WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 223, 8 June 1923, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T.D.H.)

If Britain scrapped her Navy to please America, why haggle when told to adopt prohibition for her mercantile marine?

The Austrian Royal Family are sore because they sent the crown to be put in pawn and did not even get the ticket.

Two revolutions are in the air in South America. —It does not seem 60 long ago since South America had a monopoly of this form of politics.

New Zealanders may laugh at the discussion in the House of Commons about baths being luxuries, but we must not forget that it is only a few years ago since we had our own discussions as to whether soldiers in camp at Trentham needed baths, and it was even seriously declared in our Parliament, so far as I remember, that going unwashed would make them more hardy. One 'hears a great deal about the Englishman and his tub,, and in most cases in Britain it still is a tub that comes out once a week on Saturday nights. In some of the cheaper tenements in Britain, where fixed baths have been provided, they are mostly used for storing the coals. In some parts of Paris it is said the public bathman still perambulates the streets with his bath and cauldron of hot water, and carries up the bath and waits while his clients use it.

Britain’s upper classes, who.did without soap and water for so many centuries themselves, seem still to have a lingering feeling that if the lower orders were encouraged to rush into daily bathing, one of the few remaining hall-marks of gentility will be gone bevond recall. During the war there was much complaint in sleepy English country towns that the “cottage folk” were wearing such good clothes that it was becoming impossible to tell who were gentlefolk and who were not. If the cottage folk should by any chance take to having a daily bath the disaster might be complete. The sound conservative instincts of the average “Satuiday-nighter,” however will save the situation. He has a profound contempt for the people who bath every day—a contempt equalled possibly only by the contempt of the once-a-monthers for the Saturday-nighters. No true Saturday-night father can abide hia children taking a bath every day. It is almost like having the outrageous impudence to insinuate that pa. and ma are not as clean as they might be. And that no doubt is why pa and ma so often keep the coals in the bath. They are not going to be bullied into unnecessary washing, and they are not going to be reflected on by their offspring.

No one at all seems ever to have thought of taking a cold bath in Britain until Sir John Floyer, the famous medical man, started, a campaign in the eighteenth century, and was generally regarded as «. crank for his pains. America prides itself on its superior attachment to the Jiath tub, but it was only in 1842 that Mr. Adam Thompson perpetrated the first fixed bath. The doctors asserted that, luxurious appliances of this sort by encouraging cold bathing would lead to a whole category of zymotic diseases. Boston became so alarmed that it made bathing unlawful, save on the advice of a physician. Virginia did not go quite so far, but put a lax of thirty dollars on all bath tubs. In Philadelphia a measure making bathing illegal between November 1 and March 15 was lost by only two votes at the Common Council. By 1851 President Fillmore braved the shafts of ridicule and had a bath tub installed in the White House at Washington. By 1860 every up-to-date hotel in New York had a bathroom, and the more glorious were known to have as many as three in order to relieve the Saturday night congestion.

A Belfast newspaper recently announced prominently in its columns that a certain eminent person had been received with jeers when what it really meant to. say was that he had been received with “cheers.” There is a more historic instance of a similar error in a dictated report of a byelection campaign. The man who dictated the report over the telephone said: “On arrival the candidate was greeted with jeers and boos.” Next morning he was astounded to read that “On arrival the candidate , was greeted with cheers and booze.

“N.J.8.” writes to say that I erred in saying no enterprising person seemed ever to have founded a publichouse on the Rimutaka Summit. A two-floored iron “shack” was once erected there, and had it stood the test of wind it would probably have also stood the test' of time. One night in a gale it folded its wings and stole away to the bottom of the ravine above which it had perched. My correspondent says it was a lady hostess who made this daring experiment, but her venture met with scant patronage. So much greater were the attractions (particularly stabling) of the Abbott’s Creek and Pukuratahi inns, on the lower slopes of the mountain, on either side, that travellers seldom gave the summit publicbousa more than a glance and hurried on to safer and cosior quarters.

My correspondent adds that ne once spent a New Year’s Evo on the very spot on which the’Rimutaka mountain-top hostelry had stood, and since then has never doubted the ability of the w ind to shift it. “Next day,” he writes. “I shifted camp to the Royal Arms, a popular publichpuse which, even m Crawford’s time, dispensed a lavish hospitality to all hill travellers that made this Featherston hostelry a sort

of headquarters both coming and goin<r. I am not too certain of the name, but I fancy the Pakurataln inn (kept by Mrs. Wagg) was called the Golden Fleece, but it, like the old inn which in the great Hutt River floor was washed away from its site, a few chains above the railway bridge at Silverstream (still marked by a few stout-grown aspen trees), is now aiso but a memory, and nearly all its oldtime patrons —wagoners for the mos’c part—long laid to rest. Bloomfield House (erstwhile the Mungaroa Inn) still stands, on route across the hill.

Little Freddie had asked papa to explain how telegrams went. Said papa: “Now, Freddie, look at that little dog. If he were stretched from Wellington to Auckland, when you pulled his tail in Wellington he would bark in Auckland. Do you follow me?” ~, ■ “Yes, papa,” said Freddie, but how about- wireless?” “It’s just the same, my boy, said papa, “except that the dog is imaginary.” destiny. I shall build me a nest in a vast trecthat only the sky shall know, And the voices of men too far away To scourge, shall soothe when the great winds blow. I shall loose tho memory of pride and tears, . , , , The days shall pass in hush and light? Till the voice of my thousand fathers urge Return, for the glory of the fight I —Ethel M. Ericson.