A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK T is a sobering thought that the
newspapers which have told in the I last week of the fruitless search for survivors from the Liberator
in which Sir William Malkin and other officials were returning from America, and of the disappearance in Burma of a machine with Mr. Eden's elder son among its crew, should have told also of the flight of the King and Queen to the Isle of Man and of the Prime Minister to Bordeaux. It may be possible to prove by statistics that flying is relatively safe—though by comparison with British railways or liners it is relatively very unsafe—but that a very con- siderable element of danger still exists is shown by the lengthening list of public men, military and civilian, who have lost their lives in the air in the past year. Mr. Eden will command deep and
universal sympathy in the double blow he has sustained at a moment when his own health is below normal, for but for the greater bereave- ment the loss of so able, so experienced and so charming an adviser as Sir William Malkin would have been matter for great grief in itself. It is a tragic irony that a man so regular in his quiet habits as Malkin,—legal work at the Foreign Office, a walk across the
Park to lunch at the Athenaeum, back in the evening to a peaceful home and garden at Gerrards Cross,—should meet so incongruous and untimely a death. He and I were of the same year at Cambridge, though of different colleges ; we used to play undistinguished hockey on a field at Grantchester which a heterogeneous club of indifferent players rented, and it has been a peculiar satisfaction to keep in loose touch with him ever since, for there was in him a blend of quiet competence, quiet cheerfulness and warm friendliness which made his companionship something to prize highly. * * • * *
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