"Slightly Guilty"

The 81-year-old chairman of Britain's Royal Arms Inquiry Commission (TIME, March 4), Sir John Eldon Bankes, last week watched his eminently dignified investigation skid off into the ditch of sensationalism. First a spokesman for 26 peace organizations uprose to charge that two members of the present Cabinet owned shares in the great munitions firm of Vickers: the Right Honorable Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Secretary for the Colonies (25 shares); and the Right Honorable Sir John Gilmour, Home Secretary (3,066 shares). "It cannot be healthy," said the peace spokesman, "if it is known that members of the Cabinet may be in a position to benefit personally, however slightly, from the breakdown of armament negotiations."

Blushed Cunliffe-Lister: "I plead slightly guilty. I find to my surprise that I own three shares of Vickers stock bringing me dividends of 7 1/2 shillings a year. I thought I had sold all my Vickers holdings years ago." Star accusation of the session was made when Harry Pollitt, testifying on behalf of the British Communist Party, charged that George V's own cousin, Prince Arthur of Connaught, held 5,000 5% preference shares of Vickers.

Vickers is frankly a munitions firm, but huge Imperial Chemical Industries, among whose subsidiaries are six munitions firms, claims that less than 1% of its profits are from munitions. Venerable Chairman Sir John began to frown when Communist Pollitt reeled off the names of holders of I. C. I. stock as "an indictment of the Capitalist class as a whole." Outstanding names: Quaker Cocoamaker Barrow Cadbury (30,875), Neville Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer (833 preference, 5,414 ordinary) and the Right Rev. Edward Thomas Scott Reid, Bishop of St. Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane (-L-2,100 in ordinary and preference shares). Sir John knew what was coming and finally it came, that Sir John himself owns 1,000 preference shares, 765 ordinary and 170 deferred in Imperial Chemical Industries.

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