A LETTER FROM LONDON

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19364, 22 July 1925, Page 10

A LETTER FROM LONDON

CURRENT TOPICS DISCUSSED

AN INTERESTING BUDGET

(Special to “Chronicle.”—All Rights Reserved.]

j AMERICAN ULTIMATUM. | The intimation that Caillaux has “a plan” for Franco’s repayment of her | war debts is timely! In financial cir- | (des in the City the Aniei»-an reminder ito Europe that the discussion of the 'debt question cannot be indefinitely i postponed is taken to bo almost an j ultimatum. Unless a favourable reply is received, it can be assumed that Wall iStreet will find it difficult to discuss I the credits which France, at any rate, urgently wants. On this question Washington and New York are under- | stood to bo in complete agreement, and it was not until the great American j bankers had been consulted that the iNote was drafted. Without. American firiance, France certainly cannot restore her own. Without a debt settlement, she cannot got American finance. It is a neat position, not at all palatable to the Paris laissez-faire school. QUEEN’S SHINGLED HAIR. A friend just back from Brussels tells me that the Belgian Court is now a shingled Court. When the Queen of the Belgians had her first “shingle” a couple of months ago, there was a certain amount of disapproval among the more conservative of her Maids of Honour, but the fashion has so thoroughly suited the “smartest Queen in Europe”

1 that more than half the members of her Cour* have now followed her exam1 pie. Not a single woman under thirty ’’ is unshingled. 1 i HATS TO MEASURE. ,- The unshingled ladies are diseonsoi ‘ late at their inability to buy hats big • enough to accommodate their buns and [ | chignons! All the smartest hats, they ; declare, are made for the bobbed or J shingled head; no one seems to bother j • about the others. Some of the smart- - est hat shops have hit upon an excelI ■ lent plan, which will please both the II woolly lamb and the shorn one. The > , felt hat, which is almost a uniform toI day, is modelled actually on the head ' of the wearer, after being reduced by . steam to a state of pliable good hum- , our. The modiste pinches and pats. > bends and clips until the chapeau fits the head exactly and the brim is at its most becoming angle. Thon it is dried off—and Madame has a hat which is “perfection,” or “ravishment,” as the ’ case may be. DONOGHUE’S MOUNT Donoghue’s mount for the Derby had ‘ been the subject of speculation for days past, and the announcement that he is to ride Manna has set. many doubts at rest. Everyone is pretty well agreed

that on the difficult Epsom course he has no equal as a jockey, and the keenness there has been to secure his services is not surprising. Ono well-known owner is said to have offered him £l,OOO to ride his horse, and another £5,000 if he won! And yet Donoghue hesitated. He is “keen as mustard” to win tho great race this year, and to build up such a record of Derby “wins” that no jockey who comes -fter him will readily beat it. And being a freelance he has been free to wait and free, in a sense, to pick and choose. A mag nificent judge of horseflesh, he has an almost uncanny power of picking out the horse on which he can win. It is recorded of one of his Derbys that when lhe Prince of Wales smilingly askm] him who was going to win, Donoghue replied with supreme confidence, “I am, sir! ” And he did. Again, on the occasion of his last Derby win. he declared with the same supreme confidence that there were two other horses in the race on either of which he could have won if he had been “up.” (Donoghue, of course, won on Manna.) THE WAITING LIST.

