CHARIVARIA.

Punch, March 19, 1913

 

One hundred painters engaged on the battleship Queen Mary have come out on strike. Every effort will be made to prevent a sympathetic strike on the part of the Royal Academicians.

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A man in Colchester has killed five hundred rats in five weeks. We have often wondered how Colchester amused itself when not engaged in the serious business of eating oysters.

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Except that he fell and sprained his ankle during the ceremony, was attacked by ptomaine poisoning at the subsequent dinner, and had to sail for America alone, owing to his bride missing the boat, the wedding of Mr. Julius Woerz, of Schiedam, may be said to have gone off without a hitch.

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The case of the elephant in Wombwell’s menagerie, which recently ate £20 worth of notes, coming so soon after that of the bank-note-eating dog mentioned in these columns, makes it seem likely that, in a few years, domestic pets will be beyond the means of most of us.

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The Press has once more begun to ask how cricket can be brightened. A little sunshine next summer would help.

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Greenwich Observatory has looked into the matter, and reports that there are fifty-two million stars. The author of “The Night Hath a Thousand Eyes” will doubtless revise his lyric and bring it up to date.

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A Spartan régime for the legal infant is advocated by Mr. Justice Lush, who has laid it down in court that a stuffed iguana is not a “necessity.”

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The prudent habit of leaving the greater part of one’s jewellery at the banker’s seems to be spreading in America. A millionaire’s wife has been seen at the opera at Los Angeles wearing gems valued at less than £80,000.

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We have no confirmation, up to the moment of going to press, of the rumour that the members of the Dominion House of Commons who sang loudly during a great part of a recent sitting are to appear on the London music-hall stage as the Canadian Gag-Time Octette.

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As tragic a case of the Devil and the Deep Sea as has ever come to our notice is revealed by the statement in a daily paper that only the institution of the side-whisker can cure the cloth-cap habit at Cambridge.

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Quite recently we mentioned the aviator who, when a thousand feet above London, recognised it by the unpleasant smell. We now read that a fox-terrier smelt its way back to the Metropolis from Birmingham.

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Two motor-omnibuses collided the other evening, in Oxford Street. If this internecine strife is to become prevalent, the Traffic Problem may solve itself.

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Has newspaper opinion no weight? While our journals, commenting on a recent case of alleged shop-lifting, were still ringing with condemnation of the practice of petty pilfering, a man at Stratford was sent to prison for stealing three iron boilers.

 

 

                               

 

Unsigned column as printed; credited to P. G. Wodehouse in the Index to Vol. 144 of Punch. Wodehouse wrote seven columns in early 1913, taking over temporarily from Walter Emanuel, the longtime author of the “Charivaria” column.