People and Their Doings.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20508, 9 January 1935, Page 6

People and Their Doings .

Will the Duke of Gloucester Give the bead for More Informal Fashions in Hot Weather? : A Woman Who is On the Saar Plebiscite Commission.

]\£ISS SARAH WAMBAUGH, an American woman who is a world authority on plebiscites, is one of the four experts from neutral countries who form the Saar Plebiscite Commission. She became interested in plebiscites as a speciality during the Paris Peace Conference. President Wilson’s doctrine of the self-determination of peoples, adopted as one of the conditions of peace by the belligerents, led to a demand for plebiscites in various disputed areas. Few members of the American delegation to Versailles, however, knew much about plebiscites and how they worked. A hurry call was sent from Paris for a history of the subject, and the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, which had been appealed to, designated Miss Wambaugh to write it. On the basis of her monograph, the peace conference decided to have plebiscites held in seventeen different countries. The report she wrote then led to her appointment as an expert at Geneva when the League of Nations was founded in 1920. sS? CHARLES OSCAR PALMER, of Kaikoura, who has just published another little book of poems, carries his family’s New Zealand history back beyond the Canterbury pioneers. He traces it back in Scotland to an old Inverness family, and he finds the Rev Daniel Morrison mentioned in Defoe’s “ Duncan Campbell ” as visiting the Western Islands in the days of Charles 11. Daniel Morrison, his mother’s father, came from Inverness to Wellington on an early immigrant, ship. He met Elizabeth Cooper on board ship, and they were soon married, and their first child (Mr Palmer's mother) was born at Porirua on May 28, 1848.

JN THOSE DAYS Dan Morison skippered a trader, t.he “ Little Palmer.” from Wellington to* Fiji. lie died in 1857. Elizabeth Morrison came down to Kaikoura in 1869, and was married to Mr C. O. Palmer’s i father, Edmund Oscar Palmer, in August, j 1870. Tie is still alive, but the mother died j in February, 1914. Mr E. O. Palmer’s | father, Charles' Palmer, was born near lps- j wich, Essex, in 1818. He was early in the Navy, and as seaman and captain of the main top, he served under Charles Napier in Egypt and under Captain Lyardet on the Taranaki coast. Lyardet was later governor of Greenwich Hospital. Charles Palmer left the Navy to go pioneering on the New Zealand coast. For a while he served Wakefield. He drove bullocks in very early Nelson. He went Home and returned to Nelson with a young wife (nee Emma Webber), a small frame-house and a full stock of farming and dairying requisites. Edmund Oscar Palmer was born at Nelson in 1846. Charles Palmer’s brothers John, Stephen, Henry and Robert and his sister Salome came out to early Nelson. It was just touch and go with Charles Palmer that he was not at Wairau on that unlucky morning when Te Raupahaiata used the tomahawk. 3S? sS? r £IIE HOT WEATHER of the last few j days has induced Christchurch men to j relax a little in the formality of their dress, j but only a little, and, judging by the fol- | lowing paragraph in the “ Bulletin,” in Syd- ; nev, where the heat can climb to a good : figure, the men are also waiting for some- I one else to take the initiative. “ Australia has solid things to thank j Royalty for,” says the “ Bulletin.” “It . was the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in j the ’sixties which killed for ever the ancient | fashion of men turning out on festive occasions in gloves. H.R.H. laid the founda-

tion stone of the Melbourne Town Hall with his own hands, and all those about surreptitiously stripped their own gloves off behind their backs. n?ver to don them again. Now the Duke of Gloucester has adopted the sensible idea of taking off his coat in hot weather, lunching at Morere in his shirt sleeves, with his entourage similarly logical. U.S.A. has long adopted the shirt-sleeved mode in hot weather. Go into any American bank when the temperature is over 80. and you’ll find all the tellers and ledger-keepers in their shirt sleeves. So it is with the customers in the restaurants, . the pedestrians in the streets and even the cops, looking smarter than ever in their blue vestless shirts and their bandolier of cartridges around their waists. Visiting Yanks weep over the insane way we dress our police on point duty during summer months.” sS? "S? gIXTY YEARS AGO (from the "Star" of January 9, 1875) : From Lytteitonia, the Lyttelton news.— Norwhich Quay inhabitant. You will see by report that the Hydrostatic Polysyllabic Thomas is going to put down a trap’'somewhere in the town, and the councillors will visit it when properly cemented, to ascertain what the stink is like. I wish they could all be confined in the sewers for a short time. Ripon Street ratepayer.—l cannot tell you why the property is being improved, except that I am informed the property belongs, it is said, to the chairman of the Works Committee. Having made the cutting dangerous, it is necessary to go in for the posts and rails. This will not improve the property. Oh. no! You say you would like to get into the council? Come forward at next election. Boffin will put you through. Yours muchly, Boffin.