GREAT BRITAIN: Swan Lord’s Woes

With sanctions and the League of Nations monopolizing British news last week, few of George V’s subjects realized how fast their Government is rushing forward with its program of rearmed Might. Acutely vexed by this program is Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, 6th Earl of Ilchester, Baron Ilchester and Strangways. His hobby is swans and the Government has decided to convert a great tract scarcely four miles from Ilchester’s famed swannery at Abbotsbury into a nerve-racking “bombing range.” It has also decided to turn much of his property in Dorset into one of the world’s most powerful air bases.

Up & down bobbed Ilchester’s small Adam’s apple last week within the high, oldfashioned collar he affects. “Most lamentable!” cried he. “The land is now producing fine crops.” Chiming in with His Lordship, the Dorset County Council appealed to His Majesty’s Government to assemble their new air Might somewhere else. “Dorset is becoming an armed camp!” sputtered Dorset County Councilor A. H. Edwards. “We will soon be taking visitors to see not the swans of Abbotsbury but the new bombing station, then to Holton Heath to see where cordite is being made and on to Bovington to see tanks in operation! The amenities of this country are being destroyed.”