1949-07-09 — Page 4

THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH,

SATURDAY, JULY 9, 1949.

FOR THE SERVICES

NEWS FROM HOME

EX-SERVICE TEACHERS qUIE Maistry of Education's

as

emergency scheme to train ex-Service men and women teachers closed at the end of June when the last applications

received from were

women. Since 1944 when the scheme be- gan, 10,701 men teachers and -6,044 women passed its schools after a highly concentrated 12 month's course. A total of 120,040 men and women applied for courses and 52,207 wero ac- cepted. There have been training colleges. And this what the Ministry anys of U10 results: "Headmasters and head- mistresses have written to Us describing the new life that these young people have brought Into their schools." No longer do clanses of bored children fidget over algebraic problems of drip-

the geometry of ping tapa or the garden rake. Tho ex-Servico men and

And their pupils more than ready to work

need for

women

NOT

WELLINGTON CARRACKS GUARDSMEN CAUGHT

SMILING AT NURSES ON

AND AFTER JUNE 21

WILL BE DISCIPLINED

"Here's this Royal Commission on Population wanting more marriages, and our

mob hands

out an

order. like that."

-London Express Servicei

Now I've seen it all!

CHICAGO,

Y name is Bernard Gulliver Wicksteed

M

of the Parish ΟΣ in London, out how far an airlift pilet can Ilampstead

heen cast hole in his petrol and having fly with n tank, or at what angle a fet upon the Shores of the fighter wing should be set. The United States of Brobding- more tenchers con-nag by the Forces of Nature tinues, and the Ministry plans and the B.O.A.C., I now pro- to convert many of the emer-pose to describe to you some colleges into permanent of the Wonders of the establishments for the training Country, for they are indeed

such as few Men will be

cency

of students leaving school."

FILMS EARN £2,000,000

IR PHILIP WARTER, chief of Associated British Picture Corporation, had pleasant sur prise for his shareholders the olher day. Their 410 cinemas havo turned in a gross trading profi

during the jaat year of

ས

of

£2,038,702. An Increase £12,052 over 1947-48 Ju modest but people have been talking of foll in cinema box-office tak- ings and there is some surprise that the figure for the past year should have come out so well. City fears about cinema tak- ings are reflected in the fact list the company's 5s shares have come down from 21s last year to 10s. Shareholders are have their dividend reduced from 22 percent to 20 percent because the net proit, after making all charges, comes out at £450,013 against 2513,901,

Navertheless the results are re- garded as satisfactory and Uio dividend cut is no more than most elty people feared.

HONOUR IN PRIVATE

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS adds

lieve.

The Inn or Hotel where I have found lodging has 3,000 bed-rooms. If you were to sleep In

a different room every night it would take you more than eight years to go through the until tot, or from now September 3057.

Think of having to keep a place like that clean! The floor space alone is nearly as greal as the Green Park in London, and if the carpets were made

into strips 27ins.

wide they'd stretch from Charing Cross to Brighton.

And the washing up! The five dining rooms and six banquet- ing halls sometimes use 300,000 dishes a day.

There are 23 lifts, 35 storeys (five below ground) and at one time there was a miniature golf course on n roof. The inhabi tants of this country cannot live without feed water, and the hotel has to make 25 tons of ice every day to enable them

nced 300 survive. They also gallons of coffee.

to

What with one thing and another it takes 2,000 servants to run the hotel (195 of them in

the thirteenth to his list of British, American and Allied decorations when he goes to [the inundry.

Buckingham Palace on July 12, The only complaint I have to to be invested with the KBE by

make about a place like this la that you never see daylight be enuse you can't find your way out. I'd been here a full before I discovered that the ar

the King. He will be received by the King in private audience. Thin is done when the King particularly wishes to chat with

Jay

the man he honours. There cade where I did my shopping

is also a general-Investiture-at was still a part of the hotel-------

the Palace on the came day.

is

• Medence.

been

Fairbanks las

to attend al a time when the investiture is sull in progress, so he will wait in another room until the King is ready to receive him. Mr and. Mrs. Fairbanks are on holiday

TN

Giant trees

another province of Prob-

dingnng I saw trees so big that the inhabitants cut rond-tunnels through them as though they

in London with their three were mountains. These trees

daughters,

(Sequela olgentea) are

Uro

BERNARD

(GULLIVER)

WICKSTEED

pillars of red marble on every sldc. The beauty of it breathtaking.

Was

The greatest and most vengr- alle of these trees is called the General Sherman and weighs 6,000 tons (171 times as much as a Sherman tank). There's as calls in at Chicago on much timber in it as you'd find the closing lap of his In an average pine forest of 20 If it were folled and globe-trotting tour,

would up it

provide before flying home as the enough wood to make a box big first man to complete a

enough to hold the Queen Mary.

