Jay Walker; Cowboys

An exciting week of total failure to make London pedestrians stop jaywalking last week put Sir John Gilmour, Bart., grizzled and humorless Home Secretary, into the testiest of tempers. No other Cabinet officer has more direct control over British subjects. Scotland Yard is directly under the Home Secretary; administration of workmen's compensation laws fits into his portfolio; he advises the King when to exercise the right of pardon; he bars undesirable aliens and outranks all His Majesty's other Secretaries of State.

Sir John Gilmour cut his way to glory and a D. S. O. through the Boer and World Wars. He has been Captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews and he believes that every Briton must do his duty by King and Country. That his police should be unable to stop jaywalking last week and unable the week before to create an atmosphere of order at Sir Oswald Mosley's monster Fascist mass meeting in Olympia (TIME, June 18). pained Sir John beyond expression. In the House of Commons he explained the traditional British theory that policemen need not be present inside a public meeting to create order, but achieve calm by their mere presence around the building.

"The Government is determined that no person or group of persons shall usurp the functions of the State," declared Sir John, referring to the Mosley blackshirts who seized hecklers at Olympia with policemanly vigor and threw them outside to be arrested by Sir John's Bobbies. Later he said: "The Government has decided that alterations in the law shall be made to give uniformed policemen the right to attend any meeting at which they have reason to anticipate disorder."

A fox-hunting man, Sir John nevertheless shares with most Britons a passion for exterminating what he understands by "cruelty to animals." He frowned black disapproval last week upon the "refined rodeo" now being staged in London by SECRETARY FOR HOME AFFAIRS He will put his police into disorder. U. S. Cowboy Maestro Tex Austin. First amused, then indignant, the Wild West promoter was summoned to West London Police Court on the charge that in his rodeo he had "permitted an animal to be terrified, to wit. a steer." The steer had crashed into an exit gate of the rodeo arena, rebounded and dashed off bellowing with pain, to the alarm of British spectators who would scarcely have noticed dogs permitted to "terrify" a fox. "Things like that don't hurt a tough steer," snorted Tex Austin. "So far our rodeo has had only four real accidents-- all of them to cowboys. The record is four broken collarbones and one broken arm. That's what happened to my men. They have a great Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals here, but none for prevention of cruelty to cowboys."

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