Angel Repudiated

Since 1933, Britain's dusty little Saturday Review was published by the country's reputedly wealthiest woman. Dame Fanny Lucy Houston, widow of a shipping tycoon. Lady Houston considered herself a Conservative, but made her otherwise mediocre weekly memorable for the blatancy of its attacks on Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who she believed were plotting to sell out the British nation to the Bolsheviks. A plump, imperious person, voluble to an epic degree, Lady Houston died last month, her age, which she had kept secret, probably 65 to 70. Since no will was found, Lady Houston's former associates were left to issue the Saturday Review as they saw fit and as best they could.

Last week, readers were amazed to see the Saturday Review minus its familiar red, white & blue cover, still more astonished to read an editorial notice: "Today the Saturday Review resumes its old position as the leading Conservative weekly." Leaving no doubt about their repudiation of their former angel, the editors further announced: "The dictatorship is over and we return to constitutional government."

Lady Houston's dictatorship over her publishing property had been nonetheless complete for all that it was usually exercised in absentia. Fond of staying on her yacht Liberty, once the property of Joseph Pulitzer, Lady Houston used its cabin as a writing room in which to compose the doggerel which she often employed politically,* or to coin such phrases for Captain Eden as "That nancyfied nonentity in the Foreign Office." Another Houston dislike was for Sir Samuel Hoare, whose visit to France caused her to headline an article, "Why Send Hoares to Paris?"

Lady Houston expressed in her magazine an uncritical admiration for Benito Mussolini, "the greatest Ruler in the World today," and for Adolf Hitler. To her, neither of these somewhat frightening characters could do wrong, nor could such standpatters as Canada's rich and pious Richard Bedford Bennett, onetime Premier.

With little advertising except a two-page "Register" of gloomy provincial hotels, the Saturday Review was most interesting when Lady Houston was most irritated at some new crime of Britain's democratic government. Articles which Lady Houston wanted to reach a wider public than the Review's top circulation of 50,000 (achieved when the price was reduced to 4-c-) were put on the presses as pamphlets. At such times, Lady Houston's order was: "Keep on printing until I tell you to stop!" Sometimes "Lucy" forgot to call a halt, so the printers always arbitrarily ended their pamphlet press runs at 250,000.

On the Review's inside back cover, a standing feature was "Lady Houston's Cold Cure," for she, like America's Bernarr Macfadden, fancied herself as a health authority. A stern course of nostrums beloved by Britons (Gee's Cough Linctus, Langdale's Cinnamon, Byard's Oil), the cure was dedicated by its inventor to suffering mankind with this benediction: "If this remedy cures you, and I hope and believe it will, please report to me, and in payment let your fee be--just saying--God bless Lady Houston."

*Lady Houston was greatly upset when Edward VIII abdicated. An example of her verse, to commemorate his departure from England:

Good Bye! Good Bye!

We cry with a sigh

Driven away by a Law that's a Lie.

Great King! True Lover!

For you we would die.

Will you never return, Sir, to gladden our eye?

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