Honors

The traditional royal salute of 63 guns fired from the wharf at the Tower of London boomed out over the oily Thames one morning last week, proclaimed to Londoners the official birthday of the King. George VI was 42 years old last December, but public celebration of his natal day is June 9,* when the weather is better.

As is traditional, His Majesty marked the event by conferring honors upon British subjects recommended by the Government for services in the fields of science, the arts, philanthropy and politics. This year it took a 24-page special supplement to the official London Gazette to record the full list of 900 honored subjects, which included obscure civil servants from the dreary offices of Whitehall, postmasters in Scotland, clerks in the Burmese courts, the matron of an African leper colony.

Ruddy-cheeked, white-haired Economist Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England, president of both Associated British & Irish Railways, Inc. and London. Midland & Scottish Railway, and Vivian Hugh Smith, partner in Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd. and Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, were elevated to the peerage as barons, for public and political services. Of chief political significance was the advancement of the Glasgow engineering magnate, Lord Weir, from baron to viscount. Influential Lord Weir resigned his Air Ministry advisory post in a huff after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave in to Opposition howls and dropped Lord Swinton, close friend of Lord Weir, as Air Secretary month ago. Observers saw the elevation as evidence that Lord Weir's work had been eminently satisfactory to the Government.

Pious, imaginative Sir Arthur Stanley (Nature of the Physical World) Eddington, Britain's famed popularizer of physics, was given the Order of Merit. Rear Admiral Reginald Vesey Holt, senior British naval officer on the Yangtze and commander of the British gunboat Bee, which rescued the crew of the Japanese-bombed U. S. gunboat Panay, was made a Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Almost at the same time in Washington, President Roosevelt signed a bill awarding Admiral Holt and another British underofficer the U. S. Distinguished Service Medal.

Neville Chamberlain's head Cabinet stenographer is now entitled to sign her letters Daisy Florence Mary Brown, M. B. E. She was named a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Austerely noted in the formal Gazette as "a British subject resident in Southern California" was grey Hollywood Actor Charles Aubrey Smith, elevated to Commander of the same order. Personifying in the way Britain likes best the shaggy, jowlish Spirit of Empire, Actor Smith has been his country's most impressive cinematic ambassador.

Landing from the S. S. Manhattan last week, Lord Stamp brushed aside comment on his new title, held forth on U. S. business. "I'm here to find out what the length of your depression will be. England can't go up while you go down. We are anxious to learn the reaction of business here toward President Roosevelt's gestures toward your business. I think there's a good deal of 'I won't play' among your businessmen, and we do hope business here gets over that attitude. For we feel and know that America tends to consider politics and economics emotionally. Even if you try to discuss Plato here, it's impossible, because some one always brings up Roosevelt."

*Precedent for this arrangement was set by Edward VII (born on November 9), who officially celebrated his birthday on May 24 (the date of his mother, Queen Victoria).

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