I am told by a friend in the shippingtrade that shipowners are cont.eniplat ing going back to the policy of laying up ships for the time being. This course of action was tried during the trade slump after the war. with the result that freight rates hardened slight ly owing to the decrease of tonnage. It is not wholly a successful policy, because whatever rise in freights occurs has to be set oft’ by the number of ships not earning money and upon which expenses of upkeep have to be. met. Laying up was gradually abandoned when rates rose, and since then agreements with Continental shipping lines have resulted in better outward rates. Homeward rates in most trades are very Law. I am told that, owing to the poor grain crop in South America and the competition of foreign tramp steamers grain rates arc now as low as 10s to 12s a ton for the run homo from the River Plate. There are a large number of ships competing, even for such miserable business as this, and it. is this competition which will prevent rates hardening in the near future as prophesied by some optimists. Shipowners, of course, expect to have to take bad times with the good, but such rates as those quoted above are not economic, and do not cover the cost of the. coal burnt on the voyage. THE LEVER HU LME ESTATE I understand that the fortune left by Lord Leverhulme may not prove quite as big as some prophets have thought likely. The soap peer was extremely generous, both to charities and to his family during his lifetime, and the capital value of his estate, although large enough to bring the Inland revenue something like £1,000.000 in duties, will not be as large as his numerous activi- ■ ties might suggest. Indeed, probably the largest part of his fortune consists of real estate and objete d’art. BIG BEN’S CRACK. Not many of the people who listen to the chimes of Big Ben are aware that the famous bell has a crack in it a loot long. A famous clockmaker tells me that this is the case, and that the crack has been there during the whole of the seventy years that the bell has been tolling London the time. It has recently been suggested, that the bell should be taken down and recast, now that so many more people hear its note, but the work would demand the dismantling of the w'hole of the interior of the Tower to get it out. Big Ben weighs 13A tons and the job would cost several thousand pounds. Talking of Big Ben, I chanced the other evening to be ‘‘listening in” at a friends house in the Westminster district. Punctually at seven o’clock the sound came over the wireless of the great clock booming out the hour. An appreciable part of a second later the actual note of the bell came reverberating through the air and in by the open window. Ami we were less than a quarter of a mile distant from the clock tower. Which reminds me that listeners in to 2LO in Scotland are said to hear the notes of an opera at Co vent Garden before those notes penetrate to the utmost recesses of the theatre itself. "AND PARTNER” The partner problem is always with us in dancing circles. For some time a solution has been attempted at sub- ! script ion and public dances by stipu- I lading that each purchaser of a ticket shall be responsible also for a partner. This solution is now to be attempted at private dances, and Mrs Douglas King, whose husband (Captain Douglas King) is Financial Secretary of the War Office, is sending out invitations with the words “and partner” boldly written after the name of the invitee. ■ Mrs King is an Australian by birth, and the “Aussies” could always be trusted to surmount a difficulty, even if the method were novel.

THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD. A friend of mine who is travelling on the Continent is much disgusted with the English “trippers” he meets who are “sacking” Belgium and Northern France a la prowling Hun. “There they go,” he writes, “crowded together in miserable quantities, bleating and babbling about this solemnly fascinating land—chattering where they should stand bowed of head and in silence; pointing vain-gloriously and in ignorant reminiscence when they should feel tears in their awed eyes; thoughtless, where once all thoughts of England centred.” JOHN BULL ALONE. Despite his vaunted insularity, it strikes my correspondent “that the Englishman abroad is never so much at his ease as when he herds with his kind—never more happily miserable. ITuly, John Bull hasn’t the heart to pursue lonely ways, alone. Believe me, there could not be a funnier sight on earth than Io witness the dismay of an ‘insular’ Englishman (inadvertently left behind on a Belgian waste of new building, old wire, burst trees, scattared mortar, weeds and twisted fragments of rust) shuffling about the earth like a lost cause, spasmodically embodied in partially successful plusfours, looking for signs of civilisation. And then at last they come to him, ‘Oh, I say ’Arry, y’ did give us a turn! Wherever ’avc you bin?’” COLLECTOR’S FIND. There is a typical story behind a set of Sevres china, part of the Carnarvon collection of treasures announced for sale. It came into the possession of the late Mr Wertheimer in this way. Hearing of the existence of the set, Mr Wertheimer went down to Brighton and made an offer for the house and “contents.” His offer was accepted. Mr Wertheimer promptly took away the Sevres set and gave instructions for the house and its contents to be sold by auction. This is only one more example of how indefatigable collectors are in pursuit of a “find.” A man who.

owns a real old oak panelled room and fireplace has had an offer of £lOOO for it from America. Tie tells me his Lame and property is marked down in every famous collector’s records in the United States. They await his death, because he is unwilling to sell.

