ITALY: Rickett Lashed

With a section of London’s Press busily encouraging Italians to rise against Benito Mussolini and insisting that Italy’s Royal Family is opposed to the Ethiopian campaign (TIME, Sept. 30), King Vittorio Emanuele’s cousin the Duke of Bergamo sailed this week for war service and the latter’s brother the Duke of Pistoia volunteered. Meanwhile the Englishman to whom Ethiopia’s Emperor granted a vast concession intended for “Standard Oil” (TIME, Sept. 9 et seq.) was lashed last week in a most unusual dispatch from London by the New York Times’s leading correspondent, Frederick T. Birchall. Cabled he:

“Reports which controvert all the information coming from reliable sources in Rome have been traced by this correspondent to a common source, which is none other than the enterprising and resourceful Francis W. Rickett. Coming out of Ethiopia with his concession more or less in the discard, Mr. Rickett stopped twelve days ago in Rome, where he found neither official nor unofficial sources of revenue eager to take it off his hands.

“He came on to London and spread to all and sundry, including a number of American correspondents, these forebodings of Italian dissension.

“Mr. Rickett’s motive is interpreted by the less credulous as a desire to save Ethiopia, and incidentally his concession, from Italian rapine by putting new hope into the elements opposed to invasion. He had no success whatever in official [British] quarters, but he does seem to have inspired a certain amount of ‘publicity.’. . .

“The information reaching this correspondent from many and varied sources is all to the effect that Italy is united behind Premier Benito Mussolini in this crowning adventure of his spectacular career as it never has been before.”