- Portrait of the Week- TilE NI W YEAR CAME IN
with snow, fog, blizzards and ice. Britain, as usual, behaved as though the island had never before experienced snow, fog, blizzards and ice: pipes froze, football matches were cancelled; aircraft froze to the ground and London Airport was closed; some trains stopped and some didn't start; roads were blocked; cars Were abandoned; buses skidded; and some Lon- don boroughs didn't even try to sweep the streets or empty the dustbins.
MR. GEORGE WOODCOCK, the general secretary of the TUC, gave his official blessing to the Union Of Post Office Workers' work-to-rule' plan against the pay pause. The public was hard put to it to know whether getting its letters late was due to the cold weather or to the cold war be- tween the post office workers and the Chancellor 01 the Exchequer. The Board of Trade rejected the recommendation of the Monopolies Com- mission that the Imperial Tobacco Company Should dispose of its large financial interest in Gallahers that it had for so long kept secret. even from its own shareholders. A former Scot- land Yard official was asked to investigate how It came about that the public got to know of the proposed 10-Courtaulds merger. The new E fU executive dismissed its Communist acting assistant general secretary, and decided to apply for reaffiliation to the ,TUC and the Labour Party.
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111E UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR in Moscow had a two-and-a-half-hour talk with the Soviet Foreign Minister, and it was generally supposed that they discussed the possibility of reopening negotiations about Berlin. There was a small and unsuccessful military rising in a Portuguese pro- vincial town; the Under-Secretary for the Army was shot in the course of its repression, and there Were a number of arrests. President de Gaulle said that he still believed that the war in Algeria Could be brought to an end by negotiation, and that France and an independent Algeria could work peacefully together. But his broadcast was interrupted by OAS bombs, and lives were lost in clashes between police and OAS in Oran, and in a bazooka battle in Algiers. Plastic bombs as a form of argument caught on in Paris: they were used by butchers who refused to sell beef at fixed prices against those who collaborated With the Government. The Northern Rhodesian Government produced a report whitewashing its security forces; accused of atrocities in putting down last year's disturbances. Sir Roy Welensky was asked to let United Nations observers watch the Rhodesian-Congolese border, to see that military supplies and mercenaries didn't cross into Katanga, and so were the Portuguese authorities in Angola.
skivulk became an independent sovereign State. and Brigadier Bernard Fergusson (Retd.), who had been responsible for psychological warfare during the Suez operation, was appointed Governor-General of New Zealand. The usual 10 per cent. of ,the honours list went to Con- servative Party workers. Imported French sweet- meats were described as harmless by Notting- ham's Public Health Department, and by a health laboratory in Worcester as carrying hacteria associated with scarlet fever, tonsillitis, impetigo, carbuncles, sore throats and boils. The Emperor Of Japan published a poem he had written in honour of the visit of Princess Alexandra to Tokyo. It ran, in full, 'Receiving a Young princess from England, we talk of happy Journeys we had when 1 was young.' A reader of the Guardian wrote to say that until he read of the shoot that Prince Charles took part in at Sandringham he hadn't realised that food was SO short as to require a boy of rising fourteen to be armed and go out with his father and family to hunt for it: 'Should not something be done to relieve the difficulties of these people?'
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