“…there, in a small cage, was a gorgeous little lion cub. We were shocked. We looked at each other and said something’s got to be done about that.”
Harrods, it turned out, was also quite keen to be rid of Christian, who had escaped one night, sneaked into the neighbouring carpet department - then in the throes of a sale of goatskin rugs - and wreaked havoc.
The store, which had acquired the cub from Ilfracombe zoo, happily agreed to part with him for 250 guineas. So began Christian’s year as an urban lion.
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=452820&in_page_id=1). I can’t help but feel riding around in a Roller sounds cooler than hunting for dinner.
One memo found at Kew, written in August 1946 by a senior civil servant working with the British military government in northern Germany, makes clear how this programme worked. “Usually an NCO arrives without notice at the house or office of the German and warns that he will be required. He does not give him any details of the reasons, nor does he present his credentials. Some time later the German is seized (often in the middle of the night) and removed under guard.
“This procedure savours very much of the Gestapo methods…”
…three members of a six-strong Bios team, which included representatives of Pears Soap, Max Factor and Yardley, had called at the home of an elderly woman whose family firm manufactured 4711 eau-de-cologne, a famous brand, and attempted to bully her into handing over the recipe. When she was taken ill the team threatened to call a prison van to take her to a prison hospital. Next day they telephoned to try again.
“Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.”
Older West Germans still recall with pride the dramatic speech of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in July 1957, when he brandished a banana at the Bundestag podium and hailed the fruit as “paradisiacal manna.” Adenauer had just returned in triumph from a four-day filibuster in Rome, having finally gotten “Protocol Number 10” which guaranteed West Germans tariff-free bananas in “unlimited quantities” written into the founding Treaty of the European Economic Community (EEC), predecessor of the present-day EC.
It turns out that banana politics bears deeply on the issue of German identity, reflecting Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany.