Mellowed Colonel

As the world's most unrelenting Anglophobe, the Chicago Tribune's Editor and Publisher Robert Rutherford McCormick was treading gingerly last week when the first leg of a month's flying tour* of Europe brought him to London, the heart of the conspiracy. British newsmen went eagerly to bait him in his suite at Claridge's. Only one got in, was startled to find him unexpectedly mellow, even complimentary. "I think you [British] are coming on a bit," said the colonel. After a thoughtful pause, he added: "There's one thing which always strikes me when I come to England--that's the good manners of everyone."

Lest the colonel be disillusioned, the British press tried to find nice things to say about the ancient foe. Lord Beaver-brook's Evening Standard even detected a trace of the secret Anglophile in the colonel. "All his life," noted the paper's "Londoner's Diary," "he has had his clothes built in Savile Row, as also did his father. When he has been unable to come to London, a Chicago tailor has taken the colonel's measurements and sent them to London." The Standard also pointed out that by buying with dollars in Britain he gets his tailor-made suits for $112, his handmade shoes for $50, $5 less than Britons pay for them. Nor did the Standard's "Diary" overlook the fact that the colonel, after a visit to his tailor and bootmaker, drove off to the outskirts of London, visited the Ludgrove School, where he was once a student, and remarked: "It was here that I learned how to be patriotic to one's country." Even London's Laborite Daily Mirror had a kind word for Bertie McCormick: "Now he is with us once more . . . and has been summing us up again. Bless him. Bless his stupid old rancorous heart." The News Chronicle even suggested the time might be ripe to open the question of "a Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Esteem between Britain and the colonel."

*By commercial airline. The colonel last year sold his converted B-17 Flying Fortress in the canny belief it had worn out, had his judgment confirmed when it crashed shortly afterward.

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