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Word got out that a German 'chutist had actually landed in Eire. Police arrested two suspects, found parachute, cap and equipment, but no 'chutist. Raiding the house of a Dubliner named Stephen Carroll Held, they next found not only an opened German parachute, German Air Force cap and German uniform insignia, but also maps of Dublin bridges, harbors and airdrome, a box containing $20,000 in U. S. money. The parachute, Held explained, had been left by a German named Heinrich Brandy, who had stayed at his house after arriving from the sky. The second suspect, Mrs. Iseult Stuart, daughter of Maud Gonne (see p. 76), wife of an aviator now living in Berlin, was charged with providing civilian clothes to a 'chutist and concealing him.
Thoroughly angry at what he considered injudicious incitement of a belligerent neighbor, Prime Minister de Valera declared, "It took 600 years to get the British out of this country. We don't want them or any others to come in here again. . . . Unfortunately there is a small group that appears to be meditating treason. I tell them . . . that such a state of affairs will not be tolerated. . . ."
Day of Prayer. United by a common menace, Britons of all faiths joined in an Empire Sunday of Prayer (see p. 48). Accompanied by Queen Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, King George and Queen Elizabeth attended services at Westminster Abbey to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury assure them that "it cannot be the will of God that a rule of brute force . . . should prevail on the earth." Catholic Cardinal Hinsley's more vitriolic sermon at Westminster Cathedral, proclaiming that "there cannot be peace until by God's aid this hideous system [Hitlerism] vanishes from the world," was interrupted by a middle-aged woman quoting Scripture: "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it. . . ." She was hustled out.
Said George Bernard Shaw: "Now that we're thoroughly frightened, we'll be all right. Until the British are frightened, they never do anything but play cricket, football, hopscotch and tennis."