"Make Yourself Necessary"

GREAT BRITAIN Trouble with the circulation in their legs brought two great men low last week. "Papa" Joffre, victor of the Marne, lay dying in Paris of gangrene caused by arteritis (swelling of an artery) which has bothered him for several months (see p. 16). In London Lord Melchett, Zionist, greatest British chemical tycoon, died of phlebitis--inflammation of a vein. Alfred Moritz Mond, first Baron Melchett of Landford, was born in Farnworth, Lancashire. Like John Pierpont Morgan and many another tycoon, he inherited the basis of his fortune. His father was the famed Jewish chemist Dr. Ludwig Mond of Cassel.

Germany, who went to Great Britain with a new. cheap method of making & bottling soda water, later with Sir John Brunner formed the chemical firm of Brunner, Mond & Co. Alfred Mond was educated at Cheltenham, Cambridge and Edinburgh University. For a short time he practiced law, gave that up to enter his father's business. In 1906 he was elected to Parliament, earned the nickname of "What-What" from his habit of punctuating his speeches (he spoke with a pronounced lisp) with that nervous interjection. From chemicals, his business interests branched out to coal and particularly nickel. He became violently interested in Zionism and the "rationalization" of industry, mass production.

The War brought "What-What" fame and great wealth. He was a member of David Lloyd George's Coalition Cabinet (1916-22). His companies furnished three-fourths of the nitrate of ammonia used in British explosives, besides enormous quantities of poison gas, glycerine, cordite, nickel.

Last October he resigned his chairman ships of the council and political commit tee of the Jewish Agency in Palestine, branding the Palestine Policy of the MacDonald Government "an act of almost unparalleled ingratitude and treachery committed by a government toward a credulous and harassed people."

In 1926, dissatisfied with the policies of Lloyd George, he switched from the Liberal to the Conservative Party. Grateful Stanley Baldwin gave him a peerage in 1928. As supporters for his escutcheon Lord Melchett chose an Oxford doctor of science holding aloft a measuring glass and a laborer with a pick on his shoulder, with the motto: "Make yourself necessary," a maxim which he conspicuously in his own lifetime.

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