Word: john
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...typists, stenographers, clerks, sacked when firms folded up or skeletonized their staffs as they deserted the big towns. Shopgirls getting 30 to 40 shillings a week were dropped by the hundreds because with evacuations retail trade slumped badly. In London, Selfridge's had to let 1,000 go, John Lewis dismissed 300, gave the rest a 25% pay cut. Even the tarts had an unemployment problem due to the nightly blackouts...
Wrens. Another able War I veteran runs the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens"), a unit of 2,000 who work at naval bases as cooks, bookkeepers, cipherers, but none on ships. Their head is Mrs. Laughton Matthews, daughter of Sir John Laughton, the naval historian, and sister of a lieutenant commander on the Royal yacht. A weatherbeaten lady seadog, she was the first woman administrator sent to base in the last war, spent the peace with the girl scouts. Her women wear navy blue (with blue rating marks instead of the Navy's red), get paid...
...been on its mark to do just that since June 1938. From London headquarters Lady Reading shot twelve telegrams to her twelve regional chiefs (in Britain's twelve autonomous defense zones). They shot 2,000 telegrams to their local branches. From Lands End to John 0'Groats the grey-green overcoats began to gather their cars around station platforms. Other grey-green overcoats in London were leading little lines of towheads with lunch boxes and gas masks to Euston, Waterloo, Charing Cross, Victoria, Paddington stations, stuffing them into cars with more grey-green overcoats headed for whatever destination...
...Majesty is the first Scotswoman in over eight centuries to marry an English King, the first since Henry I married Matilda in noo A.D. She is descended from Sir John Lyon, the adventurous Thane of Glamis who in 1376 won as his bride Princess Jean, daughter of King Robert II of Scotland. Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, goes back to an earlier legendary period, but tourists still visit the Queen's ancestral home Glamis (pronounced Glahms) Castle to see where "Macbeth did murder Duncan," King of Scotland...
...democratic character: in April the Chancellor of the Exchequer appears before a crowded House of Commons to "open" the budget, i. e., to ask the people's representatives to vote the taxes which the people will have to pay. Last April Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon appeared before the Commons with the highest peacetime budget in Britain's history -$6,610,000,000 (estimated at $5 to the pound), nearly half of which was to arm the country against the menace of Adolf Hitler-which the Commons passed and the people made ready...