Card's Cup

A nearly perfect sample of self-made middle-class Englishman is Harold Keates Hales, M. P. Short, red-faced, hearty, with a good opinion of his own wits, an honest satisfaction with his eccentricities, he wears a stand-up "jam pot" collar and claims to be the only automobile driver in the world who has never once blown his horn. The energy piled up by this repression Mr. Hales has variously discharged by flying an airship around St. Paul's Cathedral (1908), achieving one of the first airplane crashes (1910), pushing and plodding ahead in the china and exporting businesses and writing regular letters not only to the Times but to "26 newspapers in England, India and the Far East."

In the course of a debate in the House of Commons on herring, Mr. Hales whipped a dead herring out of a bag and waved it at his opponents. The author of a book called Harold's Adventures, Harold Hales likes to tell his friends that he is the original of Arnold Bennett's The Card, known also as "Denry the Audacious," a brash young man who in two Bennett novels made his way by his wits. But beyond all this Harold Hales wanted some foolproof device to make Posterity remember him with respect. Forty years ago he found it.

He had read in the newspapers of the "Blue Ribbon" awarded the latest ocean liner to break the record for a transatlantic crossing. He knew of course, that this was just a figure of speech for there was no Blue Ribbon. Why not, thought Harold Hales, supply a real prize for transatlantic liners to contest for? It took 40 years to save up the money but last week, in the suburban London villa he calls Selahdale, he had a real $4,000 cup called the Hales Blue Ribbon Trophy, was ready to award it. Sighed he: "The only thing that really worried me was that someone else with more money might get in ahead of me. The Haleses never amounted to much before, but now. . . ."

The Hales Trophy is three and a half feet of solid silver, onyx and gilt, showing Victory, Neptune and Amphitrite upholding a globe and topped by a figure called Speed urging a liner into the face of a figure called The Force of the Atlantic. Roundabout were memorials to past record-holders and at the base was Harold Hales's name.

The only trouble was that Mr. Hales offered his Trophy to Italy's transatlantic recordholder, Rex, before he was ready to deliver it. The Italian Line naturally accepted it and then last month, France's Normandie broke the Rex's record. But it was Harold Hales's cup and, as umpire, he could make the rules. Rule No. 1: The Trophy shall be held by each winner for at least three months.

Thus, Harold Hales proposed last week to go right ahead with his fine presentation ceremony to the Rex at Genoa next month. The Rex will keep the Hales Trophy for three months. Then Hales will snatch it back, present it again in another fine ceremony to the Normandie.

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