Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Phony Payoff. To pass the British counterfeits, the Nazis installed a confederate in an Austrian castle, had him pass the bills in neutral countries in return for a one-third share of the profits. Gestapo informers, who insisted on hard currency for their work outside Germany, also got paid off in the phony pounds. Among those doublecrossed: the Italians who found out where Mussolini was held before his rescue by Paratrooper Otto Skorzeny; the famous valet "Cicero" (real name: Eliaza Bazna), who stole secrets from the safe of the British Ambassador to Turkey. Ultimately, some of the counterfeit notes turned...
...enterprising German weekly Der Stern, a seven-man team of frogmen, equipped with an underwater TV camera, successfully brought up from the depths of Toplitz Lake 300,000 phony pounds in good condition, the first of an estimated ?16 million believed hidden there. Scotland Yard only yawned: the British long ago had changed the design of their ?5 and ?10 notes. Just to be safe, Austrian police decided to destroy all the notes they could find...
...scandal over Kenya's Hola camps, where eleven African prisoners had been beaten to death by guards, had come the Devlin report (TIME, Aug. 3) calling the British protectorate of Nyasaland a "police state" and challenging the Colonial Office's need to avert an African "massacre" of white settlers that never took place. There were editorial outcries that Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd should resign; his office had been discredited by the very commission it had appointed, headed by a British high-court justice and including on its staff Lord Montgomery's wartime Chief of Intelligence...
Unfortunately for the British government, a House of Commons vote would not be the final determination of the Tightness of the Tory course. Negro and Asian delegates, anxiously following the debate from the galleries, were dismayed by the government's bland rejection of an impartial judicial commission: Was this the noble British justice they had been taught to respect? The Devlin commission had cleared Dr. Banda of inciting violence; regardless, said Lennox-Boyd, Dr. Banda and some 500 others would still be held in jail...
Even London's Conservative and independent press had misgivings about so rigid a course. Said the Economist in one of its sharpest attacks on the government to date: the Devlin report "was testimony to British justice and fair play. It could even have been regarded as a feather in the cap of the government that set [it] up. Instead, the government's response has been roughly, 'Tell the truth and shame the Devlin.' Politics has overridden the appearance of detached justice. Mr. Macmillan has involved the whole credit of himself and his government...