Word: year
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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NUTS; THE GREAT FIASCO, cried a rude Daily Mail banner headline. It referred to the Labor government's grandiose, three-year-old project of planting a vast acreage of groundnuts (peanuts) in the bush wastes of Tanganyika, East Africa. The nuts were supposed to yield margarine and add extra calories to Britain's meager diet. Last week, Labor bigwigs were reading the first summary of the project's progress by the Overseas Food Corp., which the government created to run the groundnut scheme. It was a most embarrassing report...
...they were "unable to report that in our opinion proper books of accounts have been kept by the corporation." But Sir Leslie Arthur ("Dick") Plummer, the corporation's chairman and Labor's vice president in charge of groundnuts, also had some excuse for this. In the first year (1947-48), the scheme had been run by a subsidiary of the empire-wide business colossus, Unilever. Plummer claimed that when his corporation took over a year ago, the books were already in chaos. This did not satisfy one Tory M.P., who exploded: "Damned if any shareholders but the British...
...Labor would stick stubbornly to the scheme. At his country house in Essex, where he farms and bird-watches, Plummer was still hopeful of getting the scheme straightened out. Said he: "We'd be pretty damn fools if we had to present another financial report like this next year!" Subordinating his distaste for Labor planning to his fervent support of empire development, Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express had a Churchillian message of cheer to Plummer: "The whole harsh picture is a stimulus to resolution and skill, an appeal to the nation's grit...
...Riding after them, breaking from the wood on every side, came the hunt," wrote Authoress Mary Webb in the climax to her 32-year-old novel, Gone to Earth. "Coming, as they did, from the deep gloom, fiery-faced and fiery-coated, with eyes frenzied by excitement, and open, cavernous mouths, they were like devils emerging from hell on a foraging expedition...
...school year moved into full swing, Hungarian students of all ages were struggling with the outlandish Cyrillic alphabet, the baffling prodigies of Russian grammar. Last term, when language courses were still optional, 53% of them chose German, 30% English, 29% French, and only 3% Russian. Now, with the study of Russian compulsory in all grades of primary and secondary schools, pupils are required to spend more time learning "the language of socialism" than any other subject except Hungarian language and literature...