CURRENT LONDON TOPICS

Taranaki Daily News, 17 August 1935, Page 21 (Supplement)

CURRENT LONDON TOPICS

DEATH OF A PATRICIAN Slit CLAUDE DE CRESPIGNY. t WIDE FAME AS SPORTSMAN. (By Air Mail.—Special to News.) London, July 4. Sir Claude de Crespigny’s death at the age of 88, once he lost his wife and lifelong comrade four months ago, was just inevitable. He has hardly left his room since, he who was before then as vigorous as a schoolboy. A patrician sportsman to his fingertips, handsome of face and athletic of figure, with ample means and simple country tastes, Sir Claude had ancient French and good Crusader blood in his veins. He did not live, but played, dangerously. He broke both legs ballooning, an arm three times hunting, three ribs steeplechasing and another in a hansom cab accident, and several fingers boxing. He served in both the Navy and the Army, won famous horse races, followed wounded tigers on foot in jungle, killed a python that got its coils round him, shot a charging rhino at point-blank range, was nearly scalped by a pet monkey, saved a man from drowning by diving into a shark-infested river, and challenged innumerable people to fight duels. He celebrated his 84th birthday by doing a 30-foot double somersault into icy water. We shall never know another Sir Claude de Crespigny. Hendon Thrills.

About half a million people inside and outside the aerodrome watched the R.A.F. pageant at Hendon. They saw all the old tricks and some new ones. Squadrons formed fours up aloft like guardsmen on parade. We had aerial combats fully annotated by wireless for the groundlings, low flying planes that hooked up ground messages, acrobatic ones that weaved Prince of Wales feathers in the sky with coloured smoke, and a comic game of aerial skittles. An unrehearsed thrill came during a display of crazy flying. From fifty feet the plane crashed. Fortunately its wings struck first and absorbed but the ambulance dashed out and four figures, clad in asbestos, overalls, rushed to the wreck. The pilot was uninjured, and later strolled around to watch the fun. But the Queen Bee was the piece de resistance. Of Tiger Moth pattern, but made of wood, this pilotless plane can do 110 m.p.h., climb 10,000 feet, and drop bombs, as directed from terra firms, miles away. We shall have regiments of bombing robots in the next war. Cinema Straws.

Is television, when it really arrives, going to kill or cure the cinemas? It is an interesting sign of the times that one West End cinema, the huge Dominion Theatre at Cambridge Circus, has already quietly installed a complete television apparatus. - This is the first of its kind in the whole world, including America, and it seems pretty certain that other cinemas will follow suit more or less quickly. The Dominion Theatre can seat 3000 people, and it is expected that large audiences, if that term is permissible, will soon be sitting in their seats to watch outstanding events of the moment as they occur. Successful trials have already taken place, I understand, but the idea is that presently we shall book our seats to see the Derby, or the Cup Final, or any similar outdoor festival of the kind, by means of a cinema television screen as it takes place. Are We approaching a time when the actual event itself will be enacted to hardly a handful of spectators, whilst millions sit in cinemas all over the countrywatching it second-hand? Horse Show Reflections.

Crowded Olympia gave an ovation to Captain J. J. Lewis, of the Free State Army, when he won for Ireland for the first time, on his seven-year-old charger Tramore Bay, the King’s Gold Cup in the officers’ jumping tegts. It was a victory for a fine rider on a great horse and, when Prince Arthur of Connaught presented the royal trophy, we heard the Free State Anthem as well as our own. These Irishmen, Captain Lewis and Tramore Bay, were the only ones to perform a faultless round over the stiff jumps, and I suspect both have, in their time, 'faced the stone walls of Galway. A great moment was when Brown Jack appeared, with Steve Donoghue “up,” and paraded round the arena. How the crowd cheered the two veterans, and what was Brown Jack thinking? Surely, - with the inseparable Steve on his back, tire old hero expected there would be a race—“one . more fight—the best and the last!” Inspired by the occasion, and the thundering cheers, I believe he would have won it, too. Wembley Drama. The return fight at Wembley between the blonde German, Walter Neusel, and Jack Petersen, the dark-haired young Welshman who holds the. British belt, drew the biggest boxing crowd ever seen on this side of the Atlantic. Just before the big fight there .was a thunder deluge. The night air seemed charged with electricity both round the dim arena and in the brilliantly lighted bandstand ring. His father chatted to him brightly, but Jack was irked by the delay in starting owing to a mistake about the gloves. He sailed right in on his toes when the gong went, and the first round, like several others, was probably his on boxing points. But his correct left leads lacked sting, his vicious right swings failed to get home, and the German, boring relentlessly, in and almost ignoring Jack’s face taps, kept whipping over slashing body blows. Jack’s old eye wound needed his father’s attention after the first round, and some of the acid block he applied to close it trickled painfully into Jack’s eye. Fortune’s Reverse.

Though neither Neusel nor Petersen is of champion genre, or in the same gallery as the real giants, either as boxers or fighters, there was real drama in this war of attrition. Jack’s straight lefts closed one of Neusel’s blue eyes, but the German’s blows had more devil. Victory for him looked sure when, suddenly in the eighth round, Jack landed one or two head blows that had more power behind them,, and his excited Welsh friends, seeing the German groggy and almost open in his guard, shouted to him to drive home a coup de grace. Perhaps those body blows had weakened Jack,' but he completely failed to land the right blow, though he attacked like a tiger, and next round Neusel reversed the fortunes. He damaged Jack's other eye, and had him holding on for dear life. In the tenth round he drove him to the ropes, fired in a barrage of blows that made Jack lose all grip of the. game, and caused Petersen pere to hold a towel ready to surrender. Jack staggered to his corner, but, after a word with his father, had to see that towel thrown into the ring in token of defeat.