Londoners take it calmly

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33963, 2 October 1975, Page 15

Londoners take it calmly

(N.Z. Press Assn—Copyright)

LONDON, Oct. 1

While the police maintain their patient vigil on the Knightsbridge Spaghetti House, the long siege is providing Londoners with the kind of excitement they usually see only on television.

In other cities around the world, such an event would be accompanied by shooting, tear-gas, and terror, but here, the British phlegm prevails. Policemen take off their helmets and chat around the tea van. Office girls and shoppers bring their sandwiches as they stop to check on progress. The traffic trundles past only yards away from the building where the three gunmen and their hostages are holed up. “Anywhere else there would be water-cannon

and God knows what running through the streets,” a businessman said yesterday as he watched the scene from his first-floor office above the Spaghetti House.

The nearest thing to violence came in yesterday’s drizzle, when a man claimed that his front-row position on the crashbarrier had been stolen by a woman with a pink umbrella.

“You can't do that,” he snapped. “I bin ’ere since 9 o’clock.”

The police moved swiftly, and in minutes calm was restored.