NEW GUIDES FOR LONDON

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 51, 23 November 1929, Page 31

NEW GUIDES FOR LONDON

RETIRED OFFICERS AS “TOURIST AIDES”

Visitors to London will hereafter be able to entrust the “staff-work” of ■ their visits to a group of retired army, navy, and air force officers who have formed an association known as “Aides de Camp, Ltd.,” under the patronage of Countess Haig, widow of the famous Field-Marshall. Training classes are being held at present in which these ex-officers are being qualified to furnish expert guidance in every subject in which visitors to England are likely to require guidance. Visitlug bankers who want to see the English banks, visiting lawyers who are interested in the law courts and the old inns of court, lovers of Dickens who want to ferret out the Dickensian haunts of London, visitors who want to see the cathedral cities of England, all these will be able to engage their own aides de camp, each specially trained in his own branch. All the ex-officers who join “Aides de Camp. Ltd.," receive a basic course of Instruction iu the geography of London, British and Irish geography and history, map reading and the drafting of itineraries, rail, road, river, and coastal travel; British and Irish health resorts, universities, cathedral cities and manufacturing centres, customs regulations, money exchange, and hotel tariffs and usages. In addition to this general training, specialised training is being given' in such widely varying branches of English life as the London hospitals, London, Liverpool, and Glasgow shipping, and places .of American interest throughout the country. In each case maps and prints are being prepared, so that whatever the visitor’s interest ' his aide de camp will be able to make his exposition of it as vivid and as complete as possible. Each aide de camp is encouraged, upon entering the association, to enlist for his own special subject. If he is himself an insurance man. he takes sufficient training in his own subject to enable him to take visiting insurance men on tours of the most interest-

ing insurance sites, both past and present, in the metropolis. If be is willing to specialise in the general subject of historical Loudon, from the time of the Bomans down io comparatively recent times, he has ro know the topography of the city proper and of the West End; the more important ancient and medieval monuments such as the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, and St. James’s Palace; such places of interest as the museums and art galleries, the cathedrals, docks, Dickens sites, Houses of Parliament, the Royal Exchange, and the other Exchanges, and the Horse Guards; the theatres, the Zoo, Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks, the boxing, cricket, and football centres: the Thames throughout its length. It is planned to make these trained aides de camp available at short notice for any length of time and on any subject of interest to a visitor. Their duties are to be much like those of any army aide de camp toward his Major-General. If the visitor is a shoe manufacturer who wants to see the shoe factories of Nottingham, his aide de camp will make all the arrangements at Nottingham iu advance and will accompany him throughout bis trip. If the- visitor is a Pennsylvanian who wants to make a pious pilgrimage to the grave of William Penu. his aide de camp will accompany him to Jordans in the depths of Buckinghamshire, where all the Penn family are buried in the churchyard of the old Quaker meeting house. If the visitor wants to investigate his descent in a small village in Northern Wales, an aide de camp will be found for him who has specialised in tracing genealogies in small and remote parishes. If the visitor wants to see the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, an aide de camp will be supplied who has specialised in old London. Because the staff is to be composed exclusively of ex-officers, the London Post of the American Legion is taking a keen and friendly interest in its development