1940-05-14 — Page 23

Tuesday,

HONGKONG TE LEGRAPH

May 14, 1940.

MAGAZINE

PAGE

THERE'S A NEW OCCUPANT AT

10

DOWNING STREET

phlet director in the Affairs of the

hug would hae bid a conte inatiding conspicuous situation, in'd have been' adorned with some einblens _of our national greatnesE OF some Intimationis of our rank umong the nu- tions of Europe."

But one's ex-

unrenilsed, There is a let- ter-box bearing the Inscription, "First Lord of tia Treasury," and

there are three bells on

On Sunday-Mr. Winston Churchill. pectations are moved into No. 10 Downing Street, which was first occupied 202 years The ago by Sir Robert Walpole. first Prime Minister to occupy No. 10 refused to accept the house as a personal gift from George II., and it became the Prime Minister's,

official residence.

the right, and there is nothing else of note. In- side the door you pass under по scintillating

SOMETIMES the starlings fiebandeller but th00-watt bulb

wheels out in a ragged cloud from St. James' Park, and after a mad chuse above the Horse Guards descend on the trees in the garden of No. 10, Downing Street. But find- ing nothing of greater in- terest there than an incon- gruous fig tree, they are soon. aprawling hysterically back again across the sky.

In the same way the sight- seer, conscious that he is approaching one of the most famous buildings in the world, feels cheated when he finds himself standing in front of a modest town house distin- guished only by a flag-pole on the roof. And the flag-pole, he has to admit, looks a Uttle ridiculous, like an Old Etonian tie knotted round the neck of a tramp.

AS a gulde-book puts it:

"One would have thought that the official residence of such person as the first minister and

City Relies On A Girl

сеп-

CONTINUANCE of a turies-old custom may depend on Muriel Blackburn, aged twelve, of King Edward-rond, Ripon, Yorks,

She is deputy horn-blower for the city of Ripon, where every night for more-than 1,060 years a horn has been blown at each corner of the market crom, and three fimca in front of the home of the Mayor report Muriel succeeds, deputy horn- blower Thomas Wright, who is in the Army. She handles the 101b: horn with apparent case, and is taking her job seriously,

Family Tradition

(pearl surface). In a

a lantern and

on your right you will be in- formed by a sunray clock, of the sort you see in most French jewellers, that you are two minutes later than you in fact are.

But all this, you realise, as you penetrate deeper into the building past busls of Pitt and Melbourne and down a long passage and a sharp lutn to the left to the Cabinet room, all this is remark- ably like the British Constitution. It rambles, it twists round comers, It has plece added here and un- other there.

The modest facade on · Downing Street shields a very large build- Ing indeed. It is like the shabby sult of clothes which the wealthy Englishman sometimes wears for kis travel.

Nor has this carelessness of con- ventional opinion always, been confined to the architecture of No. 10. The adventure which gave the starlings the worst shock that any bird can receive seems to prove that even Mr. Gladstone could, Ines a

sense of the pro- prieties.

A distinguished visitor In 1872 was shown into the garden, where, he found the Prime Minister in

Commissioner of

д

carnest conversation with the First

Works and

Sir Frederick Storm called

who had promised to de- monstrate the possibilities of "fell- ing trees, noiselessly by means of gun cotton."

The three were arguing round a sort of mast which they had suc- ceeded in sinking: Into the ground, and the First Commissioner of Works was prolesting to Mr. Glad- stone against the danger and ob-

supply, Sir Frederick won the of the experiment, Un- day. "No one," he assured the Prime Minister, "will be one penny the worse."

This, he afterwards confessed to ол exaggeration, for every window in the neighbourhood was shattered by the explosion, and the distinguished visitor - found" himself in a shower of glass from the skylight.

•

the

MR. Gladstone was among i large number of Prime Ministers, who disliked Jiving at No, 10, and

Her father, Mr. Harold-Blackburn, -used--it-whenever possible for

has been the city's horn-blower for twenty-two years. Every night "hë wears a picturesque fawn and blue coat and three-cornered Block k

hat.

