Housebreakers are now in posses sion of the Hotel Cecil in the Strand; (we or three hundred men with axe and pick started this week to demolish this famous building, and all that will be left by Christ mas will be a yawning chasm, the Bottom of which will be below the level of the Thames bed. There will then risk above the Emban! ment Gardens one more commercial palace of white stone. There is enough first class material in the doomed building to construct two or three smaller hotels. Several buyers have purchased various parts of the interior. Thus one buyer from Birmingham has bought the swing doors of the main entrance who are to be erected on a smaller hotel in the provinces, and he has also bought the panelling in one of the great: halls. The Hotel Cecit had walls 150 ft, high and foundations 5° ft. deep, and has to be demolished in 16 weeks.
Meantime strong criticism of the policy of the directors of the Hotel Cecil Ltd. in regard to the sale was made at a meeting of shareholders. Mr, Henry Smith, Chairman of the United Realization Company, declared that the Hotel had been sold at tod low a figure 1,500,000, and that the payment of the preference dividend to the date of liquidation was, in his opinion, coming out of capital instead of' revenue. Complaints were also made concerning a proposal that certain directors should receive remuneration on the basis of one per cent. of the price (at least $15,000). The resolution relating to the' latter was carried by a large majority, and a poll was demanded. 'The Chairman, Mr. Douglas Broad, said it was a great disappointment that the sacrifices he and his colleagues bad made to carry the deal through should be met with criticism. "Strong opposition to" some of the directors' other pro-were made but the resolution january liquidation was passed unanimously of this, but it is dificult from an outsider's point of view to under stand the objection to the £1,500,000 sale since in these hard days it is
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.