First visit by a Pope to U.K. will be big business

Press, 4 February 1982, Page 6

First visit by a Pope to U.K. will be big business

NZPA London The first visit to Britain by a Roman Catholic Pope will be big business. The Church in Britain has appointed the International Management Group run by the super-agent, Mark McCormack, to look after all the official marketing of tour souvenirs next May.

I.M.G. — whose worldwide clients include many top sporting figures such as the five-times Wimbledon champion, Bjorn Borg — already has commandeered a chapel at St Vincent’s Convent in London as its headquarters.

Strewn over tables there yesterday were _ about < 200 different mementos of Pope John Paul.

They ranged from cheap carrier bags with a beaming portrait of the Pope to platinum plaoues depicting him

with the Queen, on sale at £1250 (SNZ2B7S). The quiet little convent, whose usual visitors comprise society’s rejects and deadbeats looking for hand-outs, soon will be host to sharp-suited I.M.G. men with minds like calculators, according to the "Daily Mail."

A spokesman for LM.G. said that each item to be marketed had been tastefully chosen and tested for quality. They include address books at 60p ($1.38), beer mats at £1.20 ($2.80), teaspoons of stainless steel at 50p ($1.15) and silver at £3O ($69), T-shirts at £3 ($6.90), balloons at ten for 60p ($1.38), and ballpoint pens at three for 80p ($1.84). For the better-off sou-venir-hunter there will be a leather-bound book containing all Pope John' Paul’s speeches during his six day

visit, costing £250 ($575). A gold pocket watch will sell for £lOOO ($2300).

For £4 ($9.20) you can buy a brick bearing the words: "To commemorate the visit of Pope John Paul II to Great Britain, 1982.”

The idea, according to the “Standard,” is to knock a brick out of a wall in your own house and replace it with the engraved one.

An I.M.G. executive, Richard Crow, said: “What we must always bear in mind is that this is a pastoral visit and that everything we license must be in keeping with that. “We license the sale of mementos and the Church gets a cut of the profits, but we don’t expect to make money. We would be delighted to break even. “We are making sure that people can buy, at reasonable prices, a true record of

the visit.” Most of the papal products, made under licence by 43 companies, should be in the shops by the beginning of April, well in time for the Pope’s arrival on May 28. The “Daily Express” has reported, meanwhile, that a London ticket tout is prepared to pay £2OO ($460) for tickets to the Pope’s Mass at Wembley on July 29. News of this has filtered down from pubs frequented by Catholics, the paper said. The chief organiser of the papal visit. Monsignor Ralph Brown, said he was working on several ideas to stop touts getting hold of tickets. He said the tickets would be distributed to Catholic parish priests who would give them, free of charge, to their congregation. If demand exceeded supply, parishioners would ballot for them.