Aeronautics: Schneider Cup

Plans for the Schneider Cup Races at Calshot, England, were complete, down to a regulation which prohibited small boys from flying kites in the vicinity of the course above the Solent. Then there occurred, last week, the culminating blow in a series of misfortunes which had led up to this year’s contest. Italy and France, the two nations who were to challenge England’s possession of the Cup, announced that they would be unable to participate in the races unless they were postponed for six months. Both gave as reasons bad weather, ill luck and loss of pilots and machines. The Royal Aero Club consulted the contest rules and announced that no such postponement was possible, that England’s planes, unofficially reported to have flown faster than 400 m.p.h., would hold speed trials of their own.

If the total collapse of the Schneider Cup Races was a disappointment to everyone concerned, it was particularly disappointing to the eccentric elderly lady who is reputed to be the richest woman in England, Lady Houston, widow of the late shipowning Sir Robert Houston. When Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald last winter announced that England did not have enough money to enter a team to defend the Schneider Trophy, Lady Houston found the situation unbearable. Although she had been enraged when the Government demanded an $8,000,000 inheritance tax on her husband’s estate, she swallowed her pride and said she would give £100,000 ($485.000) to insure the entrance of a British team. When the British Government asked for a banker’s guarantee (Lady Houston had, at one time in the negotiations over her deceased husband’s estate, been declared insane), Lady

Houston declared she had been insulted, but would make good her promise nonetheless. She did so.

Last week Lady Houston expressed her disappointment in another magnanimous gesture. Said she: “I challenge the air men of the whole world to another race to be called the Houston Trophy race. Be sides giving the trophy I shall award to the winner £1,000.”