Pepper Pother

Gilt-edged securities on the London Stock Exchange took a bad tumble last week. Wincing under a rattling barrage of bad news, British businessmen and bankers were jittery for the first time in three years. Peanuts started it by sinking one of the biggest commodity houses on the venerable Baltic Exchange. Then shellac threatened the City (financial district), until the distressed shellac manipulators were rescued behind locked doors. There was a sharp break in Australian gold shares, a break in tin. Last week the century-old Bradford house of Francis Willey & Co., world's largest wool dealers, was in trouble. It was apparent that British recovery was slowing, and finally there was the current political excitement.

But the British jitters were chiefly the result of the pepper pother. Reopening of the pepper market after three failures and a week's suspension by no means marked the end of the pepper pool's spicy history (TIME, Feb. 18). For by last week it was clear that Garabed Bishirgian, the shrewd little naturalized Armenian "Pepper King," had fine friends in high places. Broadly hinted was a British "Stavisky" scandal. Names of Cabinet and Parliament members, big bankers and business"-men, were indiscriminately linked to the great commodity speculation of the past two years. Wild as such talk probably was, there were among the big stockholders in James & Shakespeare, Ltd., the fallen pepper king's trading company, two names known to all England: Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, tall, suave, icy board chairman of huge British-American Tobacco Co., Ltd.; and Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna, bald, brainy head of Midland Bank, world's largest, and onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer.

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