Word: baron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Majesty's Treasury waving aside a bearded gentleman with a bundle of pictures. The caption: "Much obliged, but we are a nation of shopkeepers. We don't want any art today, thank you." The snubbed picture-pedlar, as every Punch reader knew, was a Lancashire-born sugar baron named Henry Tate. He had just offered 60 contemporary paintings to Britain's National Gallery-and had been turned down. Five years later, he retaliated millionaire-fashion by building Britain a brand-new gallery and throwing in his collection as a bonus...
...gilt railing in an amphitheater of blue, white, gold and red, to hear Queen Victoria proclaimed first Empress of India. They rose to their feet as a flourish of trumpets announced the arrival, across 800 feet of red carpet, of His Excellency the Viceroy, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Second Baron Lytton. The proclamation was read, the Royal Standard was hoisted, and artillery fired a grand salute of 101 salvos. Mixed bands played God Save the Queen, then trumpeted the blaring march from Tannhduser. Richly caparisoned elephants trumpeted too, and rushed wildly about with trunks erect when they heard the roll...
...their hostess, the gentlemen would have to bid in cold cash (which would go to a charity) for the ladies they wished to escort during the impending quest. Some of the ladies objected; after a democratic vote, the majority went along with the auction plan. So Master-of-Ceremonies Baron Stanley of Alderley (he's terribly good at this sort of thing) mounted a chair in the sitting room. Cried he: "Now, who wants Loelia?" (the recently divorced Duchess of Westminster). Bidding was sluggish, and the ex-Duchess finally went for seven guineas. Blonde Princess Ali Khan...
...Died. Baron Georg von Trapp, 67, World War I chief of Austria's tiny submarine fleet, manager and nonsinging head of the Trapp Family Singers; of cancer, in Stowe, Vt. The choir (buxom Baroness von Trapp, seven daughters and two sons), ran away from the Nazis in 1938, became a top U.S. concert attraction...
...custom dies hard in England. To Kingsteignton's rescue came Baron Clifford of Chudleigh, who invited the village's ram-roast committee to the deer park of his 3,000-acre estate, let them shoot a buck. With that slight deviation to modern complexities, the village planned to carry on its ancient rite this week. But Kingsteigntonians were still rankled by the irreverent crack of a Communist M.P. during Rayner's plea. The Commie sneered that this was "one of those heathen customs the Conservative Party wants to retain...