Four Duchesses

Down a well-greased slide, at Glasgow, lurched, last week, the portly Duchess of Bedford. A burly workman had tipped the mechanism of the slide, giving her a shove. At her had been hurled a bottle of champagne by Mrs. Stanley Baldwin, pious, charitable wife of the Prime Min- ister. . . .

Beneath the end of the slide wavelets rippled and laughed. Into them plunged, stern first, the Duchess of Bedford, with all the emphasis of her 20,000 tons. She is the second "Duchess" ship to be built for Canadian Pacific Steamships, Ltd., now famed for its "Empress'' ships. First of the new series was the Duchess of Atholl. Came to her recent launching Katherine Marjory, Duchess of Atholl. Hers was the christening bottle. She tended and swung it with the gracious assurance of a stateswoman, for she is now Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education, a post to which she graduated in 1924, after holding high executive positions in British educational and Red Cross work. Why, then, was it Mrs. Baldwin who christened, last week, the Duchess of Bedford? Why not Her Grace of Bedford?

Friends of Mary du Cauray, Duchess of Bedford, recalled that she is a busy expert in the realm of X-ray and electro-physics with little time for champagne christenings. "What are the peculiarities of mountain eagles in flight?" is a question which so intrigues the Duchess of Bedford that she passed a recent holiday above Spain, chasing mountain eagles by airplane.

Officials of the Canadian Pacific told that later, this year, will be launched two more "Duchess" ships, namesakes of Mary, Duchess of Beaufort and the late Isobel, Duchess of Richmond, who died in 1887.