were opened to the Associated Press correspondent, and the door and the lips of the ghazi’s most intimate associate, Hikmet Bey, secretary-in-chief to the president. Six Girls Adopted While he chatted informally of the great man’s daily life two of the ghazi’s six adopted daughters—orphaned children, whose fathers fell in the Nationalists’ war of independence—strolled unveiled, besweatered, looking every inch American flappers, past the window of the secretary’s office through the flowery garden where two bronze statues of Venus are eloquent of the new day in Tur-

key, up to the modest, 10-roomed greystone houses of the president. “Yes, he’s a simple man,” said the secretary, “he has no use for pretentious luxury. There’s a marvellous collection of rugs in that house, gifts of silken rugs from China, Persia, the finest rugs of Turkey, and he doesn’t give a fig for them. Doesn’t care what’s in the house as long as there’s plenty of fresh air, plenty of books on history, political economy and sociology—and his friends, his passions are outdoors his horses and his farm.” Sent Many Books

Many of the ghazi’s bookfe are sent to him by their authors, American and English as well as Continental writers, but Kemaf knows no English, though he is fluent in French and has a read-

ing knowledge of German. He is such a master of his own difficult language, with its intricacies of Persian and Arabic mixed with the pure Turkish, that when he was a boy one of his teachers added the name of “Kemal” to the simple Moustapha with which he was born, to honour him with the same name which belonged to the nation’s greatest literary figure, Namick Kemal. Kemal’s days do not run on a formal schedule. He rises late —the new Turks are all night-owls—and keeps no regular office hours. When the

occasion demands, he proves himself a terrific worker. During the preparation of his famed 400,000 word speech last year he would work 48 hours without stopping, and during the 23 day battle of Sakaria in the Turco Greek war he took no more rest than a few minutes’ sleep each night, sitting bolt upright. He works on his nerve, consuming, so awed rumours say, at least 150 cigarettes every 24 hours, but an iron constitution and an iron will keep bis brain flashing and his muscles taut.

Even when it* is not a time of stress, Kemal takes only four or five hours’ sleep a night. He can play poker—his favourite card game—till dawn, as he often does, and still spends a busy morrow meeting the Cabinet Ministers, supervising his model farm, tinkering with the agricultural machinery which he has imported from America and Germany, returning to his TchanKaya residence for a game of billiards or a game of tennis on the court of the Foreign Minister just across the way, and then making a night of it with his intimates. His dinners are a mixture of Turkish and European dishes, but above all he must have music with his meals. Some nights it is the presidential orchestra of 60 members whb play Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and some nights it is the Turkish players who wail plaintive Anatolian airs on weird Oriental instruments. The ghazi likes them both. Kemal Good Dancer After dinner, before the poker be- j gins, there is dancing to the tune of i good American jazz. An expert waltzer and fox-trotter, Kemal abhors the j Charleston and Black Bottom. Modern reformer that he is, he is i curiously tepid over some of mod- ' ernity’s chief products. He has a , radio, but almost never listens m; he j never goes to the movies and his auto-' mobiles are to him mere means of locomotion. The theatre he loves and when an occasional European troupe comes to Angora he is to be seen at every performance. But troupes are rare in the capital, where no theatre has yet been constructed. Young himself, he is only 46, the ghazi likes young people around him. and his Cabinet members and all his associates are young men. They are a group of hard-working, hard-playing leaders of a new generation in a new land, led by a man who knows what he wants and who will spare nothing to achieev it. “We shall transport the new Turkey from its corner of Asia, shadowed by fatalism, clouded by old traditions, into Europe,” said one of his associates to Kemal when the National ist movement was first afoot. t “No,” said Kemal, his blue eyes afire, “we shall transport Europe into Turkey, but Turkey shall still be ours.” He calculated, and still calculates with hours of minute study, every move toward the achievement of his

goal of a modernised but independent Turkey. Hater of chance, of the “Kismet” that ruled his forefather*, his favourite oft-repeated remark ii. *1 would not even accept a frog hopped to me by chance.”