Word: houston
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...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?) 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...
Died. Dame Fanny Lucy Radmall Houston, eccentric widow of Shipowner Sir Robert Patterson Houston, reputedly England's richest woman ($25,000,000); of heart disease; at Byron Cottage, Hampstead, England. A champion of British supremacy, in 1931 she gave $500,000 to enable Britain to win the last Schneider Cup Trophy air races, financed the 1933 flight over Mt. Everest, twice offered to donate $1,000,000 to strengthen the British Army & Navy...