British Commonwealth of Nations: On Whom the Jest?

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For a generation the scintillant acumen of Lord Birkenhead has won him the name of lynx at the bar and lion among the ladies. While Lord High Chancellor of Britain (1919-22) he was revealed as a sphynx possessed of corroding scorn and a face so immobile as to suggest paralysis. To round out the quatrefoil of his quadruped characteristics, the Earl of Birkenhead habitually walks with a sodden heavy stride, his hands held dangling before his chest like the paws of a performing bear. But when he rises in public debate or sits down to a private tete-a-tete, he reveals the brilliance and supreme persuasive power which have often made Conservatives favor him for the post of Premier. As everyone knows, he is Secretary of State for India, a personage. Therefore a sensation was created last week by widely bruited reports that he would receive £7,000,000 (nearly $35,000,000) when the will of Sir Robert Houston, the late owner of the Houston Line, should be probated.

Despatches stated that Sir Robert had reckoned as negligible Lord Birkenhead's reputed proclivities for gaming tables, toddies and toasts of every kind. The rich shipowner was envisioned by many of his intimates as anxious to testify to his long intimacy with the potent statesman by bequeathing Wealth to Power. All Britain was a-tiptoe when the will was probated at Jersey, England, late in the week. Sir Robert left his entire fortune to his widow.

His friends confusedly about-faced, recalled that Sir Robert used to dye his beard, remembered that Lord Birkenhead once called him "the only genuine dye-hard," advanced the press-trumpeted sensationalism that Sir Robert "made the Earl of Birkenhead pay £7,000,000 for a jest."