Foreign News: Death of Birkenhead

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The pension of a Lord Chancellor is £5,000. Custom decrees that a onetime Woolsacker shall not accept it if he has other income. Not so Birkenhead. He argued with merciless logic that he had given up a legal practice netting $200,000 a year to serve the State. Coolly demanding his pension, he added $50,000 to his income the first year by journalistic feature writing, took on a series of directorships in giant corporations said to net him $10,000 a year each. Most im- portant was-his Board Chairmanship of Greater London and Counties Trust, Ltd. Because his stockholders included "powerful American interests," because some of the legislation under which greater London and Counties Trust, Ltd. flourished had been enacted under his Lord Chancellorship, there were cries of "Scandal!'' but Tycoon Birkenhead brazened through. He lived and died by Disraeli's maxim which he liked to quote: If you would govern men you must be superior to them or at least despise them. Charming though he could be, true friend though he again and again proved himself, he could say in 1916 as Attorney-General, after his prosecution of Sir Roger Casement for high treason: "Nothing ever gave me greater delight than the execution of Casement." To the great jurist, chief prosecutor of the Crown, this hanging was only a big job brilliantly well done.

Ashes. By the late Earl's express command his body was cremated.

The new Earl, 22, Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford, where he is still a student, is two inches shorter than his tall father, thinner, quiet. He continues the traditional Birkenhead carnation in the right lapel.