Word: britannia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Setting down at New Delhi in a BOAC Britannia late one morning last week, Britain's Harold Macmillan found Union Jacks fluttering over India's capital in festive display for the first time since the British Raj moved out in 1947. Out at the airport to greet the only British Prime Minister ever to visit India while in office was an array of notables headed by Jawaharlal Nehru and backed up by thousands of cheering citizens...
...near-hurricanes that had formed when cold air from the north mixed with tropical air. A British weather ship stationed 600 miles west of Ireland reported a 230-mile wind blowing eastward at 34,000 ft. Transatlantic airliners, hooking rides on it, broke record after record. A turboprop Britannia of British Overseas Airways made the first commercial New York-London flight in under eight hours. A few days later an El Al Israel Airlines Britannia rode the jet wind from New York to London...
...West. For Britain and France, the U.S. allies who fill out the world's Big Four, the year's theme was a recessional. Sir Anthony Eden, physically sick and spiritually drained after the fiasco at Suez, resigned as Prime Minister. His successor put out a White Paper proclaiming that Britannia was done with ruling the waves, was thinning out the proud red line of far-flung posts on which the sun never set, and withdrawing to a more realistic stance as a tidier, tighter nuclear power. Guy Mollet, the other architect of the Suez failure, fell from power...
Wilson writes not so much with a pen as with the needle of a tattoo artist who wants to inscribe "no" on Britannia's forehead. In After the Show, a well-illusioned young public-school type tries to be chivalrous toward a tawdry young girl, only to find that she scarcely knows what he is getting at; his illusions are shattered when she puts an Elvis Presley record on her gramophone. In More Friend Than Lodger, Wilson plots a triangle, not only of marital infidelity but of social insecurity, involving a stuffy publisher, his disarmingly bitchy wife...
...BRITANNIA CRASH, which killed all 15 of test crew aboard prototype of medium-range model, darkens future of Britain's big commercial turboprop. Cause of disaster is still a mystery, and drawn-out investigation on top of previous production delays (TIME, Sept. 23) is bound to discourage buyers...