OUR LUCKY DIPPERS.
Further and final particulars of the drawings from the Lucky Bag at the Purple City are replete with illustrations of the extraordinary congruity between the prizes and the age, sex and station of the recipients.
Mrs. Sarah Boakes, who received the colossal equestrian bronze statue of Lord Thanet, weighing three hundred tons and valued at five thousand guineas, told our representative that the idea of getting one of the big prizes never entered into her head, and added, "I did not sleep a wink last night; the statue was in my mind the whole time." Mrs. Boakes, an attractive elderly lady of some seventy-five summers, is engaged at a laundry at East Putney. The haulage of the statue to her home at 129, Arabella Road, S.W. 15, is likely to be a costly affair; but Mrs. Boakes has made an application for a grant-in-aid to the Ministry of Health and has received a sympathetic reply from Dr. Addison. The cost of reconstructing her house to enable the statue to be set up in her parlour is estimated at about £4,500.
Mr. Jolyon Forsyth, who won the African elephant, is a stoker on the South Western Railway and lives at Worplesdon. He applied to the Company for a day's leave in order to ride his prize home; but his request was most unwarrantably refused, and the matter is receiving the earnest attention of the N.U.R. Mr. Forsyth informed our representative that his wife keeps a small poultry run, and hopes that she will be able to make room for the new visitor without seriously incommoding her fowls. Failing that, he thinks that employment may be found for the elephant on the Worplesdon Links, either in rolling the greens or irrigating them with its trunk. The claims of the animal to an unemployment allowance are being considered by Dr. Macnamara.
Gladys Gilkes, a bright-eyed child of six, living with her parents at 345, Beaverbrook Avenue, Harringay, who received a Sandringham opera-hat, is enduring her felicity with fortitude. "I have never been to the opera yet," she naïvely remarked to our representative, "but my brother Bert plays beautifully on the concertina."
Great interest has been excited in the neighbourhood of Tulse Hill by the success of Mr. Enoch Pegler, the winner of the three-manual electric cathedral organ with sixty-four stops, the most sonorous instrument of its type yet constructed by Messrs. Waghorn and Fogg, the famous organ-builders of Penge. A special piquancy is lent to the episode by the fact that Mr. Pegler, who is seventy-nine years of age and has long been a martyr to rheumatoid arthritis in both hands, belongs to the sect of the Silentiary Tolstoyans, who discountenance all music, whether sacred or profane. Mr. Pegler, it should be explained, authorised his grandniece, Miss Hester Wigglesworth, to put in for the Lucky Bag in his name, but, on the advice of the family physician, Dr. Parry Gorwick, the result has not yet been broken to him. Meanwhile, thanks to the tactful intervention of Sir Eric Geddes, the instrument has been temporarily housed in the Zoological Gardens, where daily recitals are given at meal-times by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell and other powerful executants. Unfortunately the organ was not yet installed at the time of the recent encounter between a lion and a tigress, otherwise the fatality would, in the opinion of Sir Frederick Bridge, have almost certainly been avoided.
When that my Judith sticks her slender nose
In things whereon a lass doth ill to trench,
An ever-widening breach my fancy shows,
For this is but the thin end of the wench.
