"SO THIS IS LONDON."

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 76, 29 March 1924, Page 14

"SO THIS IS LONDON."

NOVELIST MAGISTRATE. DEBATE ITS BEAUTTES. (From Cur O>vn Correspondent.) LONDON, February 20. One of the most entertaining means ever adopted to collect funds for London hospitals has been renewed this year, by the resumption yesterday of the debates in the School of Economics at London University. Here meet notabilities in literary, scientific and forensic circles in a sort of lecture and counterlecture rather than definite discussion.

Appropriately they led off with "So this is London," Sir Chartres, the BowStreet magistrate getting off the mark first. His first dictum was that a good magistrate ought to be seen and not heard, "unlike his jokes, which are apt to be heard and not seen." He had only made one joke on the bench in eighteen years. It seemed to him a rather good one. Only one man in court saw it, and there was what the papers call "a laugh." A truculent usher pointed to the man and said, "Order in court," and a policeman bumped the man slightly against the -wall and threw him out into Old Street. This experience did ijot encourage him to make any more jokes. He told about a woman who handed him a document to prove she could pay a debt. It was her husband's will. He asked her, "Is your husband dead ?" and she replied "No, but he is going to be hanged on Wednesday."

Of the Piccadilly night signs he said that they at any rate gave a stimulus to an industry with .which he had a good deal to do at Bow Street—picking pockets. He thought anything that disguised architecture of that part of London was a substantial gain to its inhabitants. He spoke bitterly about the ruin of Regent Street, and asked why the architects could not have kept the portico and replaced a storey higher in Portland stone. The old portico was removed because it was supposed to be a resort of bad characters. He did not know there was much in that argument now—it might relieve the congestion in the night clubs. His idea of Heaven was a place where advertisements really would be true, where his silver locks could regain their pristine beauty by buying from the hairdresser—Blank's restorer.

There was, he said, a great wave of sentimentalism in life to-day. In Victorian days it was in literature and art. To-day it infested our public life.

In our courts, he added, whether a prisoner gets six months or is acquitted, everybody seems to go away perfectly satisfied. I don't believe that condition of things exists in any other country. Those who have read Mr. Pett Ridge's books in which his characters are all Cockney, will know that a better Londoner -never breathed than he. So as the protagonist of London the organisers of the discussion had seized the best. He, to, devoted his attention to those outward insignia of the business behind shop fronts. Speaking of the entertainment of shop-window signs, he quoted two, one in a furniture shop, "You find the girl, and we find the rest," and the other in a jolly undertaker's shop in St. Martin's Lane with little specimen coffins," "Economy and style guaranteed; distance and destination no object."