NEWS IN A WHISPER

Taranaki Daily News, 21 October 1933, Page 10 (Supplement)

NEWS IN A WHISPER

NO MORE SHRIEKING HEADLINES. WHAT AUSTRIA HAS DONE. No longer are Austrian newspapers allowed to shriek Unimportant news in headings ten times as big as their subject Austrians are being given the opportunity of judging for themselves the importance ,of news without the distraction of these mammoth headlines. There are far too many sensational papers which seek to make up their dullness by the size of their type. The new. Austrian decree allows no* big type at aIL -No sub-headings are allowed, and a headline may only run into two lines if it is not spread over more than one column. Much of this is absurd, but we like the spirit of it. It is said that the more extravagant press of Vienna can hardly recognise itself, and we can well believe it, for whatever would our Daily Yells look like if these restrictions were applied. A week before we heard of this new Austrian decree (says the Children’s Newspaper) we measured for curiosity several headings in one of our London sensationals. In two cases the headings took up as much space as the news which followed; in two others they took up half as much again; and there was one example’ of two inches Of trivial news following five inches of flamboyant headlines. And all this in a paper which thinks itself very serious, very dignified, and so much better than the rest.

LESSONS ON THE HILLSIDE. AN EXPERIMENT AT OXFORD. An experiment is being tried in Oxford which may have far-reaching consequences for boys and girls of the future. Every day during the summer fourteen elementary schools are sending classes out into the country. With their teachers the children travel by bus to the Wytham estate and have lessons out of doors in ideal surroundings among flowers and birds on the hillside. Seven widely scattered classrooms have been built for days when it is too wet or cold to sit outside. More than 200 children a day are from their drab surroundings of narrow, crowded streets and learn to know the wonders of the natural world. Their parents are only to glad to pay the bus fares. During the three years of this experiment the effect on the minds, outlook, and health of the children,, who are being given this new experience during the most impressionable years of their lives, has been said to be astonishing. Each child spends a day a week in these beautiful surroundings.

RECORD PRICE FOR RUBAIYAT.

A copy of the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam has been sold for £B9O. This precious volume may have been one of those which lay in the twopenny box at the door of Bernard Quaritch s bookshop nearly 100 years ago. The story runs that Fitzgerald was so disappointed at the welcome with ■which his translation was received that he dumped a parcel of his unwanted copies in" Quaritch’s shop to be sold for any sum they would fetch. The twopenny Rubaiyat has therefore increased in value 106,800 times. We wonder what the old mystic poet of Persia would have thought about it.

NEW MILLS FOR OLD. VEGETABLES IN WEAVING SHED. Many a factory has started in the back room of a cottage; and we believe there is one well on the way at the moment. It is in Great Harwood in Lancashire, where Mr. Alan Robinson, finding himself without work after five years at Blackbum’s Technical College, and not wishing to wait, like Mr Micawber, for something to turn up, collected enough old parts to start ‘ a small weavmg apparatus in his room. His silk table-runners, scarves, and other dainty things sold as if they had no competitors in Lancashire, and soon Mr Robinson had to move to larger premises. He found a derelict garage, and now has three modern looms running by electric power. Towels are now his speciality; and, strange to say, his difficulty is not so much how to get orders as to know who to refuse. The preparation machinery consists of a gramophone motor and turntable with an old sewing-machine. Two shuttles resting on the turntable give the threads the required twist, while the sewingmachine does the actual winding. It is strange to read of factories growing up at this time, when so many fully-fledged ones are derelict and dismantled. Only a short time ago we were telling of the different uses to which derelict cotton mills had been put; now we hear of . one in Queen Street, Darwen, where thousands of tomatoes and lettuces are being grown most successfully by old mill-hands, who have turned the weaving shed into a market garden. The Union Jack is a difficult thing for blind children to form a picture of. The National Institute for the Blind is now preparing paper sheets with the details and colours of the flag embossed with different kinds of dots.