IN THE PARK. Mr Kipling tells us that East is East and West is West, and “Never the twain shall meet! ” They met one morning this week in Hyde Park under the shaded walk where Lond n’s fashion promenades beside the gay riders in Rotten Row. I saw a charming lady, who looked far too slim and young to be a matron, with her small baby girl, who was wheeled in a sumptuous pram by a Chinese Ayah. Mamina, who nodded to dozens of friends, was attired in smart riding breeches, with riding boots to the knee, a brown jacket, and a brown wideawake hat. The. Ayah wore blue trousers of the pre-Oxford cut, a flowing blue coat, ami a black silk handkerchief round her head. It was a problem which represented the more advanced mode—the Newest Woman —the daughter of Western Mayfair or the daughter of Far Eastern Hongkong. FASHION TN THE PARK. The hours in the Park, twixt tea and <1 inner, become smarter and smarter. About 6.30 there are quite as many beautiful young men in tophats and lair damsels in cltyTon frocks as on any Sunday morning during. Church Parade. They sit. on the chairs beside the broad walk in long and closely packed rows of smartness, smoking fat cigarettes from the new long holders. Only last year the girl who smoked a cigarette in the Park, if not outrageous, was unusual. This year in the evening probably every girl is a smoker. It i:still “nut the thing’’ to smoke on Sunday morning; and even the men forego cigarette and cigar at Church Parade. G.B.S. IN RETREAT. Mr Bernard Shaw, who is getting over an attack of influenza in his London quarters at Adelphi Terrace, has a quiet retreat in Ayot St. Lawrence —from which so many fulminations have come, notably the Preface to St. Joan. Mr Archibald Henderson, j his biographer, relates how one evenI ing, about eleven o’clock, he asked Air Shaw how he happened to take this place in Hertfordshire. “Come with me and I will show you.’’ he said; and they wandered across the common in the moonlight over to the old English church, redolent of mystery and sanctity. Shaw pointed to the inscription on a tomb near by. “Jane Eversley. Born 1815. Died 1895. Her time was short.’’ Said Shaw: “I thought that if it could be truthfully said of a woman who lived to be eighty years old, that her time was short, then this was just exactly the climate for me.” WHY THE LION’S TALE IS DOWN. Mr Herrick, the artist who designed I the much-debated Wembley lion, is a modest gentleman in the thirties, a little inaccessible, but a physical giant. He fought in the Scots Guards during the war, and wore the sergeant’s chevrons, which are not easy to secure in the Guards’ Brigade, but he refused an oiler of a commission. He is not at all perturbed by the art criticism directed upon his Wembley lion, and tells me that there was deliberate design in keeping that noble beast’s tail well down. It is meant to symbolise the artists’s conviction that Britain, any way, is not asking for more trouble in these post-war days. It is a “conshie’’ lion. Mr Herrick’s work includes a variety of commercial posters —it appears on most hoardings nowadays—and all of it is characteristic. He has a profound contempt for what he calls “fluffy art.” ROYAL SPURS IN PAWN. A. young officer stationed at Aidershot tells me there has been great excitement at the discovery in an Alder- , shot shop of a pair of spurs bearing the insignia of the Prince of Wales. Thi

spurs were once the property of King Edward, and were, it is thought, pawned by an erring Royal groom. Ft is only a couple of years since Court circles were horrified at the discovery that a pair of Queen Victoria’s silk stockings were being offered for sale in Great Portland Street. APROPOS RIDER HAGGARD I think the obituarists rank the late Sir Rider Haggard b< low his merits. Literary high brows will curl lips of scorn over any comparison between Rider Haggard and Josef Conrad. Vet though the former’s work was of far less even craftsmanship, and included many deplorable pot-boilers, his literary style at its best might fairly challenge even Conrad’s. It was founded, like Ruskin's, on Bible English; the majestic music of Deuteronomy sounded through it. And is it possible to name any Conrad character to match one or two into whom Rider Haggard breathed the breath of living fiction? It may be like contrasting the psychology of the nursery with that of the seaman’s boardinghouse, but 1 can think of no Conrad creation fit to link arms with either Allan Quarterman or old Umslopogaas. THE ACID TEST. Surely the acid test for a romancist is whether he has called out of the vasty deep any character whose human personality entitles admission to the select circle of the Immortals. And respectfully x suggest that Allan Quartermain, though our post-war youth may be more interested in living magnetos than dead lions, will live with D’Artagnan. Allan Breck, Ulysses, Locksley, and Crusoe, not completely on terms of social equality with all of them perhaps, but as at least a poor relation. Rider Haggard was one of the few authors capable of giving a vraisemblance to a “bonnie fechtcr. ’’ He was an epic, hand at describing a minor scrap. But he failed when it came to the holocaust of a main action. The legend is that Selous, the hunter, formed the basis of Allan Quartermain. Sir John Curtis was Sir Rider Haggard himself. “JACOB’S LADDER.” Mr Norman MaeOwan’s now play at the Royalty almost persuades one. to be a spiritualist. To Air Dennis Eadie, in the depressing role of a dying journalist worried about his family, appears the shade of a sporting Tommy who served under him in the war. The warrior ghost gives him a dead cert, tip for the 2.35! Mr Eadie was lucky so far. But that is nothing to his luck in getting £lOOO “on’’ with a strange bookie at 22 to 1! One may accept the spook, but that bookie is a bit. too stoop for credence! Having thus won £22,000 wherewith to leave his otherwise destitute family in reasonable straits, Mr Eadie fulfils the medical tip, and expires in the odour of financial sancity. Why his wife, a most unsuspectable dame, should deliberately iqueer the dear gentleman’s last moments by making a gratuitous confession of marital infidelity, is a real poser. That’s the worst of these conscientous egoists! Mme. Edvina, the operatic star, made her stage debut in the comparatively small part of the wife.