Portrait of the Week
No doubt the Suez- crisis ought to have monopolised public attention over the weekend; but in fact it was squeezed on to the conversational sidelines by the weather during the holidays. Saturday, according to Kew, was the coldest August Saturday for over three-quarters of a century; and on Bank Holiday itself the weather went manic. Some places steamed in the sun all day long: others, no more than a few miles away, were visited by violent thunder, rain, and hail; in Tunbridge Wells the hailstones lay three feet deep, and reports of their size grew with the telling till they rivalled the eyeballs of the dogs in 'The Magic Tinder-Box.'
Meanwhile, the storm over Suez tended to die down, in spite of reports of mobilisation from all sides. Leave-takings from Britain were comparatively cheerful; reservists boarded their transports with neither foreboding nor resentment, though the dislocation of so many civilian careers may create difficul- ties later. The risk remained that such highly-publicised troop movements might create precisely the opposite effect from that Which presumably was intended: that they might be construed less as a show of strength than as a bluff. The French and British Governments complained that Israeli ships are refused Passage through the Canal; when it was put to the French Foreign Ministry that this embargo had existed for years, its spokesman could only reply that 'there is no reason because a crime has been committed some years back that it should be allowed to go on being committed with impunity.'
The Prime Minister seemed rather less self-assured than usual on his Wednesday night television appearance. It was as if he realised that he had waited a few days too long, and that the speech would sound less like a rallying call than an apologia. What he had to say, however, was unexceptionable; Particularly his reminder that the appetite of a dictator 'grows With feeding'—a lesson that some people in England do not yet appear to have learnt.
Colonel Nasser's coup stimulated the Indonesian Govern- ment to do some nationalising on its own account by taking over and writing off Indonesia's debts to the Netherlands, amounting to many Million pounds. How many million pounds remains disputed : Indonesia boasts E366 million; The Hague computes the total at less than a quarter of that sum.
In .Cyprus Mr. J. A. Cremer, the seventy-eight-year-old former government official who was being held as a hostage by EOKA, was released. The three EOKA members under sentence of death, for whose lives he was to have been hostage, were told that they could not be reprieved. Miss Drosoulla Demetriades, who broadcast a denunciation of terrorism over Cyprus Radio after her fiancé was killed, was brought to England for her safety—and, alas, it quickly transpired from an embarrassing press conference, to help out Colonial Office Propaganda over here. bargaining position, or simply out of a too clear recollection of what can happen to satellite climbers, is not known.
Over a thousand people lost their lives in a dynamite explosion in Cali, Colombia, where six blocks of buildings were destroyed. In the most serious accident in Belgian coal- mining history fire trapped over three hundred men.
At home, one car strike has been settled: 12,000 workers at Briggs Motor Bodies Ltd., Dagenham, a subsidiary of Ford's, were instructed by their unions to return to work when their holidays are over. There is more optimism, too, about the prospects of settlements elsewhere. The holidays are evidently providing more than the normal benefit of physical relaxation.
Mr. J. M. Andrews, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1940 to 1943, died at the age of eighty-five. London bakers announced that the price of the standard loaf will probably go up from Elid. to 11d, when the subsidy ends on September 30. The fifty-two shops of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer Society are to employ official rodent officers in place of cats. French archEeologists and speleologists are still locked in sour combat over whether the drawings found in caves near Les Eyzies are prehistoric wonders or modern graffiti. Dr. Moussadek has been released at the expiry of his three-year sentence. The American Democrats are preparing to pick their Presidential choice. The Rhodesians believe they have discovered a weapon against the disease bilharzia, which has for so long made bathing in lakes, and even washing, hazardous. And yet another man, G. D. Ibbotson, has run the mile in less than four minutes.
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