The Henson Journals

[132]

Tuesday, August 24th, 1926.

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Storr with his wife and daughter went off about noon, and Ella & I then motored to Lumley Castle, where we lunched with Lord & Lady Scarbrough. Sir Ronald Storrs was there, and Mr Marsh, Winston Churchill's secretary. I was interested in Storrs's conversation. He spoke amusingly of the Anglo–Catholick pilgrims, who are disposed to regard with almost abject reverence Oriental ecclesiastics, whose reputation was as black as their robes! He said that the birth–rate among the Arabs had been conditioned by a heavy rate of infant–mortality, but that we were so quickly improving their hygiene conditions that the babies were tending to survive, so that there was reason to think that the Jewish immigration wd be more than counter–balanced by the natural increase of the Arab population. He said that the extreme unpopularity of the French in Syria made our rule in Palestine popular, & that the abandonment of their Protectorate by the French wd be a grave misfortune to us as it wd mean the return of the Turks, with whom we had no military strength to contend. He gave me a cordial invitation to visit him in Cyprus, whither he is about to proceed as governor.

Dr & Mrs Spooner arrived for a short visit. He is four score: & she is purblind, but both appear to be cheerful.

The news from the coal–fields today is discouraging. Cook has succeeded in stemming the tide of reaction, which threatened to restore activity to the Midland collieries. "Peaceful picketing" of a very violent kind went along with his eloquence with the result that most of the men who had "signed on" refrained from actually starting work. Meanwhile the winter is approaching: & when it arrives, the situation will become almost unendurable.

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