RIVAL GUIDES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 183, 4 August 1932, Page 9

RIVAL GUIDES.

ENGLISH FOOTBALLERS. PIQTTANT DISPUTE AT a WHAKA." FORMAL WELCOME ABANDONED. (From Our Own Correspondent.) ROTORUA, Wednesday. Jealousy among the Maori guides caused an amusing complication in connection with the visit of the English footballers to Whakarewarewa. Great preparations were made for a welcome by one section of the guides, who believed that they had secured the patronage of the visitors. In the meantime, however, the other section of the guides had got busy and booked up the team members to be led around among the sights of the thermal park.

When this became known the forestalled guides "called off" their welcome, and the spokesman, duly adorned with mats and primed with an oration, was told that there would be no opportunity to broadcast Maori opinion upon visitors and football. The result was that when the successful guides arrived with the party at the meetinghouse things were a bit .flat. An emergency man was found to extend a welcome, but he had not got far past the .Maori equivalent for "Friends, Romans, and countrymen," when the "perkless" party arrived on the scene and proceeded to tell the, impromptu orator and his guide friends what they thought of them all. The welcome was not quite according to programme, but that was just as well for the visitors. They heard a flow of language which, although they did not understand it, left them with no doubts about the scope of the Maori vocabulary. When things cooled down (as far as it is possible in Whaka) the guides in possession took the team around the sights and arranged an entertainment for the evening On arrival at the hall, however, all was darkness, and the proceedings there had to be called off, but the guides took the footballers to a private house and staged a very entertaining programme.