A LETTER FROM LONDON

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19434, 21 October 1925, Page 5

A LETTER FROM LONDON

CURRENT EVENTS DISCUSSED

POLITICS, PEOPLE, AND THE RING

(From Our Own Correspondent

All Rights Reserved)

LONDON, Sept. 10. Prime Minister’s Walks. A friend just returned from Aix-les-Bains tells me the Prime Minister is not spending a lazy holiday. He is due back in town, by the wav, at the end of next week. Almost 'daily he indulges in country strolls which extend to anything between ten and fifteen miles. Walking is one of Mr Baldwin’s favourite forms of recreation, and, when at home he goes to Chequers for the week-end, he saunters off on similar jaunts. There is hardly a pathway or beaten track from the house to the Berkshire hills beyond with which he is not acquainted. The Prime Minister makes no secret of the fact tfiat he is able to concentrate in thought upon the problems of the day more easily when walking in the open country than in any <?!her way. A Balliol Man. The Coal Commission is not composed entirely of non-scientific business men. Sir William Beveridge, the Director of the London School of Economies, may be trusted to supply academic theory as well as business experience. “Beveridge of Balliol’’ had a wonderful career at Oxford, and has been called “an intellectual machine.” He has been a journalist, a barrister, and civil servant, and in his forty-six years he has acquired a wide experience of Economic subjects. It was he who persuaded Mr Winston Churchill to institute Labour Exchanges, and the same persuasiveness induced L. G. to visit Germany when he was contemplating National Health Insurance. Seamen’s Strike Folly. A sea captain with thirty years’ service, who was reporting to his owners in the city to-day, told me that the majority of seamen realised that the present time is the worst possible for an adventitious strike. The slump is so serious in the shipping industry that hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping are laid up in British ports, and dozens of additional vessels are. being laid up this month. The result is that hundreds of seamen are out of employment, and have little chance of being re-employed until next spring. It, therefore, follows that there is a very large force of qualified seamen . mxious to get a job, and these can be called on to replace the comparatively small body of strikers. One company alone has 400 men out of employment. Broadcasting Geneva. Evon cheap home-made crystal sets managed to listen-in quite successfully to the relayed broadcast of M. Fainleve’s address to the Genova League Convention. It was quite fascinating to catch the torrential Gallic oratory, and hear the sudden bursts of applause. One might have listened over a particularly good ’phone to someone talking in the next house, so plain was the smallest sound, but there was an added allegory. Every now and then, never wholly drowning M. I’ainleve, came a dim siren hoot, and the urgent tap-tap of Morse code. Some extraneous sea circumstance was butting into European history—as fateful realism keeps interfering with Geneva idealism! New Rifle. Statements in some of the London newspapers about the War Office adopting a new rifle are misleading. Apart from the question of expense, which would make such a venture prohibitivo just now, the experiments are not yet concluded. A certain amount of definite succes has, however, been achieved with a weapon that is a pound lighter than the existing service rifle, and dispenses with the attached magazine case. The reserve cartridges are stored in the stock of the rifle itself. Exhaustive tests, from all the many standpoints of active service necessity, of which shooting is only one, must take place before the new model is officially approved. Ajad then will come the struggle between the military efficiency school at the War Office air'd the national economy school at the Treasury. Prince George. I hear that Prince George, in his letters home, expresses himself as being extremely lucky in the unique experience he is deriving from his attachment to the China Station at the present time. He says he is getting plenty of hard work and tons of excitement owing to the peculiar and varied duties which the ships of the Far East squadron are called upon to undertake owing to the disturbed conditions in China just now. He frankly admits that he is also gaining a wonderful insight into the diplomatic workings of the situation. Tokio Visit. ; The Prince is a lieutenant on H.M.S. I Hawkins, which is arriftng at the Japj anese capital in a few days for Miner- : ous replenishments which will neces- ! sitate several days’ anchoring there. • This will afford an opportunity for a welcome leave ashore for both officers and men, and the Prince is game to avail himself of it. He will be the guest of the British Ambassador at the Embassy for two or three days—quite unofficially—which will doubtless be spent in sight-seeing. This is the Prince’s first visit to Japan, and the land of the Geisha. Smart Wedding. Some of the smartest society weddings of the London season take place at the Brompton Oratory, which makes a superb setting for a brilliant occf sion of that sort, and it is here thai the marriage will be celebrated of Mlle. Francoise de la Panouse and Count Rudolphe de Salis. The latter is n very presentable Scots Guardsman, second son of Count de Salis, a very old family, with associations in Italy, France, Ireland, and Germany, a branch' of which migrated here two ; hundred vears ago. The bride is Lady i May Cambridge’s best friend, and one of the most lovely girls in London Society to-day. It will be ■ an ex- > tremely ‘ ‘ popular ’ ’ wedding—in the *; most exclusive sense of that word —

and some illustrious guests will figure on the marriage register.

