"The Old Bus"

Greater grief had no nation last week than Britain. Not only the mother country but her children sorrowed. Every armory throughout the Dominions half-staffed its flag for the R-IOI (see p. 24). Bounding from his bed at news of the disaster, Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald hurried to the Air Ministry, remained there more than an hour as bulletin after bulletin added horror to the ghastly story. When it was certain that the Air Minister himself had perished, Mr. MacDonald said: "To me no one can now fill his place of genial companionship and friendship. Only those who have been associated with Lord Thompson know how much the nation has lost." (He was a leading Labor peer in the House of Lords.) Down on their knees in the Parish Church at Sandringham went Their Majesties, prayed feelingly for the 47 dead. "I am horrified," telegraphed George V to Mr. MacDonald, ". . . national disaster . . . serious loss . . . including Lord Thompson, my Air Minister." Among the first to hurry across the channel to the scene was the Prince of Wales. British reporters, besieging Henry Ford on his return from Germany (see p. 18), found him taciturn, truculently unwilling to be interviewed--until they told him about the disaster of which he had not heard. Shocked into conversation Mr. Ford repeated again and again, "Horrible, horrible!" With the nation economically depressed the R-IOI'S loss seemed to strike brutally deep into Britain's present pessimistic psychology. People gathered on street corners to ask each other WHY? They had known the R-IOI affectionately as "The Old Bus," looked upon her as a vital link in the new, swift transportation chains of Empire.

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