He was passionately interested in the theatre and spent large sums backing productions, among them being the highly successful "Balalaika" which but for some unexplained mistake would have brought him in £10,000. He was devoted to his wife, and is said never to have got over her death, and to his boy now at school under an assumed name, never to be allowed to know that his father was a crook.
In all his swindles Spiro was perfectly clear-sighted and even something of a moralist. "It it weren't for peoples greed and stupidity, always hoping to make something for nothing I might go out of business" he once said.
The first of the autumn's photographic exhibitions, that of the Professional Photographers' Association, opened in Piccadilly this week, and contains things both beautiful and curious. In proportion as photographers have given up trying to imitate painting, with ridiculously fuzzy prints heavily worked up by ili, and are concentrating on the special virtues of the camera—exquisite detail and fine gradations of light and shade—so their claim to be artists is more readily granted, and the best art criti of newspapers review these exhibitions seriously.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.