Five Shillings

An indiscretion is the one thing a member of the British Foreign Office must never commit, and last week London rang with the discovery that on March 3 an indiscretion was committed by Civil Servant Thomas Henry Glasse.

Mr. Glasse wrote on official Foreign Office stationery a letter to the Motor License Department of the London County Council--a British Labor stronghold headed by famed Herbert Morrison, who may well be the next Labor Prime Minister. He asked that Don Jose Fernandez Villaverde, secretary to the Duke of Alba, who is the representative in London of Rightist Spain, be granted a renewal of his driving license "without requiring him to undergo a driving test or pay the fee of five shillings normally chargeable."

"The Duke of Alba and his staff," added Civil Servant Glasse as his clinching argument and indiscretion, "are regarded officially as diplomats in all but name."

This effort to save five shillings ($1.25) blew up around His Majesty's Government last week a whirlwind of Labor charges that they have secretly recognized the Spanish Rightist Government. Alba, one of the very bluest-blooded grandees of Spain and one of the wealthiest under King Alfonso XIII, announced in regard to the affair: "It was a plot of the Reds, that's all!"

In the early days of the civil war, Spanish proletarians seized the Madrid palace and handsome park of Alba, part of which was damaged by a Rightist incendiary bomb. Today Alba's most valuable art treasures, such as Goya's portrait of a former Duchess of Alba and canvases by Rubens, Murillo, etc., are hung temporarily in the proletarian museum at Valencia. In Madrid, boys & girls in the peaked caps of the People's Army drill with rifles in Alba's park. A militiaman who insists on always wearing his peaked cap, even indoors, regularly uses Alba's electric waxer to keep the parquet floors of his Madrid palace gleaming. Communist guides lead groups of peasants and proletarians about in the stately halls, lecturing as in the palaces at Leningrad and Moscow. Alba is a blood kinsman of Winston Churchill, discharges the duties of an ambassador in London, where both he and onetime King Alfonso XIII are objects of sympathy, occasionally get a friendly English cheer.

In the House of Commons this week the Labor Party made the Glasse indiscretion the spearhead of their drive for a motion of censure against the Prime Minister, demanding a British General Election.

"Liberty in Europe is being murdered, and the Prime Minister is the undertaker --waiting to bury the corpse!" cried Orator Arthur Greenwood, presenting Labor's motion. "Mussolini has been tricked over Austria, yet in Mussolini's hour of weakness the British Government has gone to his rescue! . . . The British Government is permitting the Spanish Loyalists to be butchered to make a Roman holiday!"

The Prime Minister replied that if His Majesty's Government followed the course desired by Labor "you would have sinking of ships, you would have perhaps naval battles, and a European war would have begun!" Neville Chamberlain insisted that his policy has "met with approval, not only in this country but abroad, with the possible exception of Russia." He refused to call a General Election for "no Government with an ample majority ever went to the country at the demand of such feeble opposition." The House finally supported Chamberlain by 359-to-152.

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