Word: sir
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...duty of the British nursery governess is to wake the children from their naps. Last week, with Economic Dictator Sir Stafford Cripps bending sternly yet benignly over it, Britain was awake. It was resentful, expectant and confused, but, undeniably, it stirred...
Villagers of Filkins, in the lush green Cotswolds, where Cripps was the local squire, tell a significant story of his earlier days there. Cripps heard that a shiftless villager called Old Joe was in debt. He went to see him. "Nice little house you have here," said Sir Stafford. "You don't want to sell...
...Well, sir," said the villager. "It's mortgaged, see. An' I can't afford to pay no more on it." "How much do you owe?" asked Cripps. "?400." "Well, suppose I gave you ?500?" Old Joe jumped at the chance, but his face fell when he heard Cripps's conditions. For Cripps added that he would pay Joe the extra ?100 at the rate of ?1 a week. " 'E knew," explained a villager, "Old Joe would only blue the lot if 'e 'ad it all at once-so 'e rations...
...quick mind first turned to science. He loved to take the family car to pieces and put it together again. After his schooling at Winchester, a near-perfect examination paper in science won him a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and a job on the research staff of Sir William Ramsay at the University of London...
Tightening the Screws. Justly or not, some Britons suspect a connection between Cripps's austere appearance, his cold baths, his raw carrots, and the increasing national austerity. Said the Economist: "However right Sir Stafford is at present, it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that he is right because he is in his element, because he positively prefers an austere, restricted, controlled economy, because, like the tympanist in an orchestra, his instinct, when he has nothing else to do, is to go around tightening up all the screws...