Luckily for go-as-you-please journey

the trees the Americans have found they are with-

more valuable alive than dead. Instead of cutting them up

ncres. sawn

The next Stale to Washing ton is Idaho, and travelled through I discovered a¦ lake where the trout are so big that they live on salmon.

It is called Pend Oreille (pro- nounced Ponderay), and until 1945 there wasn't a trout in it. The salmon had li pretty well) to themselves, but as they could not get down to the sen they never grew more than a foot or so long.

Then some fishermen put in a few hundred rainbow troui, hatched from Canadian spawn. The trout turned on the land- locked salmon and began eating them.

to make a box for the Evidently salmon is just the Queens Mary they have diet for trout, because within made them national monu- two years fish that weighed ments and built camps be- only a few ounces when firat neath them, where tourists put in had grown to 30 lb. The

night. can stay for 25s.

biggest caught so for weighed One of these camps was 37 lb, a world record for burned down last year, rainbows. The blaze raged for hours, but no more than slaged the great trees around it, There is some chemical in the bark that resists all but the flercest fires. It

also

One thousand years in the

town of wine

by GERALD SCHEFF

Wo thousand bults of sherry, each contain- ing 108 gallons, aro on the way to England from Spain.

Merchants hope tho Ministry of Food will soon increase the quota, and this, with the revaluation of the Spanish peseta, in expected to cut the price of sherry by about 28. 6d, a bottle.

B

While this is happening. 33-year-old Spaniard, Manuel Maria Gonzalez, has gone to London to translate a history of sherry written by his uncle.

Senor Gonzalez is one of the 11 children of the 71-year-old Marques de Torre Soto, a sherry "king."

His home is in runny Jerez- de-la-Frontera, Andalusia, the birthplace of sherry.

SENOR GONZALEZ ... son of

sherryking?

Surprisingly, the man who did most to popularise sherry in England was that enemy of Spain, Sir Francis Drake.

A dog alvon á small quantity slept for 11⁄2 hours, but "awoka without a hangover.

A dog given the same amount of maizo. alcohol stayed in - a coma for 40 hours and was zbaken for some time.

Gonzalez notes that no one in Jerez has ever been known to suffer from gout,

Until 80 years ago, all sherry was sweet. Then one, Unclo Joseph, developed a fine dry wine, now the most popular type,

The Marques de Torre Solo suys that good wine is the result of bad business. He moans that the methora of producing sherry arc 'largely the same as they were centuries ago,

Pressed by foot

In Jerez the golden grapes for much of the best wine are still pressed by foot-the workers wear leather boots studded with nalls.

The weight of a man is, re- garded as ideal for this process.

Sherry is kept in casks of New Orleans oak-later used for Drake, according to a popular maturing whisky-and is stored bellef, once settled in Jerez as in cool, lofty bodegas. It is eight merchant, and might have to ten years old by the time you ended hin days there but for a buy it. row with a neighbour, who is Bald to have "smitten him in publiek."

Once Jerez was called Keres, and the Moors who occupied He left Spain in anger, and Spain from 711 AD to 1492 call-

returned as a scaman to sack ed it Scherrls, which explains the coastal towns. how the wine got its name.

In 1587 he attacked Bred 16 ships, and took 3,000 pipes of sherry, which found favour at the English Court.

Tasted by Noah Itecords show that in 1493 the inhabitants supplied wheat and wine to Christopher Columbus.

Gonzalez the elder reminds us that Noah first tasted wine after the Deluge and was 601 yours old at the time.

Cadiz away

To this day the Jerezanos fell or their children to be good "he Drake" will get them. round sherry chiefly because

Controversy has always raged

1 2. It is spirit-strengthened, i and

The skins of the grapes are sprinkled with gypsum be- fore presshy a practice which in Ping recorda was popular Africa 2,000 years ago.

lle quotes David the King from Psalm 103

2. "....and tel good wine give Joy to the hearts of men"

In 1860 the British Govern

of sherry.in its natural state. ment sent a malsalon to Spala to and out the alcoholle strength

..

A Persian legend has it that

dis vinous fermentation was covered through the fondness of an ancient king for grapes. stock the king tried the experi- To make sure he had a good ment of storing the grapes In Jors; he found they fermented

labelled the

And no hangover and

jurs "poi- I had a try at catching one

sonous." but all I could

Later, the Lancet conducted One of his wives, having lost its own look myself,

investigation, and a decided to drink the medical congress reported that Invour, were salmon, curse it!

Well, next week the traveller "polson." Instead of dying she sherry was stimulating to will be home. At least he will felt a pleasurable desire to live, appetite, the digestion, the intel- biggest and oldest living things repels infects, microbes, and if he can ever find his way out and reported her discovery

to lect and the body! on earth.

fungus, so the trees never

monstrous hotel in the king.

