Portrait of the Week
SUMMER TIME ENDED, and autumn brought its Pains. A BEA Vanguard landing in the fog at London Airport crashed, and thirty-six people died. The fog gave-motoNsts nightmares, breeding traffic jams and pile-ups. Autumn, too, brought Parliament back to Westminster. Labour's major- ity was away in Rhodesia, but the Commons chose in Dr. Horace King their first Labour Speaker, and the Prime Minister winkled out Mr. Roderic Bowen for one of the non-voting jobs, notwith- standing the Liberals' wrath at seeing one-tenth of their voting strength disappear. The House of Lords voted decisively to end hanging, the Archbishop of Canterbury said Christians should support the use of force in Rhodesia in certain cir- cumstances, the Queen wrote to Mr. Ian Smith, and MPs discussed how to reform their proced- ures. Meanwhile Mr. Edward du Cann, the Tory chairman, voiced a private regret that Sir Alec had felt it right to step down from the leadership —adding, however, 'Don't for a moment take this as any criticism of Ted.'
THE BEATLES COLLECTED THEM MBES, with Buck- ingham Palace in danger of disappearing beneath the squealing fans, a woman doctor opined that female hormones fed to livestock may account for the tendency of girls to mature sexually much earlier these days, the average strontium-90 levels found in human bones continued to rise, and re- search at Bristol indicated that children aged from nine to eleven devoted twenty-four hours- each week to watching television. The average weekly household income rose last year to £23 12s., it was reported, and more than half of the homes had Washing machines. Miss Christine Keeler was married, allowing the newspapers a few more crumbs from an old banquet.
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A NEW £25,000 JACKPOT prize for Premium Bond- holders was announced, which puzzled those who remembered Labour's earlier puritan sniffs at the whole scheme (when Mr. Wilson denounced it as 'a squalid raffle'). Plans for a new Labour newspaper to be born of the age we will be living in next year became known: its title, picked from 'more than a hundred suggestions,' is to be The News. Welsh Nationalists who protested fiercely against Eng- land's raids on Welsh water were a little mollified legal a proposal to give the Welsh language the same tegal status as English. Pork butchers in confer- ence at Blackpool declared roundly that they did not want any government interference with the nine million sausages eaten each year, but for all that the English scene was not without its restless- ness for change, and the Banbury borough council voted by fourteen to nine in favour of moving Banbury Cross..
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