No private individual would behave with such incredible mean- ness
as some Government departments. Take this question and answer from Tuesday's Hansard:
1Via. E. P. SMITH asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will consider reissuing an old age tobacco book to Mr. F. Potts, Myrtle Cottage, Hastingleigh, Kent, whose original book was destroyed by fire when his house was burnt down on 20th February last.
SIR S. CROPS : As my right hon. Friend the Financial Secretary stated in reply to the Question from the hon. Member for Canterbury
• (Mr. Baker White) on 13th May, books of tobacco duty-relief tokens lost through accident or theft cannot be replaced because this would promote abuse of the concession.
This old-age pensioner, I am told, had his house completely burned down; he lost all he had, and he himself escaped through a window. Of course, his tobacco book went with the rest. No doubt his
ration book did, too • but lost ration books are replaced without the smallest difficulty. Can the wit of the Civil Service devise no means by which a new book can be issued to an old man to whom tobacco means so much without "promoting abuse of the concession " ?
The completion by Answers of sixty years this week is an event of some note. Why ? Because Answers made Lord Northcliffe. Equally, of course, Lord Northcliffe, then Alfred Harmsworth, aged twenty-three, made Answers. He started it, as Answers to Cor- respondents, and it laid the foundation of his fortunes. It was not an original idea, for the new weekly was avowedly modelled, though with considerable differences, on Tit-Bits, launched by Mr. (later Sir) George Newnes nine months earlier. As I remember them, Tit- Bits was bright green and Answers bright orange What the tints are today I have failed to note. Both papers supplied the need for information—admittedly rather scrappy—on a variety of subjects, and to that extent rendered some real service to popular education. Both have survived. Two similar publications, Pearson's Weekly and
CasselPs Saturday 7ournal, have disappeared in the face of a far keener competition than existed fifty years ago. * * •
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