“Members of the National Union of Hikers, friends (loud cheers), our energetic and enthusiastic secretary Mr Sydney Prew (cheers) has convened this extraordinary meeting tonight at very short notice in order to deal with what I do not hesitate, I say I do not hesitate to call a most extraordinary situation. In fact I shall not hesitate, I say I shall not hesitate to call it one of the most extraordinary situations I have encountered during thirty years of what I hope I may call public life (hear, hear), a life which I have tried to direct along the path of liberal ideas and democratic progress (applause). I am not going to anticipate what other speakers better qualified than myself have come here to-night to tell you. I do not consider it the duty of a good chairman to cut the ground, or may I say pull the chair away from under the speakers who follow him (laughter, a little uncertain at first, but growing louder when the smile upon the face of the President made it clear that the facetiousness was intentional)? I recall the story of a chairman that once took the chair for the late Dean Hole of Rochester, who was to give an audience the benefit of his experience as the most enthusiastic and most knowledgeable amateur rose-grower in the country. This chairman, no doubt a most worthy man, was not endowed with the blessed faculty of knowing when to stop, and in introducing the Dean he allowed himself to ramble on for some three-quarters of an hour, at the end of which time he called upon the Dean himself to give the audience his address. ‘My address is the Deanery, Rochester,’ snapped the Very Reverend gentleman, ‘and I am going there now.’ (Loud and prolonged laughter during which Lord Buntingdon reflected what a mercy it was that the chestnuts of his youth were capable of flowering again in his age.) Well, not wishing Mr Sydney Prew, our most esteemed secretary, to emulate Dean Hole, I have pleasure in calling upon him to address the meeting” (loud applause, which was renewed when Mr Prew stepped forward on the platform).