NEWS FROM 100 YEARS AGO : 12 July 1924

12 JULY 1924

Herbert Asquith, addressing a Liberal campaign meeting at Norwich, found encouragement in the circumstance that opponents were not for the moment in good fighting trim. Of the Government he said that, while they had enjoyed almost unexampled tolerance and no lack of goodwill or co-operation, they had shown a singular incapacity for constructive statesmanship, and had relied mainly upon Liberals to mould their crude raw material into shape. After an advocacy of Proportional Representation, Mr Asquith referred to the Housing Bill and to Mr Wheatley’s “new theory of housing finance.” An attempt to popularise the fiction that house rents could be emptied of all charges for the replacement of capital was, he said, a reckless deception.

Proposals for a reorganisation of the coal mining industry and for the development of electrical energy on a big scale are contained in the report of a private inquiry, which was presided over by Mr Lloyd George.

Presiding at the centenary dinner in memory of Lord Kelvin, in London, the Earl of Balfour said Lord Kelvin pursued for years a great ideal. He hoped to bring together information on electricity, magnetism, the constitution of the atom, and the nature of ether, to show their inter-connection and to make them part of one great organic whole.