Sling along with max

Even the Royal Navy began to move with the times and to adjust the accommodation it offered to sailors to their requirements. Following the 1936 Review of Service Conditions it made extra long hammocks available for extra tall seaman. Admittedly these were only stocked at the home dockyards and yards abroad had to request them specially. As before it fell to the goodwill of sail-makers to provide hammocks for very small ratings with permanent duties in food preservation and pest control.

With remarkably little fuss the Postmaster General announced an innovation that lasts to this day. The BBC was to begin making news broadcasts in foreign languages. He emphasised that this was to be unvarnished news and not propaganda. Indeed the World Service as it was to become soon established itself as a benchmark for reliability in a world increasingly dominated broadcasting so dishonest as to verge on fiction.

The congress of the French Radical Party marked the final breach with the Socialist Party, formerly its allies in the Front Populaire. The Socialists were accused of breaching an electoral pact and losing the Radicals a substantial number of seats in the recent cantonal elections. There was also considerable hostility towards Air Minister Pierre Cot, formally a Radical but in reality a quasi Communist, who was accused (quite accurately) of supplying military aircraft to the Spanish Republicans in a telling register of just how little sympathy their cause enjoyed even at the left-centre of politics.