GREAT BRITAIN: Blennerhassett at Bay

Blennerhassett at Bay

Who steals a London stockbroker’s dignity steals practically his purse. Last week the City chuckled at the plight of William Lewis Rowland Paul Sebastian Blennerhassett, wealthy Throgmorton Street stockbroker, addicted like all his ilk to eating lobster salad at Pimm’s. In King’s Bench Division before Hon. Mr. Justice Branson, outraged Broker Blennerhassett brought suit for libel against a vendor of the silly jerk-on-a-string tops called yo-yos. The yo-yo man had advertised that a man named Blennerhassett had gone stark, raving mad from diddling with yo-yos.

“From the afternoon that advertisement was published,” wailed Plaintiff Blennerhassett. “I was jeered to such an extent that I had to leave the Stock Exchange. I tried to make a re-entry later but the position became intolerable.”

Whimsical, the advertisement which blighted Broker Blennerhassett began: “Take warning of the fate of Mr. Blennerhassett, as worthy a citizen as ever ate lobster at Pimm’s or holed a putt at Walton Heath. ‘Sound Man,’ they said in Throgmorton Street. But yo-yo got him. . . .”

“I am the only Blennerhassett in Throgmorton Street,” testified Broker Blennerhassett. whose lawyers emphasized that he is a War hero, holder of the D. S. O. “A letter addressed simply ‘Blennerhassett. Throgmorton Street’ would reach me and I used to lunch regularly at Pimm’s.”

“But were you in the habit of eating lobster salad?” cut in Sir Patrick Hastings, eminent K. C. for the yo-yo defense.

“Unfortunately,” snapped Broker Blennerhassett. “I was!”

Deft Sir Patrick Hastings soon had the Court’s lips twitching. He read aloud the more puckish portions of the advertisement describing the efforts of a Blennerhassett to make a yo-yo perform for his children. He began with “deprecatory condescension. . . . The yo-yo was recalcitrant. . . . First it would and then it wouldn’t. But the Blennerhassett blood was up. He was determined to make the little devil on a string do its stuff. . . .

“Came the dawn and he was still there, disheveled and wild-eyed, with the yo-yo string still dangling from his trembling fingers. . . . Eventually poor Blennerhassett was taken away. . . . Today he is happy in a quiet place in the country and under sympathetic surveillance he practices yo-yo.”

Summing up for the defense, Sir Patrick Hastings stressed that printed apologies had already been made to outraged Broker Blennerhassett. argued that the ad writer had chosen “Blennerhassett” without malice, “simply as a name which suggests a stolid, humorless, didactic person. . . . Moreover in the advertisement the briefcase of the Mr. Blennerhassett in the picture was far too small for the initials of the plaintiff ‘W. L. R. P. S. B.’ ‘

Mirthfully convinced, Hon. Mr. Justice Branson dismissed the libel, ordered Broker Blennerhassett to pay costs, including the fat fee of suave Sir Patrick Hastings.