OWNING A TITLE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 623, 30 August 1933, Page 3

OWNING A TITLE

PESTERED BY PROMOTERS OF DOUBTFUL BUSINESSES. BEGGARS AND TOUTS. Uneasy lies the head that wears a Coronet . . . for it is filled with a strange variety of doubts and fears. Doubts, for instance, as to the integrity of the benevolent-looking gentle- j man who sits at a cromium-plated 1 desk, smoking two cigars at a time j and giving suspiciously spontaneous j answerS to beautiful seerefcaries who pop out and in, writes Lord Tenny- ' son, the famous cricketer, in the Sunday Despatch. Yes, one of the greatest disadvantages of being a Peer is that every "aud" company promoter in the four kingdoms is dying to have your name on his illuminated prospectus. It adds tone to an otlierwise somewhat j doubtful business; it is so helpful for 1 this gentleman, as he adjusts his two- ! pearl tiepin, to refer vaguely to "My friend Lord , who has joined

j the board." So useful when the crash comes. There is nothing like a title for developing a strain of tolerant cynij cism. If you look at it as I do, you | become amused rather than annoyed j when a seedy looking individual ! sidles up to you and whines: "You remember me, my Lord; I was one of your signallers." j I had no idea there were so many ! signallers in the Great War, and that ! I met nearlyj all of them. If I had } fallen for all of them I should have spent nearly as much as any moneylender would lend me if I would let him. There you ,are, then. Touts, doubtful company promoters, "earbiters" of every known variety make for a Peer, as eagerly as a moth goes after a candle. Cheap Aniusement. I would not discourage them. They are cheap as amusement goes nowadays. I have passed the stage at which I used to get angry because everybody thouglit a Peer was either a philanderer or a Croesus. That is a delusion. We all have our work to do. Some day I shall make my maiden speech in the House of Lords — not, I hope, to a rapidly-diminishing audience nor to a thoroughly bored gathering of my peers. For I am vitally interested in politics. I have no use for the man who is no more than ,an ornament to drawing-rooms. I just believe that every man should risk his neck at least once during his life even if it does disturb his im-maeulately-parted hair. Steeplechasing , hunting, boxing, football, cricket — one or other of themj ought to be made compulsory among the leisured classes. Even at the lowest, these things |give one the virility which is needed to deal with the , varied. hazards of a mere Peer. J Match-making mothers, for instance. They have all the instincts of j the hunter highly developed. So have ; the daughters. Now, writing about the modern girl has always been a popular craze, and I am prepared for a storm of indignant protests when I assert that the modern girl's gravest mistake lies in trying to be too much like her big brother. We rather bewildered males do not judge a girl by the number of cockj tails she can drink, nor by her ability - to tame racehorses, nor by the speed [ with' whicht she can run, nor by her I batting average. C^irls will never beat men at their- own games unless — with that ehivalry which we positively cannot help — we let them. i i The Chaperone. I Many years ago, when I was at Cambridge, a girl went nowhere without a chaperone. Nowadays, a few of them would have to look in the dictionary to discover what the word means. And, thank heaven for that, ■ say I! Nevertheless, if I had a

daughter, I should prefer that she were brought up in the way of 1908 and .not in the manner of lu33. Perhaps I am a bit old-fashioned. - All men- are— aibout their own' womenfolk. We find the modern girl — with her eighteen-inch cigarette holder, her infinite capacity for risking the pains which follow those little coloured drinks— intriguirig, interesting, alluring; but we f eel glad she is not our sister or our daughter. I admire the society girl who opens a hat shop pr sells f rocks or antiques. She has reaehed the dawn'of realisation that there is nothing harder to do than — just nothing. Cocktails and corner seats in the club are not good for the young women and men of this or any other age. Gout is the least of their many devastating consequences. A shrunken outlook is worse than a swollen ankle. And I * do wish women would cut out this idea of equality. If only they realised how far they have to descend to reach our level! I feel sure it is all a horrible mistake. These match-making mothers, those sensation-seeking society girls . . . I would not preach to them. I offer them not my coridemnation but my sympathy. Love them. . . . What is love, any way? Do we really want to know? Would it not be likely to suffer from too close an examination, just as much as those hairline eyebrows, those Devonshire complexions — all milk and roses — which are encountered in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair? It were better to accept them as they are without wondering how they happened, I think. A Hiard Time. I have been in love. Perhaps I am 1 in love now. It is a pleasing affair. I would not inquire the why and wherefore of it. But there is all the differenee between being in love and making the ideal marriage. This is a hard world, in which dreams are likely to crash when they run up against such severely practical things as a bank pass-book or a butcher's bill. Love has noi time, no use for such everyday things. Perhaps you may wonder what all these things have to do with the terrors of a title. But how easy life would be if one could feel that they had not! Money is scarce. If it grew on the

trees of the old estate, how much simpler it would be to make all those mllions of signallers happy, how much easier to invite the suave gentleman who wants his name on your prospectus to go to a place which is warmer than the South of France; yet how much more diffieult to arrange one's strategical dispositions against the mothers faced with the problem of marriageable daughters. We Lords have a hard time of it. We have to be able to work out to places of decimals where the Lord stops and the mere man begins.