OUR LONDON LETTER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20493, 11 August 1936, Page 9

OUR LONDON LETTER

THE KING’S OWN HONOUR WHY RECRUITS ARE REJECTED (From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, July 2. Although in theory all honours flow from the Throne, there is in fact only one honour which the King can bestow on his own initiative, without the recommendation of his Prime Minister. This is membership of the Royal Victorian Order, to which King Edward’s first appointment is his mother. High honours, such as peerages, come from the Cabinet; and most of the minor honours are recommended by the heads of the various Departments of State, including the India, Dominions and Colonial Offices. The old abuse of selling honours is supposed to have been abolished; but liberal contribution to party funds is still a very useful way of getting into the category of men honoured “for political and public services.” Gross abuse is prevented by the fact that every honours list, before being submitted to the King, has to be sifted by an importial committee of three. Its present members are Lord Macmillian, the eminent lawyer; the Marquis of Crewe, who was Secretary of State for India over 20 years ago; and Mr G. N. Barnes, the former Labour M.P. Political Guests Unwelcome Switzerland’s refusal to allow the Emperor of Abyssinia to remain in the country is not a gesture of hostility to the defeated ruler. Nor does it mean that Switzerland wants to curry favour with her strong neighbour, Italy. It is simply due to the difficulty of providing sufficient police protection for a visitor who would have to be constantly guarded against the risk of assassination. As it is, the Swiss police have to perform more of those anxious duties than any other force in the world. The country is full of political exiles with grievances, and every time there is a League meeting scores of statesmen arrive any one of'whom may be marked out for vengeance—unless the police are vigilant. From a purely professional point of view, the event most dreaded by the Swiss police is a visit from Mussolini. Some years ago it was believed that the Duce intended to make a journey to London, but the Swiss Government refused to take the responsibility even of allowing his train to pass through their territory. Rejected For The Army In all the talk of the British Army’s shortage of men it should be remembered that the War Office could get three times as many soldiers —if it wanted them. Latest statistics show that two out of three men who present themselves for enlistment are rejected because they do not come up to the Army’s minimum standard. One third are turned down on physical grounds and the other third for shortcomings of education or character. The high percentage of medical rejects is quoted by some as proof of the poor physique of post-war Britain; but actually most of these disappointed recruits would have been accepted readily enough in war time. Foot troubles account for most of the rejections, and bad hearing follows closely. Next in order come faults of teeth, heart, eyesight, and weight. The Army’s weight list is 8 stone, but men below this standarad are often accepted if good food and a healthy life can be relied upon to bring them up to the weight in a reasonable time. Racketeering in London A “racket” on truly American lines is alarming the proprietors of some of London’s smaller restaurants. Two or three roughs go to a restaurant and during the meal an apparent quarrel breaks out between them. Eventually one man picks up a glass and pretends to throw it at his companion. This begins a fierce fight in which the combatants take care not to hurt one another, but succeed in smashing much of the restaurant’s furniture. A day or two later comes the sequel. Another man calls at the restaurant, informs the manager than a dangerous gang is out to wreck his place, but adds that the roughs can be bought off for a certain sum. Such incidents have happened often enough to prove that an organised is at work, but its members operate so skilfully and quickly that the police have not yet been able to lay hands of them. Thirst For Adventure | A young London couple wanted to go on a seafaring honeymoon, but could not afford to buy the little ship they needed. So the husband advertised a few few weeks agv for six young men to join the venture and pay £lOO each towards the expense. Such is the thirst for adventure that the young man now finds himself almost able to man a whole fleet of yachts to sail to the South Seas.

More than 200 would-be sailors wrote to him; and even after weeding out those who have not enough money and those whom he does not consider suitable, he still has a list of 40 eager adventurers offerin? to put up nearly £lO,OOO. One man actually wants to contribute £5,000,000. So the modest honeymoon cruise with six companions has grown into a nautical enterprise whose members are thinking of buying a much bigger ship. They are hoping to buy and re-commission the famous Cutty Sark, which has been lying anchored at Falmouth for the past 14 years, but it is doubtful whether the present owner will sell.

Where “Intelligence Tests” Pay Many people still imagine that intelligence tests for vocational purposes have not yet got much beyond the stage of being an amusing game for psychologists, who make school children and factory workers do odd things with queer apparatus and then tabulate the results in learned treatises. But a report just issued shows that these tests are actually saving valuable time and money in such a strictly practical organisation as the Royal Air Force. The tests are now used to select suitable boys for training as cadets and aircraftsmen. Net every boy who starts training makes an airman, and those who

prove unsuitable eventually have to be dropped. But this means that the rejected lad may have wasted months or years of his time an 1 the Government wasted money on training him. Now that the vocational tests have been adopted the R.A.F doctors can pick out at once the kind of boy they want before training begins. Comparison with the time before the R.A.F. adopted the tests shows that 10 per cent of the wasted training is now saved. The tests are very varied. One of the most interesting involves giving a short piece of dictatioi which the boy has to write out over and over again until it becomes almost mechanical. Then the examiner, without warning, makes a few small changes in the wording of the piece. He wants to see whether the boy notices the changes, or whether habit makes him go on writing the piece as it was before. This test is designed to show the boy’s aptitude for perking out of habit and rising to emergencies such as would often occur in flying.