My American hosts used to describe to me the excitement of those early days of 1943, when the ballot was held. An attempt was made at first to keep a fixed price for the tickets, £1000 for a dukedom entry and so on; but this attempt soon proved impracticable. When the first allotment had been completed the tickets immediately began to be put up to auction, and prices soared dangerously, £10,000 being freely quoted for a dukedom entry before the end of April. But a slight trade depression produced a slump, and prices were sagging heavily by the end of June, when the ballot was held. The Duke of Illinois, for example, got in on the ground floor and picked up his ticket in discharge of a bad debt at £4000. Among all the buyers, none brought a cooler head or a more iron nerve to the business than a young citizen of Connecticut, Wilson J. Harkness. He had speculated early; a millionaire himself, he had formed a ring in which all the other partners were men of straw whose premiums were paid by himself, and by the time the first allotment was made he found himself almost safe for a marquisate, while he held a block of baronetcies that almost amounted to a controlling interest. At the moment when the market was strongest he sold out his marquisate options, and as prices fell began steadily buying peerages. His forethought was justified, for though at the time of the ballot he held eighty-six peerage tickets, only one of these proved to be a winning number. (His three baronetcies, by a gracious act of international courtesy, he allowed to lapse to the Crown.) There was some feeling at first among the successful competitors against the adoption of territorial titles, and there is still a Duke McGinnis in Boston to-day, but Wilson Harkness knew by instinct what was expected of him, and early appeared in the Honours List as Wilson Lord Porstock.
It was in the first flush of good feeling, when Great Britain felt the relief of being discharged from so fearful an indebtedness, and the United States public felt bound to us closer than ever by the ennoblement of so many of its most prominent citizens, that I made my business trip. I went by air, of course, on the _Atmospheric_, one of the old Handley Page line. I missed, by doing so, the sight of the Statue of Liberty, which had then only just been fitted with the apparatus which makes its right eye wink on the approach of the traveller: but as we came to earth at the customsdrome we were greeted by the gigantic “Eagle” scar on the hill-side, which has since been filled in with lapis-lazuli, but was then more striking for the simplicity of the natural chalk. We were still in the old prohibition days, and I remember that before landing we came to water beside a sea-going liner, into which we transferred all our petrol tins, receiving in return a heavy cargo of similar tins, concerning the contents of which no questions were asked of us when we landed.