Notes by the Way

Our Labour Peers
“Burke’s Peerage” for 1949 is shortly to be published, the first issue since 1939, and the publishers have issued a pamphlet giving details of changes that have taken place. The Times (22/2/49) comments on some of these.

“In a note on Labour members of the House of Lords the pamphlet mentions that several of these noblemen have taken out a coat of arms at the College of Arms. Lord Citrine’s coat of arms is “a very beautiful representation, having in the chief what is known as a Saxon crown between two swords ; his supporters are an Alsatian wolfhound and a lion, all proper, the lion charged on the shoulder with a spade and a pick-axe in saltire with a pen nib over all.” In the crest of Lord Calverley (formerly Mr. George Muff) a “miner’s safety lamp all proper is shown in front of two miners’ picks in saltire,” while Lord Quibell has “a coat of arms of a plain and beautiful nature, his supporters being a grey horse and a bulldog.”

Continuity of Foreign Policy, Communist Version
One of the points of Communist Party propaganda is that the Labour Government is continuing the foreign policy of its predecessors. They are not the only ones. The Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian(12/2/49) reported the following :

“A Russian claim to rights in the Antarctic was put forward by the president of the Soviet All-Union Geographical Society, Mr. L. S. Berg, at its meeting in Leningrad yesterday, Moscow’s “indisputable rights,” he said, were founded on the 1819-21 expedition, led by the Russian navigators Bellinghausen and Lazarev, which for the first time rounded the Antarctic mainland and discovered and mapped several islands, gulfs, and capes. This expedition disproved the “mistaken idea” put forward by several foreign explorers including the British navigator James Cook—that no Antarctic mainland existed.

Mr. Berg said that valuable minerals and the possibility of uranium ore deposits gave “international significance” to the area. Attempts to settle Antarctic disputes without Russia, which had an “historic right” to take part in decisions, were unjustified, and any agreements reached by the seven nations claiming sovereignity in the Antarctic would have “no legal force” without Russia’s consent.—Reuter.”