Favourites
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
In the year that Ranjitsinhji put aside his bat to concentrate on being the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, journalist A. G. Gardiner looked back on his dazzling career.
In 1907, Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji Jadeja (1872-1933) triumphantly ascended the throne of Nawanagar (Jamnagar) in India, twenty-three years after the bitter disappointment of seeing a rival displace him. It was not part-time work, so in 1912 Ranji called ‘stumps’ on his spectacular career in English cricket, and A. G. Gardiner of ‘The Star’ bade him an affectionate farewell.
After witnessing a bus conductor’s battle of wills with the London public, journalist Alfred Gardiner felt obliged to give him a little advice.
The conductor of an open-topped bus once told a lady carrying a little dog to take it upstairs, despite the lashing rain. The passengers backed her up, stopped the bus and summoned a constable. The conductor stuck to his position, however, and eventually got his way; but after everyone else had gone home he tried to win a little sympathy from journalist A. G. Gardiner.
On the day that the Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, ‘Alpha of the Plough’ wondered if the country would prove worthy of him.
Like other correspondents for London’s newspaper ‘The Star,’ Alfred Gardiner took a nom-de-plume from astronomy, choosing ‘Alpha of the Plough.’ In this extract, written on November 11th, 1920, he reflected on the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey that same day, and wondered if the people of Britain really understood what had happened.
The Foreign Office had a long tradition of regarding a strong Russian Empire as ‘not in the British interest,’ but John Bright saw only mutual benefit in it.
In January 1878, John Bright MP addressed a meeting in Birmingham on the subject of Russia. Russia and Turkey were at war over Turkey’s treatment of Christians in the Balkans, and there were those in Parliament who said it was ‘in the British interest’ to support Turkey and clip Russia’s wings; but Bright thought that Russian aggression was a Foreign Office myth.
Advice is a dangerous gift, and for centuries our greatest writers have wondered how to dispense it safely.
‘It is always a silly thing to give advice,’ says Erskine in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W. H., ‘but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.’ Back in 1750 the Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), suggested a way to sugar the pill.
Milne felt that chess was a game deserving of its place in the gallery of sports, but also that it had a drawback.
A. A. Milne comes to the defence of chess, arguing that it is game deserving of as much respect as any of the more physically demanding sports. And yet, there is something about it which means that his enthusiasm rarely lasts more than a month or so.