Foreign News: Lady & Lion

To enlisted men of His Majesty’s fighting forces the name “Fanny” conjures up a vivid image of Dame Fanny Lucy Houston whose social equals call her “Lucy.”

A friend to all the King’s horses, “all the King’s men and especially to all the King’s battleships and airplanes is Lady Houston, reputedly George V’s richest female subject. Without her sudden, impressive gift of £100,000, the British Air Ministry could not have entered and won the final Schneider Trophy Races (TIME, Sept. 14, 1931). Last week irrepressible Dame (“Fanny”) Lucy was at it again on her yacht, The Liberty once owned by not-quite-so-rich and eccentric Joseph Pulitzer. From The Liberty, on which Lady Houston lives with steam constantly up, blazes at her whim an electric sign DOWN WITH MACDONALD, THE TRAITOR!

Because she admires rich, pious Conservative Canadian Premier Richard Bedford Bennett as much as she despises poor, pious Pacifist Prime Minister MacDonald, Lady Houston picked a likely horse last year, named him “R. B. Bennett” and had the satisfaction of seeing him win the North Derby at Newcastle. Last week in her large fore-cabin aboard The Liberty she haughtily received the manager of London’s Saturday Review, which she owns. Cringingly he told her that the leading wholesale newsdealers of Great Britain, on advice of their solicitors, had refused to distribute the next copy of the Saturday Review if it should contain, as planned, Lady Houston’s personally penned opinion of the Prime Minister.

Apropos of the U. S.’s recently upped naval building program (TIME, July 10, et seq.) and before the British Admiralty retorted in kind (see col. 1), Lady Houston had written for her Saturday Review that Prime Minister MacDonald was “squandering millions on peace conferences” while he let the Empire’s defense forces go to ruin. This was only to be expected, she slashed, from a man who, like Scot MacDonald, urged British munitions workers to strike during the War at a time when British soldiers at the front were short of shells. “How can you be secure?” Dame Lucy planned to query the readers of the Saturday Review. “How can you be sure your dear ones will not be sacrificed through the treachery of this traitor?”

Perspiring, the Saturday Review’s manager finally argued irate Dame Lucy into withdrawing the two most offensive paragraphs of her article from copies of the Saturday Review intended for the wholesale news dealers. “But I shall keep on in some other way!” she declared, repeating her determination not to let the British lion remain what she calls “a toothless old lap dog!” Next day itinerant vendors hawked furtively on the streets of London a special, unexpurgated issue of the Saturday Review.

No sooner was he back in London than the Saturday Review’s distracted manager received an irate cablegram from Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment:

“I have just learned that you are about to publish an article alleged to have been written by me, under the caption Germany’s Aim: She Wants More Territory. … I declare herewith explicitly that I have written no such paper either for you or any other publication. … I expect in fairness that you will immediately stop the issue in question, or, if too late for that, you will make known my disavowal.”

The manager made known the disavowal.