Word: mountbatten
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...days (399 this year) that two months ago, when Soviet Spy George Blake sawed his way out of Wormwood Scrubbs in London, the issue of prison security welled up into a national scandal that acutely embarrassed the Labor government. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins reacted by naming the eminent Earl Mountbatten to head a committee of inquiry. In turn, the onetime First Lord of the Admiralty pledged his word that "We will be out working all the time, not sitting on our backsides...
Mouths Agape. As promised, the Mountbatten committee went right to work, toured the biggest prisons and interviewed inmates as well as guards and wardens. It also studied a flood of recommendations from the public. One man proposed hollow cell bars filled under pressure with dye so that anyone trying to saw through them is sprayed an incriminating color. While it gave short shrift to such blue-sky schemes, the committee did suggest that Wormwood Scrubbs use closed-circuit television and more searchlights for better prisoner surveillance. The equipment was installed within a matter of days...
...married New Jersey-born Paul Child, ten years her senior. The two had met during World War II while she was serving as a chief filing clerk in the OSS in Ceylon and China and he was in charge of organizing the war room for General Wedemeyer and Lord Mountbatten. As Julia quickly found out, she had married a gourmet, a man who cared passionately about food, and had been brought up by a mother who once spent six months searching for just the right coffee bean, ended up by roasting her own combination of three...
...Britain wondered where Blake was: Scotland Yard staked out the abandoned R.A.F. airstrips around London, put a watch on the docks, kept a discreet eye on the Russian and East European embassies. Seven other spies were transferred to less porous prisons, and the Home Office appointed Lord Mountbatten to investigate the scandalous state of security in British jails, which have been losing inmates at the rate of ten a week. A more fascinating question concerned neither Blake's whereabouts nor his means of escape. Rather, it was a question of identity: Who and what was George Blake...
...name of the British royal house was changed in 1917 by George V, Elizabeth's grandfather, from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor (whereupon Kaiser Wilhelm II, George's first cousin, gleefully called for a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha). Philip is a Mountbatten, a name also Anglicized in 1917 from Battenberg...