THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1935. AN AVIATION PAGEANT.

Wairarapa Age, 9 February 1935, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1935. AN AVIATION PAGEANT.

Since the Wairarapa and Ruahine Aero Club is one of the most enterprising organisations of its kind in the Dominion, its conduct of the North Island Air Pageant, for which over forty 'planes are to assemble at the Hood Aerodrome on Saturday, March 2, no doubt will be highly successful and worthy in every way of the increasing importance of the Wairarapa as an aviation centre. Pilots from many parts of the Dominion will be taking part in the competitions and displays of flying and the occasion no doubt is one on which the club will add notably to what it has already done in putting the Wairarapa on the map where aviation is concerned. So much has already been done in this way that it is natural that the people of this district should take a keen interest in the great and rapid strides that are being made in the development of air transport. There are many people still living who remember the days in which a sea passage of a hundred days from Groat Britain to New Zealand was at least reasonably expeditious, if indeed it was not entitled to be rated as something very much better than that. With the development of air transport, an expectation that the passage between this country ami Great Britain may be made before long in ten days or less seems by no means extravagant. The extension of Empire air mail lerVices to Australia is an accomplished fact and it should not be long before these services are continued by air to New Zealand and followed up by the establishment of passenger services. The long-distance services now in prospeet necessarily will be supplemented by many feeder and other services within the Dominion. Possessed already of a firstclass air port and excellent subsidiary landing grounds, the Wairarapa is well placed, thanks in the main to the enterprise of the district Aero Club, to play its full part in these developments. The North Island Air Pageant will be an occasion on which it will be open to the people of the district to give on easy and pleasant terms the support to which the club is so well entitled. POLITICAL DIVISIONS. There is nothing mysterious about the result of the Wavertree by-election in which a British seat, regarded hitherto as held safely by the Conservatives, has been won by a LabourSocialist candidate. The official and independent Conservative candidates got between them nearly nine thousand more votes than were cast for their successful Labour opponent. It needs to be recognised in Britain and elsewhere that electors who allow their votes to be split in this way are in effect allowing themselves to be disfranchised. Members of the nonLabour parties in Britain evidently must strive for practical agreement on leading issues of policy if the National Government is to escape defeat. Much the same need is plainly defined in this country. There is an undue tendency to allow dissensions to develop between sections whose only logical and rational policy is to unite in support of a strong union of moderate parties. Those who are prepared to break up this unity over some question of detail, however important that question may be, should consider where their intended action is leading them. It is a poor policy to part from those with whom I we are able to agree only in part if this means playing politically into the hands of those with whom we are not able to agree at all.

A POPULAR WRITER. News was cabled from London a few days ago of the death of Mr. J. S. Fletcher, a novelist held in wide popular favour chiefly as a writer of detective stories, though he wrote also novels of Yorkshire life that were notably distinctive in character and fell only a little short of being first-class works of their kind. Mr. Fletcher’s Yorkshire stories, "The Town of Crooked Ways,” "The Mill of Many Windows” and others, are written with rich and telling artistry. Characters and background are painted with an almost Pre-Raphelite precision and finish, but by no means to the sacrifice of qualities of action and dramatic interest. Though Mr. Fletcher might have won considerable fame and popular favour purely as a novelist of

Yorkshire life, he widened his public I immensely by becoming one of the | most successful writers of detective stories of his day. The popularity of the detective novel—by no means to be confused with an unwholesome and neurotic exploitation of underworld life—is one of the great facts of our modern day. To some people the taste for detective fiction seems purely depraved or immature—at best a continuation in years when people ought to know better of the juvenile taste for penny dreadfuls and the like. The fact stands that some of our proudest intellects—learned judges and divines among them —as well as hosts of humbler folk, find solace and pleasure in the detective "shocker.’ In the production of books of this kind, Mr. Fletcher was a past master. Some of his detective stories are laid against a Yorkshire background and in nearly every instance he told a rattling good yarn. Many a reader, of the great army whom he entertained right well, twill in fancy lay a flower on his grave.