Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 60 Years.] FRIDAY, 31st JULY, 1936. NO. 10 DOWNING STREET.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 31 July 1936, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 60 Years.] FRIDAY, 31st JULY, 1936. NO. 10 DOWNING STREET.

It is easy enough to romanticise the official residence of the Prime Minister of England, No. 10 Down-

in" Street, for it is a little mysterious in the first instance that he should occupy such an incommodious place in such an inconvenient lane, and, in the second, so many momentous decisions have been taken there, for the nation’s weal or woe, as to set the imagination busy conjuring up and dramatising each scene. But all this is not what Mr Basil Puller and Mr John Cornes set out to do, in their book on the house. They trace, for the first time, its complete history, as far as it can be ascertained, and thus add to the interest of the residence by revealing the interest of the site, the building itself, and the surroundings. As is well known, in Celtic times Westminster was an island, the island of Thorney, containing a Druidic temple, perhaps a sort of parliament house, and a small settlement. Successive waves of invasion broke directly over it; the Druid shrine gave place to a Roman temple, that to a Christian church, destroyed by the Danes and later rebuilt. The

court made its home in this, part, and, to serve Henry VIII., a brewery was built on the site of what is now No. 10 Downing Street. This gave place to a house, occupied by Sir Thomas Knyvett, the apprehender of Guy Fawkes; under Cromwell, George Downing, a high official, became lessee and tenant, his name being subsequently bestowed on the as yet unbaptised, miry and filthy little street. When, in 1735, Sir Robert Walpole accepted No. 10 as a gift' from George 11., he made the condition that it should be entailed in perpetuity to the office of the First Lord of the Treasury; though more Chancellors of the Exchequer than First Lords actually occupied it, for the next hundred years. The history of the house now begins in earnest with its long succession of distinguished tenants, from Walpole to Mr Baldwin. Its walls have known every variety of feeling from the despair of Lord North in the American crisis, to the levity of that Puck of Prime Ministers, Sir Francis Dashwood. It has never lacked a human atmosphere, except once in the early Victorian era, when it -was given over to officials and the head of Her Majesty’s Government lived elsewhere. But, since 1905, when the Prime Minister was at length officially recognised, there has been no question of abandoning a long tradition. If Pitt the Younger drank his port here, Walpole entertained his Queen to breakfast, Wellington made it a sort of military base, somebody else died in it, Gladstone evolved here a tax on beer, Asquith, and later Lloyd George, directed from it England’s conduct of the Great War, then, however, very poky and uncomfortable,’ it is now too haunted and hallowed to be left or even rebuilt—the hub of the Empire, as the writers call it, a visibe symbol of unpretentious administration.