FOLLOWING PRECEDENT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3823, 19 October 1936, Page 7

FOLLOWING PRECEDENT

BALDWIN AND DISRAELI The news by the late English mail, that Mr Baldwin, the British Prime Minister, is to pay a round of country house visits has quite a Victorian sound, and, with his devotion to the memory of Disraeli, one can imagine the Prime Minister reading again some of the letters in which “Dizzy” described similar tours sixty years ago. He travelled in 1874 from Osborne to Warminster for Longleat, and the account of his journey suggests that there are things we do much more easily nowadays, says a contributor to the “Manchester Guardian”:— My travelling from Southampton to Warminster was very fatiguing. I had to wait at S. and also at Salisbury; an hour, at each place. They had telegraphed along the line to kqep compartments for me, so wherever I stopped there was an enthusiastic group—“ Here he is” being the commion expression followed by three times three, and little boys running after me. You know how really distressed lam at all this. And I had an headache and wanted a cup of tea, and made fruitless efforts to gee one. ... I got a cup of tea, however, at Salisbury, from apparently a most haughty young lady; but I did not do her justice. Shei not only asked me for an autograph, but to write it in her favourite work, “Henrietta Temple.” I could have refused the Duchess of Manchester, but absolutely had not the pluck to disobey this Sultana. I never felt more ashamed of myself in my life. He arrived late, and dinner was not a success. . . . “A more insipid and gloomy and stupid dinner I never assisted at . . . people who dine at eight don’t like dining at nine.” To add to everything else the Longleat paper 1 displeased him; the ink was muddy, and “the pens are made from the geeso on a common.”