MOTES AND COMMENTS

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18069, 17 March 1923, Page 8

MOTES AND COMMENTS

Troubled Waters: Oil hasn’t done much for troubled waters in the case of the Dardanelles. —Detroit News.

Lioyd Osbourne's Stevenson Rarities. The first edition market, and particularly the R. L. Stevenson market, is about to be tested by some very exclusive pieces next month at Sotheby’s. They are tho property of Mr Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson, who was his collaborator in many broadsheets and in “The Wrecker” and other works. Several of the rarities belonged to the Davos l’latz period of 1882. They include leaflets announcing “black Canyon,” “Moral Emblems” (printed on the back of a concert programme), and a leaflet advertising “S. L. Osbourne and Co., job printers,” and “A martial elegy for some lead soldiers,” and many examples of the eccentric quality of that press (says an exchange). Another curiosity is a broadside, 111 sing you a song of tho tropical sea On-board of the old Equator,” presented to each guest at the Ti\ oli Hotel, Apia, at a dinner given by “R. L. Sto celebrate the safe arrival of the schooner Equator in 1889. Only one other copy ol this is known to exist. A stranger thing is a proclamation directed against him, issued a, H.M. High Commissioner for the. Western Pacific m 1892. Loi d Rosebery was Foreign Secretary then, and when this proclamation was brought to his notice ho immediately ordered it to be withdrawn.

The Abstemious Bookmaker: A remarkable character, with many characteristics of a former time, has just died in the person of Georgo Gurney, once a well-known bookmaker and for many years a farmer in a small way near Aylesbury. Ho is understood to have left a considerable fortune. A correspondent in tho “Manchester Guardian” writes: “He was as unlike the popular idea of a bookmaker as well might be. He was straight as a dart, hard as nails, and he used to boast that lie lived on sixpence a day. He retired from the turf in 1907, giving his clerk enough money to start a farm in Canada, and he settled down himself on a little farm. He would never slate whether he included in his sixpence a day the price of tho products of his garden that he ate and the eggs from his own hens. Ho often came up to London, but thero is no record of him visiting his old colleagues of tho ring who are to be found in many of the London almshouses. Gurney was a "very careful man even in the days before the present banditti made racegoing a dangerous trade. He used to have express trains stopped at Itickmanswortn especially for him when he lived there. On arrival in London he would he met by a pugilist, usually a famous negro boxer. He made no bad debts, for his transactions were all in ready money. Ho had an extraordinary head for figures and lie sometimes had as many as G.OOO transactions in one week, all that number being written down, calculated, and balanced by a single clerk. He had many of • the qualifications to become a useful citizen, instead of which .”