BANK "HOLIDAY."

Auckland Star, Volume 246, Issue 246, 16 October 1926, Page 38

BANK "HOLIDAY."

GRIP ON LONDON CITY.

A London holiday is an awe-inspiring affair. It grips the greatest city in the world by the scruff of the neck and liirows it into such a state of unearthly .urmoil that one wonders why it isn't stopped. Stop a London holiday? Canute tried an easier job many years ago!

All have heard of Bank Holiday. Nobody knows why it is called that, but it has been co for fifty-five years, and has such a spontaneous backing that it will be so known when men talk about the Motor Car Age as presently they do about the Stone Age. A bank holiday does not mean what it says; it means that everything with doors is shut, locked, and barred, and a great path of solid humanity leads from London to the sea. A genius decided that bank holiday should happen on a Monday. This shifts the scene of chaos to late Friday and early Saturday, when eight millions—stop for a moment and think what that means—when eight millions drop mechanically into fearsome queues at all those big mysterious stations that ring London and lead to the freedom of wind and wild and wave.

Nobody in the world, outside London, knows those ghastly queues. The whole precincts of great stations like Charing Cross, Waterloo, London Bridge, Liverpool Street, Victoria, and Marylebone are covered thick with a patient mob strugling grimly with suit cases and kids for a peep at a ticket oflice and a train. On an August Bank Holiday, the transport companies, by the commendable, if not necessarily hygienic, method of wedging twenty into six-seat carriages, win memorable victories over the mob. And then there is an army of six or seven million Londoners concentrated in semiundress along the English coast makina full use of every single little lecrepid breaker that wends its unfortunate path from the Continent across the way. London by the sea is perhaps the most amazing sight in all this amazing island. Imagine a warm Easter Monday in Auckland. Collect everybody on Cheltenham, NVrrow Xe.-k. Takapuna. .Milford, and all the beaches up the gulfgather in every stray kid left in the. suburbs; pot every fin bucket and wooden spade south of the line; tear up all the paper used by the ''Star" in one issue, and find every dog in New Zealand. Having done this, put them all down on Shelly Beach, and run for the Waitakeres.

If you could stay there you would have a small idea of Southend, Margate and Brighton on Bank Holiday '