Personalities.

Alexandra Herald and Central Otago Gazette, Issue 447, 10 November 1904, Page 2

Personalities.

LORD OJiSLOW. LOBD ONSLOW is a loyal Minister of the Crown, and naturally appreciates loyalty, but he once found the sentiment disconcertingly displayed when he , was Governor of New Zealand. He had just taken his stand upon the platform for a public function in a tiny up-country hamlet, when, with a click and a whirr, the National Anthem sounded upon the air. He did not know where it came from. At the conclusion of the anthem, he was about to open his address, when there was another click, another whirr, and off went the anthem again. He waited, with head bowed, for enthusiasm to wear itself out, when lo! the performance was repeated once more. • Sort of recurring musical decimal,' he muttered. Then somebody explained. Unable to raise a band or a piano, they had placed a musical box beneath the plntform, wound it up, and forgotten, or did not know how, to apply the stop-koy. The box' ran down' in the end, and Lord Onslow got through in time to catch his proper steamer for England.

BAFON PETRE. Bernard Henry Philip, fourteenth Baron Petre, who has now reached his forty-sixth year, is the last of a long line of famous Petres, of whom the father of the first baron was one of the principal Secretaries of State in the reigns of Henry the Seventh, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, and married a daughter of Sir William Browne, Lord Mayor of London in 1514. The fourth baron was committed to the Tower in 1678, together with Lord Stafford-, Lord Arundel! of Wardour, Lord Powis, and Lord Belasyse; and died there, five years later. The ninth baron married a niece of the ninth Duke of Norfolk, and the tenth wedded the sister of his step-mother, who was also sister to the twelfth Duke of Norfolk. The twelfth baron wore the Grand Cross of the Order of Pius the Ninth, and the thirteenth was domestic prelate at the Vatican. Of this Lord Petre the present peer is the young brother, and of his eight sisters, three of whom were christened Mary, three are nuns. One of Lord Petre's seats, Ingatestone Hall, is the scene of Miss Braddon's famous novel, ' Lady Audley's Secret.' It was once -let off in suites of apartments, and the well in which the luckless Tolboys met his fate is still to be seen in the grounds.

BAROJi AYLJWEF. Lord Aylmer, who .is acting in Lord Dundonald's place, at any rate until a successor is appointed, is Adjutant-General of the Canadian Militia, of which his fatber was Colonel. He has been married for just on thirty years to the daughter of a distinguished Montreal statesman, the Hon. John Young, and was born to the eighth baron sixty-two years ago. The peerago is an Irish one, and the first of a long lino of distinguished Aylmers on the record was Sir Gerald, Knight, of Dollardstown, County Meath, who was Lord Chief Justice of Erin nearly four centuries ago. It was a descendant of this Sir Gerald in the.fourth generation to whom a baronetcy was given in 1662 and who established the connection of the family with the Louths by marrying a daughter of the fifth baron of that creation, and thus paved the way for a peerage for his son, the. famous Admiral Matthew Aylmer-Aylmer, of La Hogue. The third baron was a captain in the Navy, the fifth was a general, and the sixth an admiral. The fourth Lord Aylmer found himself so ill-off that he could not maintain the dignity of the title, and, so far as he was personally concerned, allowed it to lapse. The sixth baron died unmarried, and Sir Adolphus Aylmer, a cousin who had long since, like his parents before him, been domiciled in Canada, had some slight difficulty in proving his heirship. Two years after the sixth baron's death in 1858, however, the House of Lords allowed the claim; and the present peer succeeded to the title three years ago.