People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 4 December 1913, Page 41

People We Hear About

Mr. George Duncan, the * clever young Aberdeen professional, who is a Catholic, : has : followed up his recent victory in the £4OO tournament at Walton Heath by winning the French Open Championship in-golf at Chantilly.

The position of -organist at St. Anne's Catholic Cathedral, Leeds, rendered vacant by the death of Mr. Arthur Grimshaw, has been filled by the appointment of an eleven-year-old Jboy, Master Harry Alban Chambers, son of Mr. Henry Chambers, of Hareliills Place, Leeds. At the age of seven Master Chambers began to'study the pianoforte under a lady tutor, and when eight years old he composed the music of a hymn, and accomplished with ease several difficult transpositions.

Mr. Charles Hallam Elton Brookfield, who was appointed joint examiner of plays with Mr. G. A. Bedford at the latter end of 1912, and who died recently at the age of 55, was the son of an Anglican canon. He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. For many years he was on J the staff of the Saturday Review, and was a busy dramatist, and the author of between 40 and 50 clays. He was a convert to the Catholic Church, and* five years ago founded the Guild of Catholic Actors and Musicians. His widow is a well-known authoress.

On October 5 Miss M. E. Braddon celebrated her 75th birthday, and she is now busy at work on her 75th novel—a remarkable and, in all probability, unprecedented coincidence. Her brother the late Sir Edward Braddon, was Premier of Tasmania, and also its -AgentGeneral in London. She went on the stage under the name of Mary Barton, but she was not a success as an actress. Then she took to story-telling, and immediately captured the novel-reading world with * Lady Audley's Secret. Since then she has been turning out novel after novel with clockwork regularity. - In private life she is Mrs. John Maxwell.

Countess Markievicz, who is superintending the soup kitchen for the Dublin unemployed, to the delight of the illustrated papers, is a member of a family well known in Great Britain. Married to a Polish count, her own name was Constance Gore-Booth; her brother is Sir Jocelyn Gore-Booth, of Lisadell, County Sligo, and her sister, Miss Eva Gore-Booth, is distinguished by her work in organising the women textile workers of Lancashire. The Countess has been the leading actress in the Dublin Repertory Theatre, and the Count is the founder and director. She claims, of course, to be a good Nationalist; she is the moving spirit in the National Boy and Girl Scouts—those Nationalist rivals to the Baden-Powell Scouts, and of late she has frequently spoken on suffragist platforms. Mr. John Purroy Mitchel, a grandson of John Mitchel, the Irish patriot of '4B, who spent 27 years in exile for his country's cause, has been elected Mayor' of New York. He was elected successor to the late Mayor Gaynor, and the New York Times acclaims him as a municipal expert, as a man who knows more about the details of municipal government than, probably any other man in an administrative office in that city. Mr. Mitchel is an Irish leader in the city of which he is the administrative head, and no man has done more for the Home Rule cause than this grandson of one of the purest of Ireland's patriots, a man who sacrificed everything for the sake of his oppressed cradleland. Young Mitchel— is only thirty-three—-bers amongst his most intimate friends nearly every member of the Irish Party.