At Cambridge, it would seem, diplomats grow rather than are
trained. Details have just reached me of the tact with which something between a diplomatic incident and an international crisis (if a slight hyperbole may be permitted) in connection with the Poppy Day celebrations this month was averted. A pageant, in which the Middle East was to figure largely, with highly rele- vant but not highly respectful references to such personalities as Dr.Moussadek and King Farouk,was announced. Middle Eastern undergraduates blazed with wrath. There was Ialk of appealing to their Legations. Instead, one of them, very sensibly, went and talked to his tutor, who at once saw the Senior Tutor of the college most concerned and also the Senior Proctor. The latter took immediate action. Negotiations, of a type Mr. Eden would warmly approve, were opened with the organisers of the pageant. They had been proposing to throw effigies of -the Persian Prime Minister and the Egyptian Sovereign into the Cam. Abandoning that project reluctantly, they asked the Senior Proctor whether there was any objection to immersing the Senior Proctor's effigy instead. He said nothing could be better. Everything thereafter went well. The car that was to have displayed King Farouk and his harem displayed the Senior Proctor and his harem ; that functionary was duly drowned, and his bona fide wife contributed to the collection for the " seven little ones " thus orphaned. The result was that the Poppy Day proceeds reached an all-time record for Cam- bridge. The right place for the Senior Proctor is clearly the Embassy at Tehran.
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