—Portrait of the Week
IT \VAS REGARDED as a matter for congratulation that as few as forty-four people were killed and 1,219 injured on the roads over the Easter week- end, TWO MARCHING COLUMNS of unilateral nuclear disarmers converged on Trafalgar Square on Easter Monday and demonstrated in the rain. Their numbers were estimated at figures ranging from 25.000 to 125,000: later, thirty-seven of them were charged with obstruction—those who had sat down outside the United States Embassy to protest against Polaris being disowned by Canon
Collins. At their annual conferences. the Young Socialists, the Co-operative Party and the Asso- ciation of Engineering and Shipbuilding Draughts- men all voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament, but the Clerical and Administrative Workers' Union backed the Gaitskell policy. The twenty- seventh party congress of the British Communist Party decided that a civil war wasn't absolutely necessary in Britain, and that the Labour Party didn't belong to Mr. Gaitskell : it is ours.'
THE CLOUDS OVER South-East Asia began to dis- perse—Pravda said so. and in so many words, presumably as pleasantly surprised by Chinese approval of the British and Soviet notes on Laos as everybody else. President Kennedy arranged to visit President de Gaulle in Paris next month and, meanwhile, his Ambassador in Tunis made an attempt to get the Franco-Algerian talks reopened after a hitch at Evian, where the Algerian spokesmen objected to French flirtations with other Algerian nationalists, and where right- Wing French extremists blew up and killed the mayor. There were also a number of other bomb outrages in Paris.
MR. MACMILLAN REGAN TALKS 'on world problems' with President Kennedy in Washington and Lord Home (who is the British Foreign Secretary) called on the Secretary of State. This may well have aroused the suspicions of the newly formed and flourishing American 'John Birch Society.' committed to the belief that 'Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,' and that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. and Mr. John Foster Dulles, were its tools. A number of Republican businessmen were surprised by all these names except that of the late Mr. Roosevelt.
FOUR-YEAR-LONG South African treason trial came to an end, when the twenty-eight remaining accused were acquitted by a unanimous vote of the three judges. Swedish troops armed with rifles and such like were protected by Katanga police when Africans armed with pangas marched on to Elisabethville airport and tore down United Nations flags, In the Soviet Union where, it will be remembered, a censorship that didn't exist was recently abolished, a dike disaster near Kiev that had happened on March 13, killing 145 people, was revealed to the public on March 31.
A STRIKE OF TRAWLER SKIPPERS and mates looked likely at Hull and Grimsby, where trawlermen demanded a ban on Icelandic ships after last month's agreement between the British and Icelandic Governments. An Icelandic ship with a record catch was greeted with boos and catcalls, this being the nearest the honest Hull fishermen could get to 'Eel' Skellagrintson, go home to Reykjavik !' A front-page article in the Daily Mail on Cranborne Chase, 115-a-term school for Top Peoples daughters,' finally settled who are the Top People, and in what order: 'pupils include the daughters of a duke, a senior official at Buckingham Palace, wealthy bankers and mer- chants, distinguished professors, and inter- nationally famous scientists and architects.'
Previous page
