FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1918
1918 - 0805.PDF
JULY 18, 1918. IT would seem, according unto Alderman Owen A. Clark,Mayor of Bury St. Edmunds, that after all we, in very good company, have been shamefully libelling the Hun—the realthing, not the 1914-18 "improvement"—in placing the Blonde Beast in the same category as the Huns of old. SaidAlderman Clark, at the demonstration on Saturday in Trafalgar Square, advocating a clean sweep by either intern-ment or deportation of the whole range of camouflaged Britons, he strongly objected to the Germans being calledHuns. He had read up the history of the Huns, only to find that while they were a damned bad lot they were gentlemencompared with the Germans. "Let the Germans," he continued, " be handed down to posterity as Germans, Ger-mans, Germans—a name representing everything that is beastly, abominable, and contemptible." > NEEDLESS to say, after this, one can accept from AldermanClark that he is a " whole-hogger against the Germans," and that they being an accursed race he suggests that, insteadof interning them all, we should rather leave out the letter "n " and start business on them forthwith. Anyway thereare a good many more who are in profound sympathy with the spirit of the Trafalgar Square meeting, and it looks asif the powers that be would be wise in recognising it and bowing to the storm. Apropos the recent aircraft factories' strike, a friend of" The Londoner," who visited certain of the works affected, , sent the following notes of his visits : "I talked to some ofthe strikers and others. From what they said, about 99 per cent, of them did not want to strike, but had been jockeyedinto doing so. There is no doubt that there are some people fomenting trouble, but they are pretty clever and don't appear.The men seemed to believe that their unions had called them out. This seems to be where the Government muddled.0The unions should have been called on to disavow this sug- gestion in a very decided way, and the Government shouldtake the step in all cases of strikes which are •unauthorised by the unions of automatically cancelling all food cardsheld by the strikers. £2 ^ " In this particular case the foreman should not ha\^ hadthe power to dismiss any man ' on his own,' but having done so, if when the man came back and blew a whistle, the fore-man had given him ' one on the jaw,' and run him out, he would have had the sympathy of the rest ' as a man.' Toshelter himself behind the ' law ' was, and always will be, a mistake not appreciated by the men."s — — • WHICH makes it look all the more as if the M.O.M. hadmade a shocking mess of things—whether deliberately or unconsciously. It has about it the smack of spreadingthe cult of bureaucracy, which is now causing so much concern in every direction in the ranks of far-seeing and sober-thinkingpeople. It is this official spirit of absorption which is abroad which is giving many to think furiously upon the future.It is a year or so back—during the war—that " FLIGHT "first sounded the alarm upon this very vital subject, and it is only within the last dozen months or so that the sig-nificance of our repeated warnings has begun to dawn upon the many, who had other matters at the time with whichthey were more intimately concerned, to bother about this growing Frankenstein. It is this insistent spreading ofthe cult of bureaucracy which called forth the other day from Mr. Samuel Garrett, the retiring President of the LawSociety, a solemn statement in regard to the exercise of bureaucracy in relation to various war Acts and regulationswith which the legal profession has to deal. It would be a duty, he said, after the war to see to it that the shackles ofofficialdom, necessary during the war, were as soon as possible loosened. When some men got into official chainsthey seemed to suffer from a total inability to remeapiber that they were the servants and not the masters of the public.There were not wanting signs of an inclination to continue and extend the system of bureaucratic control, which wasa great danger, and foreign to our character and disposition. It was their duty to expose this tendency, and see to it that THE CHRISTIANIA AERO SHOW.—The stand of Enoch Thulins Aeroplane Works. On the left isJ« monoplaile on wnicn Lieut. Tryggve Gran crossed the North Sea; hanging from the roof is a sporting monoplane; in the background is seen a biplane single-seater fighter; and in the centre a three- ..--•.- -;'.-;•:-,.---,;.T."- engined seaplane, all built at the Thulin works at Landscrona, Sweden. " " •"' ' * 803
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
