ITEMS OF INTEREST

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20150, 19 May 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

ITEMS OF INTEREST

FROM THE WORLD’S PRESS. Wandsworth Gas Company Is to reduce the price of gas by 4d a therm. London has more lodgers than any other place in the country, says a municipal official. The next half-yearly London City Council rate is to be 3s 10d in the £., compared with 3s lid. The sugar beet subsidy cost England £5,400.000 last year. The industry finds employment for 8400 men. Over GOO guests, all over 70 years of age, were recently entertained to dinner in the town hall of Dover. The London City Council has sanctioned a £108,500 scheme for improved seating for the tramwaycars. William Page Stedman was fined £2 at Caerphilly, Cardiff, for frightening a horse by throwing a cat on to its back. The Alanchester Improvements Committee has agreed io a proposal io build a 17-storey business building in the city.

England’s premier Duke, His Grace of Norfolk, is 19 years of age, while the premier Earl, the Earl of Shrewsbury. is only 13.

Keeping the, London Zoo going costs about £13,000 a year for food alone. An elephant can be fed for about £l2O a year.

The Clyde shipbuilding output for the. first two months of the year is 117,764 tons —a record for the first two months of any year.

The 16-inch guns mounted on H.M.S. Nelson, the latest British battleship, are 67ft. long, and fire shells weighing 24611 b each.

Roof drying-rooms for use on washing day arc one of the novel features of flats now being built by the London Countv Council.

* 4 Growing pains” in children are the first warnings of rheumatism, according to the British Alinistry of Health experts.

More than 200 new banking branches were opened in various parts of Britain in 1927. Tn that country there are now 9400 hanking offices.

Educating 660,000 pupils in elementary schools, 30,000 in secondary schools, 00,000 in technical institutes and 130,000 young men and women at evening classes cost London £12,531,200 in .1926.

Among the groups of women studied during an investigation undertaken by the Industrial Fatigm* Research Board, one of the finest had been born and brought up in one of Glasgow’s worst slum areas.

The candle fish, found in the river mouths off the Northern Pacific coast of North America is so named because of its extreme oiliness of flesh. The Indians convert them into candles by inserting a wick through the length of the body.

The accidental locking of a pair of handcuffs prevented an actress taking her part in a London theatre recently. During an interval she slipped on the handcuffs to test, them, and then found the key had been mislaid. Her undorstudv had to finish the play for hoi-.

Nine women of Rathfriland, County Down. Ireland, have, by a decision in the Supreme Court in the United States, been declared heiresses to ontthird of the £160.600 fortune loft bv Mr Jefferson Foyle, of Rathfriland, who died at Farmer City. Illinois.

Our first form of telegraphy was invented in 1836 by Charles Wheatstone, who also invented the concertina. H ; .s system of telegraphy was the. “single needle, still in use on some railways.

Alachines which, in addition to dating and issuing tickets, also give the necessary change for one shilling or sixpence dropped into a slot, arc the latest innovation, cf the London Underground Railway.

Free passes to vis** war graves in France and Belgium, issued to certain relatives and others, have numbered up to 18.600 since September. 1921. They permit the user to travel without a passport, thus saving a fee of 7s 6d.