Page:EB1922 - Volume 30.djvu/511

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BOMBTHROWERS, NAVAL—BORAH
471

round a pivot situated at the front end of the platform, and clamping it when on the desired line.

The grenade as such is dealt with under GRENADE while this ar- ticle is concerned only with its tail. This is a hollow tube, fitting over the firing-peg, and having at the inner end of the cavity a propellant charge contained in either a service rifle cartridge (with the bullet removed) or else a capsule with a percussion cap. The interior of the firing-peg is formed in somewhat the same way as the interior of a rifle-bolt, that is, it carries a striker, striker-rod and striker-spring which are controlled by a trigger. On the right side is a cocking-lever by which the striker-rod is forced back against its spring till the notch formed on it is engaged by the sear of the trigger. When the

FIG. 3.

grenade, with its propellant cartridge or capsule, is placed on the peg and the safety pin of its fuze withdrawn, the trigger lanyard is pulled, the sear frees the striker rod, which is impelled forward by its soring and fires the cartridge cap, exactly as in a rifle. Until 1918 this weapon used only simple H.E. bombs. In that year a second type was introduced in which a small repellant charge in the head of the bomb was fired on impact with the ground, causing it to rebound and so to burst in air instead of burying itself. The ordinary (1915 model) grenade weighed 1-85 kgm. (4lb.) and had a range of about 330 yards. The bouncing bomb was heavier (2-5 kgm., 5^ Ib.) and ranged only to 275 yards. (C. F. A.)


BOMBTHROWERS, NAVAL: see ORDNANCE.


BONE, MUIRHEAD (1876- ), British etcher and painter, was born at Glasgow in 1876. He was educated at Glasgow, afterwards studying in the school of art in that city, and in 1897 and the following years produced some excellent work in black and white for the Scots Pictorial. He established himself in London in 1901, where he quickly made a reputation by his etchings. He was elected to the New English Art Club, and was prominent in founding the Society of Twelve. In 1906 his etching " The Great Gantry, Charing Cross," was bought by the National Art Collections Fund and presented to the British Museum. During the World War his services were enlisted by the British War Office for the production of pictures of the western front, and some of these were subsequently reproduced in volume form.


BONI, GIACOMO (1859- ), Italian archaeologist, was born at Venice April 25 1859 and educated in Venice, Pisa and in Austria and Germany largely by making student journeys through the provinces of the ancient Roman Empire. He became successively superintendent of the architectural school of the Royal Academy of Venice, inspector of antiquities under the Ministry of Public Instruction, commissioner for the monuments of Rome, and, in especial, director of the excava- tions in the Roman Forum and on the Palatine Hill, begun in 1899 (see 23.591 et seq.). These he has described in numerous reports, and he has also published a report on the campanile of St. Mark's at Venice, which was rebuilt under his direction and completed in 1910. He was given honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge, and is a member of the Superior Council of Antiquities and Fine Arts for the kingdom of Italy. In 1918 he unearthed on the Palatine Hill a Greek marble statue of Victory dating back to the sth century B.C. Besides his reports on Roman antiquities he published Hibernica, notes on burial places and customs of ancient Ireland (Eng. trans. 1906).


BOOT, SIR JESSE, BART. (1850 ), British business man, was born at Nottingham June 2 1850. He started a retail chemist's business in a small way in that town, but gradually extended it until branches were established, with factories in connexion, in most of the towns in the United Kingdom. He became chairman of Boot's Pure Drug Co., Ltd., and also of Boot's Cash Chemists, Ltd., which later added lending libraries and departments for the sale of fancy goods to the various chemist's shops under their control. In 1920 he sold the whole of his business to the United Drug Co. of America, under whose control a new company was formed with the title Liggett's International, Ltd., for the purpose of taking over other drug concerns in England and Canada. In 1921 he formed Sir Jesse Boot's Social Trust, Ltd., a registered company with nominal capital 50,000 in 10,000 5 shares, to find out " by investigation the best means of removing or alleviating poverty, distress, and other social evils, and promoting social service." He became its chairman and governing director, his wife and Mr. J. W. Briggs, secretary of the Notts. C.O.S., being the other directors. He received a knighthood in 1909 and a baronetcy in 1916.


BOOTH, CHARLES (1840-1916), English sociologist (see 4.238), died at Gracedieu Manor, Leicester, Nov. 23 1916. A tablet to his memory, erected in the crypt of St. Paul's cathedral, London, was unveiled by Mr. Austen Chamberlain Dec. 15 1920.


BOOTH, WILLIAM (1829-1912), "General" and founder of the Salvation Army (see 4.239). Towards the close of his life he became blind through cataract, losing the sight of one eye in 1909, and of the other, after an operation, three months before his death. But he had continued to direct the operations of the Salvation Army, and learned to write without the aid of sight. As late as 1909 he had undertaken his sixth motor-car campaign. ' His last public appearance was made at the Albert Hall, Lon- don, May 9 1912, at a meeting to celebrate his 83rd birthday. He died in London Aug. 20 1912. His intense faith, profound and tireless sympathy, and disinterested devotion, had won for " General " Booth a unique place in the social and religious world. In the early nineties of the igth century he might have passed away simply as the fanatical hot-gospeller of a new sect of street-corner psalm -singers; it would have been incredible then that he should end his life as one for whom Westminster Abbey was seriously suggested as an appropriate resting-place, one of the autocrats of the religious world, the creator of a world-wide organization of social service.

His son, WILLIAM BRAMWELL BOOTH (b. 1856), was chief-of- staff to the Salvation Army from 1880 to 1912, and succeeded his father as " general " in 1912. His wife, whom he married in 1882, had been commissioner and leader of the women's social work of the Salvation Army in the United Kingdom since 1884. In 1920 she was made J.P. for the County of London, and in 1921 was elected one of the visiting justices for Hollo way prison, where women convicts are confined.


BORAH, WILLIAM EDGAR (1865- ), American politician, was born at Fairfield, Ill., June 29 1865. He studied at the Enfield, 111., Academy and entered the university of Kansas with the class of 1889, but did not finish his course. He was