PERSONAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 80, 13 July 1910, Page 4

PERSONAL.

Karl Grey is returning to Canada ou Friday. Mr. 11. W. Just,. Assistant-Under-Secretary for the Colonies, accompanies him.—Cable.

Their Majesties King George and Queen Alary are spending the week at Alder>hot. The King watches the training. There are no ceremonial parades Cable ittn..

The death took place at Wanganui the other day, at the age of 50, of Mr. Emile Joseph Fromont, who was for 30 years employed at the Eastown workshops. He leaves a widow and three sons, a fourth having lost his life in a railway accident at New Plymouth, about four months ago.

One of the few surviving Canterbury "pilgrims'' passed away on Friday evening in Mr. Thomas Kent, who arrived in Lyttelton in 1850 infhe Creasy, one of the first four ships. The late Mr. Kent, who was a builder by trade, was a native of Brighton, England, and was in his eighty-fourth year. He was connected with the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows from the foundation of the settlement, and though he could not claim to be the father of the Order in Canterbury, he assisted at the opening of the first lodg«, the Loyal City of Norwich, in Lyttelton, on 22nd December, 1851. in 1853 he took the first steps towards the formation of a lodge in Christchurch,

The death of Mr. George Cliinies-Ross, proprietor and chief of the Cocos (or Keeling) Islands, in the South Indian Ocean, recently announced, removes a picturesque personality. The 'Ross family has been in possession of the Keeling Islands for over three-quarters of a century. The group is six hundred miles south of Sumatra, out in the Indiau Ocean, and for some years past has been one of the stations on the Eastern Extension Company's Australian and South African cable. One of the younger members of the Ross family, Mr. Kenneth Ross, was recently a student at Nelson College. The Keeling Group consists of twenty-three small islands, f% miles being the greatest width of the whole atoll. The group is well known as having furnished Darwin with the typical example of an atoll or lagoon island. The islands were discovered in 1609 by William Keeling on his way Home from the Moluccas. In 1823 Alexander Hare, an English adventurer, settled in the southernmost island with a number of slaves. Some two or three years after, a Scotchman, J. Ross, who had commanded a brig during the English occupation of Java, settled with 'his family on Direction Island, and his little colony was soon strengthened by Hare's runaway slaves, the islands were taken under British protection in 1850, and since 1!)03 have been under the jurisdiction of the Governor of the Straits Settlements. The latest returns give the population of the group as 040— two Europeans, 570 Cocos islanders, and 67. Bantamese.