UK News
£4 Million Art Haul Found
£4m Art haul found at Euston
A Man and a woman were charged in London last night with dis-honestly handling four stolen paintings.
Gian Carlo Molo, a 28-year -old barman,and Miss Franca Bakaeva, a 24-year-old interpreter,both of Cliff Court,Cliff Road,Camden Town, will appear at Bow Street court today.
Earlier yesterday four art masterpieces said to be worth an estimated £4 million were found in the left luggage office at Euston Station.
A Transport Police spokesman at Euston said last night “The paintings were wrapped up in a carpet.
“They were left in the left luggage office on Wednesday. They had to be left there because they were far to big to go in any of the lockers”
Chief Detective Inspector Stanley Pitaway. Who is in charge of the Interpol office of Scotland Yard, is in touch with the police in Rome in an effort to identify the paintings.
After the paintings were found three art squad detectives went to an address in Camden Town.
The art squad has been responsible for the recovery of many paintings – including two belonging to the Queen -in recent weeks following the discovery of many paintings stolen from the home counties in a Belgian art shop.
Wardrobe Rescue
Two men trying to cross the Channel in a seven-foot mahogany wardrobe were rescued several miles off Folkestone by a helicopter last night
The pair, Richard Lejeune ,aged 23, of Penge Kent. And a French student,had set off from Calais.
You’ve got to ask the question…. why?
Rejoice for Mr Jackson
Mr Geoffrey Jackson British ambassador to Uruguay, is on his way home.
Safely delivered from eight months incarceration by terrorists.
His ordeal and the sufferings of his family during the months following his kidnapping are impossible to imagine.
What is known is that Mr Jackson and his wife bore the terrible uncertainty of their enforced separation with a faith, dignity, and fortitude that few of us are ever called upon to display.
The British people rejoice in his safe return home.
Close Shave for an M1 Driver
It was quite a surprise for the police patrol car driver – to run into stubble trouble on the M1.
But there he was this motorist in the near side lane, shaving off the 8.25 a.m. shadow with a battery-operated electric razor as he battled along at 45 miles an hour.
The upshot was that close shaving John Mason, a 28 year old motorway catering unit service manager, had yesterday to answer a careless driving summons, at Leicester magistrates court.
Mason, of Lutterworth Road, Gilmorton, pleaded guilty by letter.
At the same time, he said he did not consider shaving while driving was any more serious than smoking a cigarette or using a radio-operated telephone.
“And I stick by that,” he said last night ‘I can see no difference between using one hand to shave with than eating an apple.”
As for the magistrates, they adjourned the case for a fortnight for Mason to appear.
Joy of Geoffrey Jackson
“My Lovely World”
Portrait of a man back from the living dead, a happy man on his way home.
Geoffrey Jackson, British Ambassador to Uruguay, was “suspended in time and space for eight months” as captive of Tupamaros guerrillas.
“Suspended” was the description of his wife Evelyn, waiting in Sussex for him to fly in today.
Our man in Montevideo was set free at a church, and he stayed to say a thanksgiving prayer before going to hospital for a check-up.
He is not bitter about his ordeal. He tells local reporters in his fluent Spanish, that he is leaving, as his wife left, “still in love with your country in spite of everything.” And adds “You will see the Jacksons here again.”
But the lost months must leave their scars. For Mr Jackson time stopped still on January 8th and did not start again for 245 days and nights.
In solitary in a people’s prison he had scarily a clue of what was going on outside windowless walls. But in those eight suspended months Uruguay itself was in constant crisis, and the rest of the world duly made it’s history in a scatter of headlines: Moonflight, Ashes, Ulster, Decimals, All Blacks, Rolls Royce and Ulster again.
Geoffrey Jackson dozing in a jetliner on the way home last night had a lot of catching up to do.
Foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Hume will probably head the reception committee at Gatwick. Mrs Jackson will of course be there and their banker son Anthony, “thrilled and delighted.” And the ambassadors twin brothers, Seymour and Frank, doubly pleased.
Geoffrey Jackson phoned his wife as soon as he was freed. Mrs Jackson confessed she did the talking and that he could hardly get a word in edgeways. She thanked the press for being “marvellous” and in Montevideo he repeated that.
Doctors said the 56 year old envoy, who has heart trouble was fit to travel. So in blazer and slacks and with a “V” sign, off he flew, via Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.
“One thing he was quite insistent on,” said his son at the family home on Chelsea’s Cadogan Square, “was that he would continue in the Foreigh Service.”
That is after a long rest in England and a slap up party.
It’s Time to get Fresh in the Shops
By Mary Collins and Sue Freeman
The packet of shredded suet looked good enough. It was to have been part of a bread pudding…. Until the shreds started shrugging around. Out went the whole lot, maggots and all. Just one more case of uneatable rubbish being sold instead of food.
Another of the horror stories from the stores.
Now a Public Health inspector has found out what every housewife has to put up with in too many supermarkets and shops. But whereas she is too busy with other household affairs to send the goods back to the manufacturers, he has been able to compile a report. And he found that 22 out of 32 food shops in his town were selling goods more fit for the dustbin than the table!! He was able to go through his purchases and he found no fewer than 240 packets of stale cakes hiding under there bright shiny wrappers.
Mouldy
But the housewife Is buying for the family not researching for the nation and she cannot see why every manufacturer should not follow the system of date stamps as used for example on vacuum packed bacon packages.
