Foreign News: C’esf Terrible

Prime Minister Clement Attlee pointed out recently that the British government has no constitutional right to ban a public meeting. However, Attlee went on, “we must reserve the right to refuse admittance [to Britain] to those whom we have no desire to entertain.” Last week, the government proceeded to exercise that right to the full. Scotland Yard men hurried to Britain’s ports and airfields to turn back scores of travelers on their way to Sheffield, busy Yorkshire steel city, to attend the Russian-inspired Second World Peace Congress, a propaganda platform for international Communism.

Britain banged her doors shut against such neon-lit Reds as Professor Frederic

Joliot-Curie, French atom scientist, Russian Writer Ilya Ehrenburg and Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich. One delegate to get through was Pablo Picasso, Spanish-born painter. “C’est terrible” cried Picasso, describing the thorough security screening of congress delegates arriving on cross-channel steamers.

Two days before the congress was due to open, its leaders realized glumly that only a few hundred of the expected 2,000 delegates were going to arrive. Thereupon all but one of the Sheffield sessions—originally scheduled to last a week—were ordered shifted to Warsaw.

Delegates rushed about in a tizzy trying to get transportation to Poland. Meanwhile, Warsaw sprouted flags, banners and decorations. While the Sheffield flap was at its height, new prominence came to one of the members of the British conference’s organizing committee with the announcement of Sweden’s Nobel Prize awards.

Professor Cecil Frank Powell, 46, the committeeman who won the $31,715 prize for physics, got his award for developing a simple method of probing the secrets of the atom nucleus with photographic plates, and his discoveries regarding mesons, the particles believed to hold the nucleus together. Powell, who leans to the left politically but denies he is a Communist, told reporters he could not spare the time from his job at Bristol University to go either to Sheffield or Warsaw, even though he backs the congress’ aims to the hilt. He declared: “Everything possible should be done to bring peace . . . every attempt must be made to seize upon the slightest evidence of good feeling between nations.”

The 1950 Nobel literary prizewinner, also named last week, was 78-year-old British Philosopher Bertrand,Lord Russell. The 1949 literary prize, held over from last fall because members of the Swedish Academy failed to agree on a candidate, went to U.S. Novelist William Faulkner, 53-year-old Mississippian.

Now busy on a U.S. lecture tour, white-thatched, thrice-married Philosopher Russell was cited for his “many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as a champion of humanity and freedom of thought.” Russell’s most important work, in mathematics and logic, was finished 40 years ago. Since then he has written, sometimes wisely but too much, on morals, politics, China, marriage, atoms, bolshevism and world government. In 1940 a New York court revoked his professorship at New York’s City College because he advocated trial marriage for students. When a reporter asked him last week if he was still angry about the 1940 incident, Russell said: “I am not mad at anybody—except the Catholic Church.” Two years ago, lecturing in London, he incurred Moscow’s wrath by declaring: “Either we must have a war against Russia before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us.” Last week, at Bloomington, Ind., Russell thought East & West might still get along together. What was necessary, he said, was for both sides to forget their “stupid imperialism.”

In Oxford, Miss., Prizewinner Faulkner declined interviews. Said he: “When I receive formal notification … I’ll let the newspapers have a statement. And I’ll take a couple of days to prepare it.” Faulkner won his prize ($30,007, compared to Russell’s $31,715) “for his powerful and artistically independent contribution to the new American novel.”