Portrait of the Week
Ghana, the new member of the Common- wealth, began early to suffer from teething troubles; riots, baton charges, and shouts of 'Down with Nkrumah!' greeted the formal open- ing of Parliament in Accra. Meanwhile shouts of 'Down with Byng!' could be heard from Fleet Street; it had become clear that the one-time champion of the oppressed (Mr. Geoffrey Byng, QC, and former Left-wing Socialist MP) was be- coming the scourge of the Opposition press—and of the representatives of English papers in Ghana.
In Europe, financial worries grew. The Saar- landers indulged in a wild flight from the franc, and their confidence in the West German cur- rency was shared by hordes of speculators and nest-eggers whose demands for the Mark gave rise to persistent rumours that it would soon have to be revalued, upwards. At the same time, rumours were also spreading that sterling might have to follow the franc downhill into devalua- tion; rumours denied as firmly as they had been by Sir Stafford Cripps, just before he devalued the pound. To add to the uncertainty came the news that 'the lame duck' of Washington, no longer useful to the Republicans, and an object of derision to the Democrats, was finding it im- possible to get even his basic minimum foreign aid appropriation through Congress, which lopped 25 per cent, off his figure. There remained hope that the figure had been deliberately inflated, in the knowledge that it would be slashed; but the growing feeling in America against high foreign aid appropriations—and against increasing gov- ernment expenditure of all kinds—suggested that uneasiness about Western finances was justi- fied. The Western Powers have proposed a new disarmament plan, including the suspension of nuclear tests for two years.
Porters and dockers returned to work in Lon- don after the weekend; and on Monday the bulletins issued suggested that the new system was working without excessive friction. But by the following day war had broken out again over 'victimisation.' Efforts by some Covent Garden porters to discriminate against lorry drivers who had been involved in strike-breaking led to fresh sackings. Peace seemed a long way off. In the circumstances, the annual report of the TUC, with its rather prosy record of negotiations and recom- mendations, seemed far removed from the real stresses of industrial life.
In Edinburgh the eleventh festival opened to the usual mixed critical salvo; a note of alarm was sounded about the future of symphony orchestras in this country, now that the salaries of musicians and the costs of production are rising much faster than receipts—or subsidies. An American Air Force doctor, Major David Simons, has been sitting in a balloon-powered gondola above the earth at a height of over 102,000 feet; he reports that the stars do not twinkle at that altitude, and that the sky appears to be of a purplish, but indescribable, colour. Lord Jowitt, the former Labour Lord Chancellor, has died. The first prosecution in this country for a speeding offence detected by radar resulted in a conviction. Several public schools, including Etoh and Harrow, have again put up their fees. Surrey won the county cricket championship for the sixth year in succession. The BBC is to make the Light programme lighter yet; it will stop 'com- peting' with the Home Service this autumn, and concentrate on winning back lost audiences.
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