The secret code system that manufacturers apply for their own eyes only sometimes even beats the experts. We cannot tell whether the food is fresh and safe for a family to eat until it is unpacked said a spokesman for the 5,500 strong association of Public Health Inspectors “And then unless it smells obviously mouldy. We won’t know until the whole family has gone down with stomach upsets.”
Upsets and that can mean fatal food poisoning in the case of old people and serious illness for children can be avoided when the food is obviously bad. And of course the manufacturers will refund your money when you complain …
But why should we have to waste time asking for refunds on top of the hours spent in queues to buy the products? Why should stretching out the house keeping money be turned into a Russian roulette of the kitchen?
The food manufacturers claim that date labelling would simply send the food prices rocketing by 40 per cent.
They claim that housewives would always choose the freshest and therefore masses of perfectly good food would soon be out of date and wasted. Walls,the sausage and pie makers claim “If a pie was kept in a modern supermarket it would remain fresh for a number of days, but not if it was put in a shop window under the sun.”
“So as we have no control over what shops do with our food, how can we date label any, except those which are vacuum packed and stay fresh until opened?”
But aren’t food manufacturers crediting the housewife with too little shopping sense? Of course she wants, and has a right to the freshest food, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t take the manufacturers word and happily buy within the date limit, without searching only for the item that was packed the day before. And she is hardly likely to put the blame on a manufacturer if she finds her local grocery shop keeping food in conditions where it couldn’t possibly last.
Rosemary McRobert of the consumers association said “food manufacturers have a grandfatherly attitude towards housewives by which they believe that there is certain information they should not be trusted with, “but we believe that the housewife has the right to date labelling of all food. It’s not fair to put all the responsibility on the retailer especially when he often has no way of knowing himself that packaged food is fresh.”
Change
A government committee now looking into date labelling of foodstuffs expects to be pondering the question for another year. Then it could take two or three more years before any change in law came into effect.
Does the housewife have to wait that long for a fair deal???
Why Wilson Button Holed Fred
Written by Colin Pratt
Mr Harold Wilson was only trying to be discreet when he told fellow Yorkshire man Fred Hewitt to “button up” it seems But Fred thought the labour leader meant “shut up”
Yesterday the labour party was at great pains to explain that Mr Wilson really was trying to save 68-year old Fred acute embarrassment. It happened when Mr Hewitt,an insurance broker,from Kippax,near Leeds,got off a plane at London airport with Mr Wilson.
As photographers and sightseers rushed up, jovial Fred said: “Harold these chaps are waiting to talk to me not you” And as he wrote, in a letter in yesterday’s Daily Express: “Imagine my surprise when he came out with ‘button up.’
Last night the labour party’s international secretary Mr Tom McNally said Fred had totally misunderstood a man to man attempt at a cover up job. “Mr Wilson took his remark as the joke it was obviously meant to be and in like good humour advised him to button up …… A helpful suggestion that Mr Hewitt should rearrange his apparel before facing his public.”
Last night Fred replied “if I was a bit exposed the laugh is on me.”
Concorde Threat
With the world showing increasing interest in Concorde,the men at Bristol who build it stop work.
Rolls-Royce workers,making the Olympus engines,stage a lightning walk-out in support of a pay claim.
Bristol Aircraft Corporation workers join them over a redundancy row.
What utter folly !!!! This great new aircraft needs all the support it can get at the present crucial stage of trying to win orders from the worlds airlines.
Industrial disputes now can only jeopardise what is a world beater and threaten the livelihood of thousands of aircraft workers.
The plane workers of Bristol must waken to the fact that they are in a highly competitive industry which cannot afford irresponsible stoppages.
Chips,Yes but no Fish in Snooty Henley
By Declan Cunningham
At Henley-on-Thames, the home of the Royal Regatta,they are holding out against another great British institution … fish and chips. And last night the local council was accused of “Snobbery” in a row over a ban on the sale of fish at the town’s main street chip shop.
Customers at the shop in Hart Street can buy chicken and chips, pies and chips, and even battered sausage and chips,but never fish and chips.
Councillor Albert Spiers who runs the shop with his wife and son, has appealed to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government because the council refuses to let him fry fish.
‘High-Class’
His son Graham said; “It really is ridiculous and I am sure snobbery is behind it. “It seems that the street is too high-class for fish and chips. We are surrounded by antique shops and expensive restaurants.”
A spokesman for the town council of which Councillor Spiers is a member said “Snobbery is too strong a word. It is felt that a fish and chip shop is not appropriate for a place like Hart Street.”
The Woman with 240 Empties in her Backyard!
Poor Mrs Beryl Mepham could hardly move for empty bottles.
There they were-at least 240 of them waiting to be collected from her backyard.
And all because of a successful takeover bid.
Until a year ago the empties from her confectionary and tobacco shop in ferry road, Shoreham, were collected regularly by R White and Sons Ltd., a Brighton firm in Eastern Road,which had supplied all her soft drinks.
“Then they were taken over by the Whitbread group “explained Mrs Mepham”. And since then no one has been to collect the bottles. Now there’s such a large pile I can’t clear the yard. I’m also owed 3d on each bottle,”
Though she now buys her drink from another firm, the bottles are all stamped “R White.” Despite repeated appeals from Mrs Mepham, nobody ever arrived to take them away.
A Whitbread spokesman was quick to give Action Lines mobile unit an assurance that the bottles would be collected. “Leave the Matter to me.” he said “I’ll send a lorry round in the next few days, and of course, she’ll get her money back.
