FUN AT HYDE PARK CORNER

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 69, Issue 74, 7 January 1949, Page 6

FUN AT HYDE PARK CORNER

Subjects of the Day

BRITISH HAVE THEIR DAY (By Melita Spraggs in the “Christian Science Monitor”). An American limousine purrs round the Marble Arch, swing® into Hyde Park and over to the fringe of a crowd under ihe trees at Orators’ Corner. The driver listens to a gesticulating tub-thumper. In staccato gusts the speaker denounces what he considers oppression by the British police system. An officer of “the Force” comes along. “The guy’® for it,” the American says to his passenger. The policeman draws level with the motor-car. “Do you mind switching off your engine, sir,” he says. “They cannot hear what the chap is saying.” If Britain were “like a powerful motor-car rumbling along in bottom gear,” as I heard one soap-bax orator declaim recently, Hyde Park Corner would be its exhaust valve. Explosive material is ventilated here which would certainly upset “the work®” if it found outlet through them. A National institution

Orators’ Corner, with its free speech, is a national institution. Yet free speech has its laws. Sedition and insulting language are ruled out. Official interpretation is traditionally indulgent. Six policeman, who stroll around in couples, rarely interfere except to protect anyone if necessary. Take the man with the sing-song Scottish burr of Clydeside. His arms are tattooed to the elbow. A lock of hair swings back and forth over an eye as he orates. He wants to tell everyone what a nasty place he thinks London is. His terms nre uncomplimentary. “When I first came to this place . . , he says in his own phraseology with colourful adjectives— “Doing the Lambeth Walk” interrupts—it is led by three plump women who give demonstrations of the popular dance featured in that popular Cockney ballad. As the chorus dies down the bcotsman starts again. “When I go back to Scotland Oh you take the high road and I’ll take the low road,” the chorus breaks in. The man with his heart across the Scottish Border tries once more. “They - made me take a job He didn’t wanna do it,” they sing. And the crowd takes up the clioius. By this time the Scotsman begins to get the idea. * " He gives them a gag for a song. His audience does the rest. The lampooning orator is himself lampooned which is in good Hyde Park tradition. When he leaves, half an hour latei, he wonders if he should seek a careei on the stage. He confides he ought to answer advertisements m a magazine. But you’ll probably findhimon the job again in Hyde Paik next Saturday. Technique varies from soap-box iO soap-box. One bespectacled gentleman, looking like a college professor, talks about many things, from the B B C to mid-western American isolationism. . Every few sentences he stops ana raising his hand like a conductor says “One, two • • .” This is the cue for which the audience is waiting. They continue in unison, “three, four, . . ”up to 12, each number being jerked out like the cheering at a football game. The numerical recitation ends. The professor takes the floor again. Hyde Park is a rostrum where you have to work hard to keep an audience. If you don’t you’re apt to find you are discoursing to the elms. Even one of your own hecklers can steal your crowd and start up on his own.

Quips anil Sallies

The success of open-air oratory, like the Soccer football game’ played on the park green nearby, depends on quick-fire exchanges. The man who tries to make a straight speech is like the selfish player who keeps the Soccer hall to himself. He rambles on his own verbal course, failing to take advantage of the interplay of quips, sallies, questions, insults and epithets. Soon he finds the hecklers have gone. Without them the game is over.

The heckler gives bite and spice to the Hyde Park programme. He is the man who has all the questions to which the speakers must find all the answers.

• Some quips are spontaneous; others are as ripe as chestnuts of another type which fall from the trees in adjacent Rotten Row, where horse riders canter by.

“How many full stops in a bottle of ink?” asks one insistent interrupter of an orator Avho is discussing neither bottles nor ink.

With proper timing, even old gags are good for a laugh. The audience has not paid to come in, and is highly sensitive to humour of its own manufacture.

Take the topical “gripe” these days —.the smallness of the British meat ration.

The unfortunate case of the man who loses his steak under a pea is often discussed. “And what did I say to the wife?” the orator asks with a gesture so sweeping he might be hurling his audience into Park Lane.

“What did Mr Gladstone say in ISS4?” comes the answer from countless Victorian music-hall stages via the back of the crowd. One cannot listen long at Hyde Park Corner without hearing this classic inquiry. Parliamentary procedure is not often invoked at this open air forum. Though 1 have heard a sepulchral voice from beside the soap-box call out, “On a point of order, Mr Speaker

. • .” The point was lost in a fresh gust of merriment which wafted out to join the roar of the traffic as it circled the Marble Arch. Lest you should think it only nonsense which is talked at Orators’ Corner, I must add there is a serious side. Speakers who have something worth while to say get listened to, as well as heckled. But there are not enough of them to spoil the fun.