Sherry is believed to have been drunk in England as long -{London Express Service) | ogo as 1130.

LOWCH

where

G

die of this

of disease or old age. Their Chicago. greatest enemies are lightning--

and man.

I reached the forest they grow at dawn, when - mist hid everything but the first 40 or 50 feet of their gigantic They were first discovered in trunks. It was ilke walking 1852 by a gold prospector who through a forest of gosometers. lost his way. When he got back

and described them people As the sun came up the mist shook their heads sorrowfully rose foot by foot, and turned the and said: "Poor

fellow. The place into a temple with Doric sun's got him.""

0

0

กะ G

THE BRAIN TEASER THAT'S BEATING THE CRIME FANS

Get

No. 9

Him Out

Of This!

SNIP CARTON, In-

surance Agent, is in- vestigating, the strange disappearance of a stock. of vanishing-cream from Messrs Potts and Jarr, manufacturing chemists, of Chalk Farmercy.

by ERNEST DUDLEY The Armchair Detective

Bulp shrewdly suspects the notorious magician, Hugo Iro, has stolen the vanish- Ing-cream to chable him to perform his kengational Indian Rope Trick at the forthcoming Dagen ham Cocoa-Rooms Cabaret,

Igo and his hatchet-faced Swedish assistant; Axel Bchopper, ex - axe-firower, trap the unsuspecting Snip Carton and knock him out.

He recover consolousneza to End kinseif strapped by the wrists to a wall, his feel, off the ground, in a room in Igo's house.

sinister

Position

Not only to this extenenely unrestful, but the villainous magician has left.

Snip Carton to the tender

· mercies of his assistant.

Axel suffers from eyestrain, but being inordinately vain, refuses to wear glasses. As a result, although he can split 1 playing-card at twenty paces with an axe forty-nine throws out of fifty, from the fifilelh throw onwards hla alm fails to pieces. And · so dots whoever's holding the playing-card,

The Association of ́ ̈ ́Axe-

Throwers 'have, therefore, quite efghtly- purged. Axel- A

Now Axel starts practising on the helpless Sufp Carton, placing the unlucky Ace of Spades in ils victim's hand. To make sure Snip Onriött. In doomed, Igo has released the trick celling, which begins to descend slowly to crush Snip Carton flat after Axel has finished with him.

So once again Salp Carton, Insurance Agent, is ~ doomed to certain death from. (A) Cramp, (D)] Axel's axe, and/or (C) the descending veliina. "Valoss· · YOU-GET

·HDMI OUT, OF. THIS! All the clues are in the pleture. (SOLUTION ON PAGE 18)

4

To Lilliput

I'VE begun to wonder whether the sun of Brobdingnag hasn't got me, too. A few hours after seeing the biggest trees in the world I was taken to Lilliput to see a forest of the smallest ones. It was made up of perfect tule pines and cedars, and not one of them was more than a foot) high.

I was told that this was be-- "eatise of the acld" in the soll. If the pines were 'transplanted elsewhere they grew into normal sized trees, but the cedars re- mained minute whatever you dld with them.

"And now, Gulliver," said the Inhabitants of this fabulous land, "you must see the Eighth Wonder of the World, the greatest structure ever made by inan."

They were talking about the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in the State of times Washington. It is four

as big as the Pyramid of Cheops, and iwico as high as Niagara The whole thing weighs twice as much as the entire popula- tion of the United States,

"Gee," I said, having learned the language. "That's GoMo dom.TM

THE

Giant dam

THE Grand Coulee was one of Roosevelt's pet projects. Work on it began in 1934, and the power and the water stack- ed up behind the damı will be used for turning a desert size of Lancashire or Somerset into a farming community.

the

- It glistons like polishett marble, but the water doesn't seem to be moving ill it strikes a ramp a third of the way down, and turns into a seething white cloud.

I've scen Niagara ··・ several times, and always been 'disap- pointed, but the Grand Coulee when the knows are melting is [ terrific..)

As you stand at its foot unable to hear your neighbour speak you lose all sense of proportion till you see a tiny speck crawl- ing along the bridge-like crest or dam and realise it is

a 40. ton lorry..

my

[I didn't mention it to guldes, but the Grand Coulee isn't the biggest structure ever made by man. The Great Wall of China, 1,400 miles long' and ¦ 20 to 30 feet high, has it well beaten. Even in England we have Malden Castle, the ancient British earthwork' near Dorsi chester, which is twice, as.big as Coulee and all hand-done.]

Ühe

Scientists have reported that the wine alcohol Increased the intelligence of ants 'and bees.

One vine in Jerez is 350 years old, and there are some sherrles aged more than 100.

-(London Express Service)

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