Sapho Upped

Notable among the platoon of British subjects whom King George's annual New Year's Honors last week upped in the world was Actress Olga Nethersole, now 65, who was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

To U. S. theatre-goers, if not to Britons, Olga Nethersole is famed as a pre-War figure of Wickedness-on-the-Stage for her work in Sapho, a play she picked in 1900 because she thought it was romantic and beautiful for a love-sick bumpkin to carry a lush, mournful harlot upstairs to bed (see cut). The U. S. Press, on the other hand, decided it was shameless, stupid or funny. Miss Nethersole, a onetime governess, was tried in Manhattan on a charge of committing a public nuisance, was easily acquitted. Comedians Weber & Fields put on a burlesque of the stair-mounting scene called Sapolio. Gelett Burgess wrote a doggerel:

I love little Olga,

Her plays are so warm,

And if I don't see them,

They'll do me no harm.

Miss Nethersole, far from cashing in on this priceless publicity, closed Sapho and went to bed an invalid. She never forgave the U. S. After War broke out, she joined the British Red Cross and began building a reputation of another kind. She became a crusader for Public Health, working up to a learned monograph on Milk Production & Distribution in Relation to Nutrition & Disease and calling her Hampstead retreat the Vale of Health. For all this her Commandership was last week a just reward.

Some other royal uppings of the week: the King's second son, the Duke of York, to be a vice admiral, a lieutenant general and a Marshal of the Royal Air Force; Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague ("Boom") Trenchard, Baron Trenchard of Wolfeton, London Police Commissioner from 1931 to 1935, to be a viscount; Miss Jackson, private secretary to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's wife, Lucy, to be an officer. Pianist Myra Hess to be a Commander, oldtime Suffragette Christabel Pankhurst to be a Dame Commander, of the Order of the British Empire.

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