- 7 — Portrait of the Week— MR. KHRUSHCHEV rejected the United States
pro- posal for a reduction of nuclear-weapon tests by phases, and seemed to incline rather to the British suggestion of a rationed number of inspections. Mr. Bevan promised that if the Labour Party came to power Britain would stop all such tests anyway. regardless. Mr. Macmillan announced that the rate of radio-active deposition by rainfall in the United Kingdom had doubled in the past year, which a number of people knew already, and that this didn't really matter much, which not so many people were quite so sure about.
* FIELD-MARSHAL MONTGOMERY arrived in Moscow and was met by Marshal Sokolovsky, whom he punched playfully on the chest, having just re- corded a television programme for American audiences in which he punched, rather less play- fully, and not on the chest, President Eisenhower, Mr. Dulles, Mr. Herter and the late Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Another once—but more briefly —well-known soldier, ex-Rifleman Terry Dene, sang to an audience of ecstatic girls in Derby a ditty entitled 'There's No Fool .Like a Young Fool.' Meanwhile, to complete the military history of the week, thirteen British soldiers were court- martialled, accused of mutiny with violence at a military prison in Somerset.
*.
SIR DAVID ECCLES told an audience in Hanover how nice it was that we had a royal family with Hano- verian blood, and that nobody in England bought a newspaper except to read what would win the 2.30. Next day, quite a lot of Englishmen were able to buy a paper and read what Sir David had said in Hanover. Less widely reported was his assurance to his German audience that Britain is not contemplating long-term credits for the Soviet Union. This was presumably part of Sir David's plan to encourage Anglo-German trade; he leaves for Moscow on May 12 to encourage Anglo-Soviet trade.
*
THE DALAI LAMA admitted to Mr. Nehru that he had in fact written the letters published by the Chinese, in which he had appeared to deplore the Tibetan rising, and to complain of being under rebel pressure. This adtinission pained the Dalai Lama's friends, who had thought him tougher than that, but Mr. Nehru's friends, who had thought him not tough enough, were pleased to hear him rejecting Chinese charges against India—that she had expansionist aims in Tibet, and was keeping the Dalai Lama under duress—and deploring the use of the language of the cold war by 'a great nation with thousands of years of culture behind it and noted for its restrained and polite behaviour.'
*
THE GOVERNMENT offered £30 million to the cotton industry to reorganise and re-equip itself : 'a fairly generous contribution to the funeral expenses,' observed Mr. Harold Wilson. Oil consumption in the United Kingdom went up, and the price of coal is to go down. The Amalgamated Engineering Union rejected its leaders' advice to put negotia- tions for a shorter working week before claims for higher wages, and voted unanimously, at its annual conference at Eastbourne, for lucre as well as leisure, as at. Eastbourne. Fifteen hundred mem- bers of the Boilermakers' Society went on strike at Birkenhead over who should chalk the lines on a metal plate before the boilermakers cut it.
*
THE MINISTRY OF TRANSPORT produced what may well be regarded as another argument against motorists having a drink when motoring by an- nouncing that when motorists, see double white lines they must note carefully which one is dotted and which one isn't and behave accordingly, obey the rules, or be fined.
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