A VILLAGE REVOLUTION.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3463, 31 March 1930, Page 7

A VILLAGE REVOLUTION.

To understand how the coming ot wireless lias affected the outlook oi the village, says S. L.-Beususan in the Loudon Daily Chronicle, it is only necessary to recall the life of any rural hamlet when the century was young. The daily paper habit had not been formed, reading was limited to a Sunday journal and the county weekly. For amusement there might be an annual fruit and flower show, with roundabouts, swings and coconut shies, a harvest supper on tne farm and a concert or two, generally arranged by people win* came down to the countryside for week-ends. Nobody travelled so far as the cuonty town save on rare occasions. Tne motor bus was unknown; the gramophone almost unheard of; through the bleak months of the year the village went to bed about nine o’clock, as remote from the heart of things as China from Peru. To-day the wireless set is in every village street. Somejtnnes the man from the garage or cycle shop supplies local needs, but often one hears of a lad who is exceptionally clever and does the necessary fitting at a price shopmen would scorn. In a village where, in King Edward’s reign, one travelledby carrier’s cart to railhead six miles away, and took over an hour to get there, the ‘cycle agent supplied £'2oo worth of wireless and installations in a. recent winter, and, with three exceptions, the work was done for agricultural laborers or small shopkeepers. The effect of this new contact with things of Large account is very significant. Let it be admitted that with the great majority of listeners-in only the lightest form of amusement is really unpopular. There are very many who tell you frankly they don’t want lectures, they don’t want plays, while kjlassical ' concerts mpan Nothing to < them; hut here and there one finds young men and women who are taking a really keen interest in the best that wireless can give, particularly on the musical side. Those who are learning to play, and are ambitious, can listen to first-class interpretations of the kind they could never hope to hear in the ordinary course of events, and this experience has a definite value. Men and women who are concerned with social questions —and there has always been a deep or latent interest in these matters among the more intelligent of the working classes in this country —are having the time of their lives.- They can listen while big question% are explained or debated; they 7 are becoming more articulate, more conscious of their citizenship than ever before. Even in the village tap-room you could always find one or two men who were striving to envisage the larger problems of life, particularly on the social and economic side, but they could not readily get into touch with firstclass opinion, and, circumstanced as they were, they only heard one side of the case, generally, in the remote countryside. To-day, with their newspapers and wireless, they 7 can gather enlightened opinions on, all questions that relate to the welfare of the State, and undoubt edly a great quickening of intelligence results. Before the recent general election the representative of a country 7 constituency told me that never before in his Parliamentary career had he found his constituents so eager to understand, so readily alive-to all sides of salient problems. Wireless has helped to stabilise the countryside, to remove from the most distant village the reproach of dullness.