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Timaru Herald, Volume CXLI, Issue 20308, 6 January 1936, Page 2

One of the most interesting features of Lord Sempill’s speech in opening the Shipping and Engineering Exhibition at Olympia was his reference to speed on the railways. He propheised that before the next exhibition speeds over the lond distances of 90 miles an hour with relatively heavy trains, and of 100 miles an hour or more with light coaches, will not be uncommon. Recent developments in the retiming of trains (the London “Times” says) indicate that the prediction is not so improbable as it may appear. Lord Sempill expects a reverse tendancy in regard to the road, while at sea the cost of speed is so heavy that no important progress can be expected. For really high speed, he said, one must look to the air, and particularly to the stratosphere. There is little doubt that spectacular as achievement has been in aviation, a great deal more will be accomplished in the next few years.

Mr Philip H. Ross, a former South African policeman, was ordered by his doctor in 1928 to go for a long walk. That was in order to get his nerves put right after having been inauled by a lion. His walk, which he began with 15/- in his pocket, has carried him 38,000 miles to various parts of the world —19,758 miles on foot. And in his nerve-settling travels, he has had the most nerve-racking experiences. He arrived at Napier, New Zealand, at 9 a.m. on February 3, 1931. At 10.30 an earthquake killed 600 people. Near Rangoon, in the jungle, a 16-foot python dropped on him and started to squeeze him co pulp. His rucsack, however, took the greater part of the pressure, and when the snake shifted its hold, Mr Ross was able to shoot it. Then he fainted. In Chicago, he found himself between two parties in a gangfight, and he lay, unharmed, in the middle of the street, while machinegun bullets hummed over his body. But his “nerves” have been cured!

Ruin is facing the “bootleg kingdom” of St. Pierre, the small French island off the coast of Newfoundland, which for 14 years has been the storehouse of a great part of the illicit liquor smuggled into the United States. This trade was stooped some months ago by the French Government, after repeated protests from the United States. Now, with the approach of winter, the island’s 3,500 inhabitants are beginning to feel the full force of the decree. In the heyday of the liquor trade money was so plentiful on the island that bank cashiers swept the day’s takings into wastepaper baskets—to be counted at their leisure after the bank had closed f r customers. Now all this is changed. Huge concrete warehouses stand empty on the silent quaysides—mute evidence of the island's departed wealth. The easiest of all dyes to use—and the most economical. FAIRY DYES (,d a tube