NIGERIAN RULER

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20255, 26 July 1937, Page 9

NIGERIAN RULER

,HOLDS COURT IN LONDON. [ _____ AFRICAN PAGEANTRY. UNIQUE EPISODE. (Times Air Mall Service). LONDON, June 23. The Alake of Abeolcuta held a small court all on his own in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, yesterday, writes Hannen Swaffer in the Daily Herald. He wore a purple robe deoorated with golden elephants, carried a sort of sceptre with a white bird at the end, and wore a big golden cap topped by another elephant. His macebearer stood near. So did his linguist and his private secretary. All four were coal-black negroes, and, if only because of the splendour of their raiment, were the object of all eyes. The Alake, who Is a Paramount Chief of the Egbas, a Nigerian tribe, beamed in the attention paid to him. “Father.” Another unusual man I met was the Bishop of Dornakal, an Indian prelate wTio, wearing a purple cassock, told me that in his diocese in Hyderabad there were only 200,000 Christians out of a population of 6,000,000. “Although I had a splendid seat in the Abbey,” he said, “my own people, even in the hill stations, 'could hear every word as clearly as I could. “Some children wrote me saying, ‘We heard Father saying “Amen.” ’ I am the Father of my flock. Making Christians is all that matters.” Then I met Walter Nash, Finance Minister in the first Socialist 'Government of New Zealand. “We are making a great Job of it,” he told me. Like Cinema. The most amazing happening of yesterday’s Garden Party was the louder hand-laps which were heard when Queen Mary, wearing simple white, entered the royal enclosure. Such a thing has never occurred before in the Palace grounds. We might have been at “the pictures.” The two young Princesses had the time of their lives. Stared at by thousands kept back behind the ropes, they ate ices in the corner of the teatent, sitting next to their mother and father. They might have been ice cornets at a street tea, the way they enjoyed them. There are four classes of guests at these garden parties—the intimate Royal circle, who have tea in a corner, the outside circle who stand at the other end of the tent, those who wait for presentation under the Durbar canopy, and the horde of ordinary folk. It was much more sedate than the last party—when, with Edward VJII as their host, the Canadian pilgrims to Vimy Ridge asked for autographs, sat on the grass, smoked everywhere and wrote postcards in the drawing-room. Yesterday, it was much more seemly. People passed through the “Victoria Regina” rooms almost with a sort of hush. They only broke one rule. They stood on the seats, in the gardens, so that they could stare at Royalty with greater ease. Stanley Baldwin, in a grey topper, might have been holding a small levee with his wife, so many were the people who went up for a hand-shake. Cosmopolitan. Kingsley Wood, W. S. Morrison, Ernest Brown, Lord GreenwoodGovernment people were there by the dozen. I did not see any of our lot, except Will Thorne, who wore a grey trilby and who took his daughter. Seldom has a garden party been so cosmopolitan. Many Coronation visitors of all shades of black, brown and yellow were present—Burmese, Chinamen. coal-black Negroes. “There seems to be little colour bar in London,” said the Bishop of Dornakal. lie seemed to be thinking, regretfully, of his own counlry. "Part of my life-work is helping to abolish it,” I replied. Sheep and Goats. Lord Cromer, by the way, seems to be ageing. The long strain of all these functions, which lie has to arrange, must be making him look forward to the retirement which, I am told, he has planned to take place in a few weeks. He and his escort of grey-topped squires, whose job it is to surround Royalty when they pass across the grounds, had a busy afternoon.

Even at the most democratic function of its kind in the world, he—and they—have to soft out the sheep from the goats.