SOBER GLASGOW

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 102, 24 January 1930, Page 12

SOBER GLASGOW

EVERYONE PLAYS GOLF AND TENNIS AMUSEMENT PLACES FULL I A VISIT TO No. 10 DOWNING STREET “I was over eight weeks in Scotland and England," said Mr. Hamilton Nimmo who returned to Wellington a few days ago, “and during the whole of that itme I believe I am right in saying that I saw no more than four drunken men. Nor was I avoiding places where I might see them. “I had not been to Glasgow for 30 years, so was in a position to see contrasts. I went to a publichouse I used to know in the old days. It was still kept by the same man, who did not know me at grst, but afterwards he recalled me right enough. He was the first to tell me that the trade had gone to pieces. Glasgow was a great beerdrinking town a while ago—Edinburgh for wine and whisky—Glasgow for beer. Well, my old friend told me that beer drinking was fashionable no longer. I asked him why, and he replied with a question: “Who played golf and tennis in your time here?” “I had to reply that it was only the well-to-do folk.” “Just so,” said he. “Now everybody plays golf and tennis. They have to keep fit to do so, and there you are!” (with a sigh). . “And what did, you pay for a glass of beer thirty years ago?” he asked. “Three-ha’pence,” I replied. “Quito so—now it is fourpence ha’penny !” “So I’m telling you,” said Mr. Nimmo, “that this craze for the open-door athletic life is making great changes, and the reproach so often hurled against Scotland that it was a drunken country has been entirely and completely removed. These are facts I’m telling ye!” So Mr. Nimmo was forced to the conclusion that the manners as well as the times had changed. He noticed that the tearooms were all well patronised, and the evidences of want, so apparent when he was a youth in Scotland, were missing. Signs of Prosperity. “There may be unemployment at Home,” continued Mr. Nimmo. “All I can say is that it was pot borne- in upon one. Everyone seemed to be well dressed, and the ‘talkie” theatres weri> crowded with young men and women when they should have been at work. You see queues outside the theatres in the middle of the day. You saw nothing like that when I was a lad in Scotland.

“I went back to my own town of Ayr, and was handsomely received by the Provost. The old place has not changed so much, except that it now has electric trams, connecting with the places round about and out to the Burns Monument.

“In London I presented my credentials to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald at No. 10 Downing Street, and I and Mrs. Nimmo had a few minutes’ chat with him before he went off to the ceremony at the Cenotaph. I conveyed the good wishes of my brother Scots in New Zealand to the Prime Minister, and he was very nice. But he was in a hurry to get away to the Cenotaph, and bidding us good-bye, he asked if he could do anything for us, at which Mrs. Nimmo spoke up, and said she would like to see through the place. He summoned an attendant, who took us all through the historic home of England’s Prime Ministers, which was interesting enough. On his office table I noticed a big photograph of Mr. Hoover, which Had apparently just arrived from America.”