HARRY LAUDER.

Putaruru Press, Volume VI, Issue 264, 29 November 1928, Page 4

HARRY LAUDER.

“Put a Scot in the Mayor’s chair of any city in the world, and he’ll have to spend more than his his time finding jobs for people from his own town. Rustle a bag of money anywhere and the Scot will beat the Jew to it every time.” In these'words Sir Harry Lauder sums up the characteristics of his fellow Scotsmen in his reminiscences (says the Weekly Scotsman). The book is a rich mine of anecdote and piquant observation. We are easily the most “clannish” race in the world, he says. We love each other even if we don’t trust each other. Wherever we scatter ourselves over the seven seas we seem to smell each other out, and gravitate as surely as Newton’s law operates. Let one Scot be attacked in the wilderness or on a cannibal is-, land, and another will pop up from nowhere to his rescue. He tells two excellent stories about Lord Dewar. Admiring his lordship’s pigeens one day, Sir threw out a hint that a couple would not be amiss at his Highland estate. Lord Dewar accordingly sent the pigeons north, but “they were homing pigeons, and were back at Lord Dewar’s place before he got my letter complaining bitterly of the joke he had played on me. That’s the kind of present one Scot gives to another.”

The other anecdote concerns a pretty girl with the surname PorterPorter. “After be’ng addressed as Miss Porter several times,” Sir Harry says, “the young lady turned tartly to Lord Dewar, and pointed out that 1 ‘My name, if you please, is PorterPorter, with a hyphen.’ ‘Ah!’ swiftly retorted lus lordship. ‘Just as lryno i . Dewar-Dewar with a syphon.’