The Henson Journals

[53]

Thursday, February 5th, 1931.

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Today I have made two speeches, the one in the Church Assembly on the Party trusts, the other in the House of Lords on the Russian question. Both speeches were quite impromptu; both were delivered in thin[?] houses; & both were applauded. It was probably imprudent to deliver either: for while the one made the Evangelicals very angry, the other exasperated the Labour Government. I shall certainly hear of them again. Darling was in the house, & told me that Di was in the Gallery, so I sent her a note suggesting that I should call on Sunday afternoon. She sent down a reply approving the suggestion.

I lunched with Carnegie. His wife was absent in Italy, but his two younger daughters were at home. The Bishops of Blackburn and Wakefield were there, and we had much pleasant conversation.

I dined with Lady Struthers. The company were,

Lord and Lady Askwith.

A French General and his wife.

Sir Reginald & Lady Wingate

Sir Sydney & Lady Waterlow

Sir Harcourt Butler& Lady Steele–Maitland

[54]

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If I had given but a little more thought to that speech in the H. of L. how much more effective it would have been! But I had no intention whatever of speaking until I was pushed to do so by Lord Newton & others before the debate began, & then I consented just to say a few words associating the Episcopal Bench with the appeal to the Government. I actually spoke for about 20 minutes.

Sir Reginald Wingate spoke very interestingly about his experience of Bolshevist propaganda in Egypt, when he was High Commissioner. Under pretence of raising a sunken Russian warship, a Russian Commission secured permission to enter Egypt, then a British Protectorate. The immense quantity of baggage passed in unexamined, until, by accident rather than design, the contents of one box were disclosed, & found to benothing but Bolshevist propagandist pamphlets printed in all languages. Further investigations revealed the representative character of this box: and the project of infecting the merchant navies of the world with Communism lay unmasked. The fiction of raising the Warship was quickly abandoned, & the Commission returned to Russia baffled.

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