"

Muriel has had a liking for blow- ing the horn 'since she was five,and when the deputy blower. Joined up. her father trained her, specially so that if he fell i Muriel, could.toko his place.

1

"She will do the joli all -right," "She can Bays Mr. Blackburn. Bh blow a blast of twelve seconds 'many a man-cannot even do that.', "My two sons, both now in the Army, have taken, my place when I have been 11, and it looks as though the family tradition is to be carried on by Muriel"

"I am delerminde not to let down the people of Ripon," says Murle

Board of Works has dege; they've put a leat made of deal in the middle of the mahogany-is, that respectfulty

Someone suggested that the green. cloth would cover it, but Appleton could only repeat: "Is that pectful?"

YQS-

which

is already infinite. Pit lived here, and Disraeli Ilved here, and the greatness of these men, the stability of the parliamentary system they helped to form, can- not be expressed in terms of gill

engles and resplendent guards.

And you have to admit, a you walk off into the roar of the buses In Whitehall, that a flock of start)- ings and A pair of British pollermen can be quite effective in their senti- mental way.

Spotting the Rank

BRIGADIER

During the 1914-1918 war this rank was known 25 Brigadier-General,

an

A Briga. dier com- mands an in- fantry or cavalry bri gado or equiva- lant for- mation o f se vor al units of othar Cortain special staff appoint- ments are held by officers of this rank,

arms.

They are specially selected for this command from offi. cers who have commanded battalions or units.

Pay: Brigadior Administra- tive, £1,527 a year for mar- riod man; £1,471 for tinglo man. Brigadier ordinary, £1,- 436 martjad man and: £1,379 single man,

you

GRIN AND BEAR IT

ON the staircase which have to climb to get to the dining- room on the first floor, hang the portralls of the Prime Ministers.

By Tangye Lean

Since Sir Robert Walpole first went into residence two hundred years ago, nearly forty successors have come

the and gone, But public's memory is shorter for its Prime Ministers than a Kings, and is doubtful whether most, people could account for more than a dozen.

~ who Even Spencer Perceval, held office for three years at the helgit of Napoleon's triumph, is generally forgotten. He was shot

dead by a madman in the lobby

of the House of Commons, fame which usually surrounds the vletim of assassination passed him by.

It occurs to most of the sight- seers who linger to-day in front of No. 10 that there are stilt sur-

prisingly few precautions taken against the political madman. policeman stands on the pave- ment opposite and another strolis up and down behind the garden wall on the Horse Guards Parade. But they will not stop you if you care lo ring the doorbell, and on the whole, they seem less anxious than a ticket inspector at” a rail- way sintion.

1s

The atmosphere of No. 10 with its walls blackened by soot and lis air of emphatic modesty, is Conservative as anything could be. No display of grandeur, It seems to imply, could enhance a dignity

AEROPLANE HELD FOR LAST WISH

By Lichty

"Dora and I had such a nico comfy chat! We both hate Estello!”

How to

SEE

THE number of stars visible

to the naked eye at any one time under good condi- tlons is only about 3,000!.

And what are these points of light which we call the start?

STARS

The be buried with her only fulfil a dying woman's wish that!

Well, nearly all the stars you see child, a son killed in a motor-cycle in the night skies are also suns, accident, the body of Mrs. Ronald like our own, only some of them Constantine was flown from Alder- are very much larger, and somn ney, Channel Isles, to Shareham are also very much hotter. (Sussex)-the first hundred miles of a three hundred mile journey.

From Shoreham the coffin was taken by train to London and then to Bradford, Yorks, for the funeral at Hipperholme, near Halifax It was there that her son lan, aged ineleen, was burled after being killed near Bradford a year ago.

