Word: daltons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Birds & the Flowers. The Honorable Members drifted in behind the procession to hear the solemn reading of the budget by big (6 ft. 3 in.) Hugh Dalton. Hearty Hugh Dalton had played to the hilt a role in another solemn custom of Budget Week. By British tradition a Chancellor of the Exchequer about to produce a budget is treated like a pregnant woman. He relaxes in the peaceful countryside, awaiting the great moment. The press lavishes solicitude, photographs him smiling bravely through his ordeal. Editorialists who have lambasted him unmercifully for months before the Great Event (and will flay...
Publicity-doting Hugh Dalton snuggled cosily into this rite. At his cottage in Wiltshire he posed with an armful of pussywillows. He walked the woods-"Before a budget I always seek out the trees." He listened to chirping birds, and he gathered violets and brought them to his office at 11 Downing Street. There, in his final hours of travail, he sat at a desk "overlooking the forsythia and almond blossoms in the garden of No. 10," reported London's Evening News...
Thus was Britain prepared, with customary sweetness and light, for Hugh Dalton's birthing. But no Briton was wholly prepared for the shock of what he delivered (see below...
...budget was a stunner, in several ways. It was a beauty for balance; Hugh Dalton had achieved a surplus of about ?270,000,000 ($1,080,000,000). It had an unmistakably Laborite look in keeping income taxes high on the rich and the middle class, while easing those of the low-income group. But it had one monstrous feature: the duty on tobacco was upped by 50%. That meant that a package of 20 cigarets, which cost 47? on Budget Day, cost 67? the day after...
...patient was charted in Britain's dwindling dollar holdings and in her trade balance (TIME, Feb. 3). Britons asked themselves if a Government which had bet wrong on a shortage in coal might not also bet wrong on a shortage in dollars. Would Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton suddenly appear in Fuel Minister Emanuel Shinwell's calamitous role? Or would the Government, now alert to dangers, try to save dollars by restrictions on such comparative luxuries as U.S. cigarets, Hollywood films, Texas grapefruit and dried eggs...