"Representative of the Rat"

Opening their Sunday Dispatch last week, Londoners saw pictures of Heiress Doris Duke Cromwell, and Mrs. Mavis Constance Tate, M. P., who cried out in the headline: "WHAT I WOULD HAVE SAID IF M. P.s HAD NOT SHOUTED ME DOWN."

In the House a few days earlier Mrs. Tate was silenced by repeated cries of "Order! Order!" when she attempted to make a scandal out of the fact that three British M. P.s recently arrived in North America. These are: the Duke of Windsor's onetime flying instructor, Captain Alexander Stratford Cunningham-Reid, who gets $50,000 a year for life from a former wife whom he divorced for adultery; onetime subway engineer Captain Leonard Frank Plugge, who after a nouveau-riche success with International Broadcasting Co. boasted, "I often compare myself to Clive of India--he created a great thing, so have I with my commercial broadcasting!"; and John Roland Robinson, who is chairman of a British Guiana gold-mining company and husband of Maysie Casque, an heiress with Woolworth connections.

In the House of Commons, irate Mrs. Tate implied that His Majesty's Government should not have let these three M. P.s go overseas during the present crisis, and she did not feel any better when it came out that Captain Cunningham-Reid announced as his reason for asking an exit permit that he was going to handle Heiress Doris Duke Cromwell's refugee British tots.

Cried Mrs. Tate: "Does the Home Secretary consider it was a suitable selection on the part of the Children's Overseas Reception Board to choose as their representative a member of this House [Captain Cunningham-Reid] whose division record is under 5% [i. e., who stays away from Commons sessions nine-tenths of the time], whose association [constituents] has passed a vote of censure on him, and who also happens to be a reserve officer?"

Mrs. Tate was shouted down at this point by the House, concluded her remarks in the Sunday Dispatch: "In no conceivable circumstances should members be allowed for any personal reasons to leave this island when it is threatened with invasion--for that is not representative of the British people. It is only representative of the rat. If members apply for an exit permit, except for Government business, they should be forced to apply for the Chiltern Hundreds.* Moreover, unless they return to their country in its hour of need, they should forfeit their [British] nationality!"

All this was good Sunday-feature stuff on an island where most people expect to be bombed any minute. The Daily Express headlined the landing in Halifax of Captain Cunningham-Reid: "M. P. ARRIVES WITH 2,000 CHILDREN." In Montreal, the best crack that M. P. Cunningham-Reid could think of was: "That woman again!"

*There is no provision in British law for resigning from the House of Commons, but a member loses his seat by elevation to the peerage or taking a post such as one of the virtually imaginary stewardships of the Chiltern Hundreds, nominal jobs with token pay and no duties.

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