FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 259, 23 January 1928, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN” DEATH OF DE ROBECK The lamented sudden death of Admiral John Michael de Robeck recalls that he jumped to fame too quickly for the pace of some New Zealand writers, who in the early days of the Gallipoli operations referred to him as “the French Admiral.” As a matter of fact, like many other great sailors and soldiers of the Empire, he was an Irishman. He was in command of the Fleet at the Dardanelles throughout those long, difficult and, to‘some extent, disastrous operations. After the war he was made a Baronet and received a grant of £IO,OOO. He had the truly charming personality of the Irishman, with the gift of humour and was a deservedly popular figure. '‘CANNY CHIELS, YE KEN"

To most New Zealanders, it will come as a surprise to learn that in spite of its reputation for the ready spending of the weekly pay envelope, Australia leads the world in the amount of its savings banks deposits. Now, if it had been Dunedin . . .! Donald, whose worthy sire brought him to Maoriland as a lusty infant, avers that there must be still a few of the McGluskey breed left in a country which was once reputed (in New Zealand at least) as an alternately drought-ridden, floodracked continent, with a varied assortment of murders, bush fires and kindred sensationalism thrown in for good measure. £200,000,000 to the credit of 4,000,000 accounts, is the tidy little sum deposited in Australian savings banks. INFANCY SAFER The latest vital statistics for England and Wales show it is much safer to be an infant now than was formerly the case. During the first four years of this century the deaths among infants under one year fell gradually from 154 to 132 for every 1,000 births. Since then the decline has continued untij last year it stood at 69 a 1,000, this being noted as “a most remarkable instance of progress in. national hygiene.” Without some such progress the rate would appear to be in danger of extinction, for the birthrate last year (16.7 a 1,000) was the lowest ever recorded among a people formerly noted for their fertility. These be no days for Sairey Gamps! * * * PROPHET OF FLYING George Cruickshank was one of the most brilliant caricaturists of the nineteenth century. A satirist whose cruel shafts of humour and an etcher whose remarkable delineation of character set the whole world laughing, in the whole range of his work there is hardly a beautiful face or figure to be found, - while the celebrated Cruickshankian steed is an absolutely impossible animal. There is a post-war flavour in several cartoons drawn by this MidVictorian satirist. His aviation cartoons were published in 1840 as a satire upon a balloon race held during that year. In one clever sketch of an imaginary air-port, Cruickshank depicts a high structure as the starting place of a “Superior Fast Going Balloon to Paris Every Quarter of an Hour. Fare 6d.” Trans-Pacific fights were not beyond the long-legged cartoonist's wide sketch of imagination. His witty pen shows the following sign hanging from an air-port balcony: “The Balloon Packet for Peking and Canton. Every Day. N.B. Balloons from Peking, via Bombay, every day, calling three days a week at Teneriffe.” Cruickshank had even more imagination than the thousands of disciples of the Wright Brothers. In one of his etchings he has drawn an aerial fire engine with firemen putting out chimney fires.

PANAMA AND A “BIG THREE” Though commenced by de Lesseps, the great French engineer, the Panama Canal is really the monument to George Washington - Goethals, an American military engineer, whose death is just announced. Yellow fever and malaria beat de Lesseps and slew thousands of his workmen; it was Goethals’s close attention to sanitation and his incessant war on mosquitos, aided by the splendid labours of the American surgeon, William C. Gorgas, who had already stamped out yellow fever in Havana, which practically banished mosquitos from the Panama Zone —and with them the diseases which had taken such dreadful toll of life. His reward was to be made the first Civil Governor of the Panama Canal Zone. He did fine work in the war in. organising transport, munitions and storage services for the newly-raised American armies—a task which presented immense difficulties. Gorgas organised the American Army medical services in the Great War. He died in London in 1920, at the age of 66. Goethals was 70 when death claimed him on Satur,da&