[…] Rufus got hold of a gun and fired it off up chimney, and down come the soot, bushels of it! All over the room, and a chimney-pot burst and rattled down the tiles into a prambulator. What a rumbullion.

The Commissioner General asked for Foreign Office guidance in view of his information about earlier events relating to the British claim. In reply, the Foreign Office, in a telegram dated 12 June 1956, pointed out that as there was now a territorial dispute involving the two Chinas, the Philippines and possibly Vietnam over the Nansha Islands the British vessel should ‘stay well clear’ of Spratly Island.

M. Pasteur was announced as prepared not only to expound his previously published investigations concerning the modification and protective inoculation of disease-poisons, but to disclose new examples of modification of such points by the oxygen of the air, and to prove that we have really reached a general method for the moddification of certain poisons, whose application has only to be varied according to the physiological characteristics of the various microbions.

England's experimental line-up will have realised early on that this would be a long, hard slog against the multi-talented Brazilians with great strength in their starting line-up and on the bench.