Tangled Feet

Few if any Englishmen of his generation have sired so many eminent sons as the Right Honorable Isaac Foot, 77, onetime leader of Britain's Liberal Party. Son Dingle, 52, former chairman of the trust that runs the London Observer, was for 14 years a Liberal M.P., is now a prominent Laborite and an ornament of the British bar. Son Michael, 44, a former Labor M.P.. edits the Bevanite left-wing weekly Tribune. But most prominent of all the Foot sons at the moment is 50-year-old Sir Hugh, who, as Governor of Cyprus, has been energetically working to bring peace to Britain's most troublesome colony.

Last week, for the benefit of the London Daily Mail Isaac Foot indulged in some reflections on his distinguished brood. "Sir Hugh." said he, "was always considered the slightly out-of-step hearty in an intellectual menage . . . Several times when he was six or seven he went off, and we found him with the gypsies on the downs --hardly distinguishable from them." Then, adding insult to injury, father Foot remarked that "anybody can be an M.P. or governor of Cyprus" and hailed a recent book on Jonathan Swift by son Michael as "the summit of the Foot family's achievement."

Hearty Sir Hugh promptly struck back in a letter to the Daily Mail's editor.

Wrote Sir Hugh: "This is the culmination of a whispering campaign put about, I am sure, by my brothers. They say to any newspaperman who will listen that I am a sort of wild half-wit brought up on the Cornish moors . . . They suggest that I was shuffled off overseas because I was clearly unfit to follow their pursuits of the law and politics." Actually, insisted Sir Hugh, he had won as many scholastic honors as an undergraduate at Cambridge as his brothers had when they were up at Oxford. "As to the gypsies," wrote the Cyprus governor, "well, I like gypsies. And who wouldn't make for the moors when the alternative was to endure the insufferable superiority of four Oxford brothers?"

This sally drew a reply from brother John, who is a partner in the Foot family solicitors' firm in Plymouth. Tartly, John accused Sir Hugh of advertising "his intellectual accomplishments--such as they are." Sir Hugh's letter, John went on, disclosed "a monumental arrogance which leads him to assume that we, his brothers, have nothing better to do than discuss him and his affairs with newspapermen."

Only at week's end, after many a Briton had recoiled at this unseemly consanguineous attack on a man whose prestige was a crucial factor in the delicate situation in Cyprus, did the Foots admit that the whole thing was their notion of a harmless family joke.

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