English Actress Goes to Prison As First Guest

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 97, 27 April 1939, Page 11

English Actress Goes to Prison As First Guest

LONDON—Miss Gracie Fields, Brit ain’a highest paid film star, has been i< jail, but not in the orthodox marine! She did not, for instance, drive up .' Black Maria, the prison van. Insteashe went as the first guest to be as', to give a theatrical entertainment i Holloway Prison for women. Gracie swayed her audience of moi' than 300 women prisoners until the; laughed, and cried, singing with her th> popular choruses of “Sally,” “Litti Old Lady,” “Smile When You Sa; Good-bye,” aud listening in amusemer.' to the plaintive “Walter, Walter, leac me to the Altar,” and to “The Organ I he Monkey, and Me.” After the singing, a “first offender shyly approached her and, dropping a gracefully sweeping curtesy, presentee ;t beaded evening bag, made specially by the prisoners as a token of gratitude Cor her visit. Tar A Negro clergyman, in one of his set , □ions, exclaimed to his hearers:— “Eternity! Why, don’t you know meaning of that word? It is for evci ind ever, and five or six everlastings i-top of that. You might place a ro.v jf figures from here to sunset, and add them all up, and it wouldn’t begin tc :ell how many ages long eternity is. iVhy, my friends, after millions and millions of years had rolled away in jternity, it would still be a hundred rears to breakfast-time.”