Empire Builders. Only the other day. Sir George Taub-man-Goldie, the founder of Nigeria, I died ; and a week later a Yorkshireman, j who was practically in control of Sir l George Goldie’s company’s interests for twenty years, passed away almost unnoticed. The present generation hardly knew them, yet that same Yorkshireman, Mr Joseph Flint, born in Sheffield 74 years ago next month, did not go unhonoured to the grave. Lord Scarborough, and the old Chartered Company, and the directors of the Niger Company, were represented, and among others present was Mr John Burns. The particular reason for the presence of that ex-statesman I at the funeral is interesting. Mi*»i Burns was at Akassa, Nigeria, from ISBO, for about 18 months employed as an engineer by the United African Company, Limited. Before Breakfast Men. Quite a number of men take regular exercise before breakfast every morning in the London parks. But the-sur-prising fact is that most of them are pre-war veterans of the Victorian Era, and hardly any of them youngsters who practised physical jerks under Army supervision during the war. The two favourite parks for those strenuous devotees of physical fitness are Hyde Park and Battersea Park, pre* sumably because both are in the neat vicinity of well-to-do residential quarters, and especially of bachelor flats. Two well-known people to be seen regularly in Battersea Park, keeping down “this too too solid flesh” before breakfast, are Sir Ernest Pollock, the master of the Rolls; and Sir John Foster Fraser, the traveller and journalist. Sir Ernest cycles methodically; Sir John, attired in a sweater and shorts, trots grimly. Mr McKenna’s Precaution. The late Mr Xxeorgc Windham, Earl Balfour’s great friend and Chief Secretary of other days, turned out regularly before breakfast, every morning he was in town, for a stiff sprint round Hyde Park. It was thus the handsome ex-Guardsman kept his svelte figure and fine poise. Lord Grey of Falloden also had the habit occasionally to use Hyde Park as a morning open-air gymnasium, though he kept himself in condition by fairly regular practice at real tennis, probably the best game there is for that purpose. When Mr Reggie McKenna was Home Secretary in the 1906 Liberal Ministry, and the militant Suffragettes were on the warpath in full battle paint, he used to be seen practising short bursts of sprinting in Hyde Park. Whether this was for exercise merely or to develop top speed in case of sudden attack by the Amazons was rather a brisk controversy at the time! But Not Web-Footed! It is perhaps not without its due significance that quite a number of famous British, poets have been really fine swimmers. The list includes two poets of the very first rank—whose works are among the English classics —Byron and Shelley. Both wrote with sincerity, and power of breasting the blue waves, and Shelley apostrophised the sea like a mistress. Of modern exemplars of -the swimming poet wo may quote Alfred Noyes, who adds to a fine athletic frame, a royal expertness at the art described by. the old Romans as chief among the sports of mankind. Mr Noyes revels in sea bathing in all weathers, and often alarms his friends by cleaving his way far out towards the glimmering horizon. If he were to get the CrossChannel fever, Mr Noyes could probably make quite a good display at Webb’s famous feat. Dr Bosenbach. Dr Paul Rosenbach, the American collector of books, comes to London on his buying trips with a of trumpets, and his dollars thunder up and down the West End like a jazz band. His dapper little brother, Paul, is also an experienced spender of dollars, but . he spends them quietly—in the purchase of antique furniture and pictures about which New York is crazy. Paul went back to New York yesterday on the Majestic,-after spending something like a quarter of a million dollars here, yet his stay was known only to those in the trade with whom he did actual business. He “looked over” the Leverhulme treasures, I hear, and made a few purchases. London Is Back. Although the “little season” has hardly started yet, and many London houses are still shut up and will not re-open before the end of October, the West End is no longer “empty” of well-known people. This is particularly noticeable in the dance clubs, where the dinner jackets which appeared in August, have gone into retirement again, and have been replaced by all the splendour of tailcoat and white waistcoat. The modern white waistcoat must have three buttons,, and not four, and some of the very smartest are made without pockets. It is no longer “stagey” to wear coloured buttons, with cuff-links and studs to match. A Blushing Canard. I think the rumour about ladies reddening their knees as part of the new rolled stocking vogue—a rumour that has now got into type in more than one London gossip column —may be regarded as a canard.- Not only are red knees about as attractive as red noses, which the powder-puff is so constantly applied to check, but nobody ever heard yet of even the most ultrafashionable flappers reddening their elbows, and those have been bare for quite a long time. What is far more likely is that some ladies are now using, both for their bare arms and particularly bare legs, artificial sunburn. And a West End chemist of my ac- 1 quaintance assures me his suspicions in ' this direction are based on convincing personal evidence of over-the-counter I sales. Our modern fashionable women,

even up to middle-aged matrons, affect the bronzed Diana type nowadays. Phil Scott’s Debacle. As some of his friends feared, Phil Scott, the handsome young ex-London fireman Adonis, has been knocked out, immediately after his record week of three victories, by Paolino, the Basque. There are no more powerful modern Hercules than these hardy Spaniards. They supply most of the Buenos Aires abattoir workers, and I have heard on credible evidence of amazing feats by these fellows. With a six-foot pronged staff in each hand, some of them will lift a half-carcase, left and right alternately, from the ground to a waggon! If Paolino has wrists and arms like this, he must have a devastating punch! Perhaps the debonair Georges Carpentier, who refereed the ScottPaolino fight, will tackle the Basque champion next. Or what about Jack Dempsey?