The apparent difference in sizu between our own sun and these other suns is simply a matter of distance, for, while our own sun is, astronomically speaking, com- near to us, the next paratively nearest sun is at the stupendous distance of twenty-five millions of millions of miles-in other words, nearly three million times na

Mis. Constantine was heartbroken at the news of her son's death, forf for away! she was devoted to him. -- Before Christmas her doctors said that sho showed no desire to live, and was Just pining away-grieved at the lost of her son...

No wonder, these other suns only. appear fo us as small points of light. But, when we talk about millions of miles we are using Agures which are only under- standable to a: Chancellor of the

Since then her husband. Mr. Ronald Comatauiting," has kept Exchequer, sprolally-chartéred" plane, siandinig. by ready to tulin her whh för burial at Kluperholme, an airwar official Bald.... Never-Recovered"

business only. Disraeli, among, the - smaller group

who loved it för" Mrs. Constantine died at Alderney tradition's sake, spent thousands of ono Sunday. There was nothing or pounds on redecoration. But nel-ganically wrong, but she became ill ther was the leading exponent, of shortly after her son was killed. their school of thought.

"of

The Younger Pitt, in his sover teen years offico, became so devoted to the house from which he had conducted the early years of the war against Napoleon that he used to complain of sleepless-

from it. ness when he was away from

The son left home two years ago to work in a bank at Bradford. While he was there he lived with his cousin, Mr. G. C. West, of Springfield, Hip perholme.

Mr. West said: "Mrs. Constantino was very unhappy whan. Ian came to Bradford. He was an only child, and they were both very much als tached to him. When he died f think It - broke. his mother's heart md she never recovered.

Astronomers use

se a different kind of tape measure, namely, "leht. years," and a "light year" is the distance" that light will travel In a year at the speed of light, which is about 186,000 miles per second."

To roach the earth the light from the gun occupied about eight and a half minutes, but, thụ, light from the next nearest Bun takes over four years to get here.

+

From some of the more-distant suns it takes hundreds and even thousands of years for their light to reach us.

Our solar system comprises the sur and his nine planets, which are Mercury. The Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and Venus, which comes nearer to the earth than any other planet.

Jupiter is object,

very conspicuous present though just al it is too low down in the Western sky to be seen at its best. It is the largest planet in our system, having a diameter of over eleven. ümnes that of the earth!

Our old friend the moan is, of course, very near neighbour, being only a small matter of about 239,000 miles away, and its craters and mountain ranges can be seen through a

field pair of good glauses.

One of the most fam!llär objects in the sky is the meteor, or so-. called "shooting-star," which con be seen of any clear night.

Shooting-stars are not stars at all, but simply small pleces of rocks or stone; and in'some' cases, metal, which do not become visible antii they have the misfortund" to en- counter the earth's atmosphere, when they become incandescent through friction caused:!by their passage through that-némisphere.

The majority of them are very small bodies, possibly no-furger than a walnut or even emaljer. Occasionally, however, a large one pays ús a visit, and in some cOLOS these larger ones, haye, managed.. to reach the earth before being en.. tirely bummed up during their paš¬· sago through the air.

There is quite a good collection of them, in the South Kensington. Natural Hutory Museum. Their fraterest-los, in the fact that they': are the only visitors from outside.... space which we can actually An oven more passionate case

When I said that nearly all the handle and examine at our leisure. of fidelity was that of Appleton,

Yesborg sing the black- stara, are sung, I was excepting is

quite a lot, to be the most famous office-keeper, of

een ki the the-nineteenth century, who 'near»

very small number of apparent.

out, and a few hours spent in be

·ly · realged, when the Cabinet

stars, which are not stars at all,

Fot but worldis, or planets, to give-coming-scquainted with some v table had to be, enlarged, i "Come

them their in hero, sir, if you please, he said

proper name; and a these, splendours of the „heavena.

might well: recompense us for lu to Lord Welby. The table had to

planet is a world which involves. Found of mun ̈ Jet what the

inconveniences w

· be enlarged +, and

"She was not really fit to make the journey to his nineral but nobody could preo Bet nội to để có

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