LORD MAYOR'S SHOW

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 9, 12 January 1927, Page 8

LORD MAYOR'S SHOW

A SPLENDID PAGEANT SEDAN TO LIMOUSINE ___ • ROAD TRANSPORT EVOLUTION. (From Our Own Correspondent.) • ' ', LONDON, 16th November: , Rain, fog, and snow we are used to on Lord Mayor's Day. but not sunshine. But so it was on 9th November. The sun shone on a wonderful pageant; which roused the enthusiasm of the thousands of spectators as it'never has doneduring the seven years the old custom has been reestablished. Before the day was ended the streets of London were deluged with rain,- .but- while the procession wound along ;its customary route all was well. It was a gracious morning. The new Lord Mayor- (Sir Rowland' Blades, M.P.), too, seemed to enjoy the day, for he spent: his time and : energy thrusting his head but of the gilded coach to acknowledge the cheers, of the crowd. Mos,t, Lord Mayors find their chains and robes too heavy to rise from their seats on this occasion. Indeed, Sir Rowland Blades is a cricketer, cyclist, golf player, and all-round sportsman, and very popular. It was .in truth a jolly show, which set all the crowd cheering and laughing. The pageant which formed the feature of tho procession assembled; in the network of streets near the Guildhall, arid one could 'wander in comparative ease to watch John Gilpin giving his boots a final polish prior to his famous ride, while the fat boy from "Pickwick Papers munched a final bun prior to taking, the stage. The pageantswere those of road passenger transport in England and the evolution of fire brigades. The first began with the human carriers a Welsh milk-woman, two men with a pole to which a load was suspended, and a Sedan chair carried by-four men. In this there was a lndy passenger. Next came the pack horses, the pillion horse,' and four saddle horses. All.horses were ridden by people of a very early period of English histmy. Vehicular trafec began witli a wheel barrow propelled by a porter, and then to the delight of everybody came those early ancestors of the bicycle—the velocipede, several varieties of bone-shaker of tho 'seventies and 'nineties. Most of those came, no doubt, from museums aim were not of a strength to hold a rider; hence 1 they we're wheeled along by their costumed guardians. Then came the more modern, "safeties," and so on down to the very latest in motor-bicycles. There was that curious contraption which made one of the'first tricycles possessing one huge wheel at one side for driving and two small wheels in line on the other, the rider perched uneasily on a steel spider frame. The whole cycle exhibit was excellent, and with it came the dariuß lady cyclist in voluminous "bloomers which shocked susceptibilities hot many years ago. WITHIN PRESENT MEMORY. What antiquities the relics of London's old street transport looked, and yet many of the adults remembered them. There was the bus of .-the knife-board age, the inside carpeted v:th straw; the dogcart, the governess cart, the hansom cab. This last, however, is not yet out of date, for one was seen carrying passengers down the Strand that very same evening. Ihere was the growler, carrying Mrs. Sairey Gamp, and as a contrast the modern taxi-cab. There followed , the single horse victoria: and the Austin seven car; the single horse brougham and the motorbrougham; State road carriage and pair with footman, and the posting ' carriage and pair, a road coach and four with Dickensian passengers. One had an opportunity of the changes in the motor-car during the past thirty years. The Daimler car of 1899, a cumbersome two-seater with wooden wheels and primitive steering, the occupants perched high; seemed impossibly remote, amid 'the fleet of modern motorvehicles,. as far out of date as would be Nelson's ships in to-day's Royal: Navy. Yet it was the last word in motoring five and twenty years ago. It led to the now Daimler "double six," looking as large as a railway coach in the city streets. A Vauxhall- Park phaeton of 1903,:not:uuliko a wheeled four-post bed, piloted the present-day Vauxhall saloon. As if to remind people that the day may come when even the latest and best of vehicular transport will give place .to a transport of another kind, Sir Alan Cobham's De Haviland. plane, shorwn of-its wings, was drawn y by a small- motor-tractor. ■ FIRE BRIGADES. The. fire. service also made an attrac: tion in a picturesque Lord Mayor's show. Till as' late .as 1866 there was no London lire brigade, and the insurance companies rushed their own engines to every conflagration. Four companies founded in the eighteen century survive—the Sun, London Assurance, Phoenix, and Royal Exchange—and in the four ears they contributed the evolution of the early fireengine was to be traced. Firemen of old days wove Saxon green and blue uniforms, but most gorgeous were the Phoenix men in red tunics and breeches and stockings. London Assurance armed its firemen with swords, less handy weapons at a big blaze than were the axes carried by others.. Then" came in the procession the fire brigade and salvage corps, with standard motor pumps and escapes, leaving a gap unfilled. The horsed engines which used to send a thrill along the streets of all large towns for a generation were absent. In all the rest the Show was brave and guy, with gold-laced bandsmen of the Life Guards riding their stately horses, the mounted band of the Royal Artillery, pipers of the Scots Guards and a dozen other bands afoot in turn filling the city with music all along the way/ It was an inspiration', to"give: the . old mancarried litters and pack, and pillion horses and other of the earliest methods of transport, with attendants and riders in. the costume of their days, '.and to fill buggy and gig and phaeton*-, with our wonderfully tailored and gowned great grandfathers and grandmothers. They made a goodly company. The crowds smiled, with one common .thought. What frights these early Victorians looked. No doubt future generations will regard our plus-foured men and shingled and short-skirted dames of to-day as just as comic. The Farriers' ■ Company, incorporated by King Charles 11. in 1674, sent a fine emblematical car,'a shoeing'forge of Caroleau days, with the iron red from the glowing coal. The musical ring of the anvil accompanied it along the streets. The Feltmakers'. .Company, too, had a good ear; and there were the Warspite boys, with their brindled bulldog, and' Sea Scouts; a sky-pointing'anti-air-craft gun, with its crew of fourteen men, workmanlike in steel helmets and much khaki; but this was not in character a military Lord Mayor's Show. NEVER SO POPULAR. It is interesting to recall that when Mr. Pepys went "to see* the pageants" of my Lord Mayor's Day, he pronounced them "good for such kind of things, but in themselves but poor and absurd." This though he sat in "a company of fine ladies'' and saw the show "after drinking of some strange and incomparably good claret." His generation thought that the Show^was "almost dropping into oblivion.'' In the nineteenth century things went from bad to worse... It may] be found curtly -stated' in a popular- Victorian book of reference that "the -yearly. procession to Westminster is now • shorn of all dignity pr" significance." Midtlle-aged people can-remember shows of .which that is not too severe a condemnation. But now in 1926 it has to be recorded, that never" in the memory of living man was the Show so popular and so welrapproved.

Every office window alpng the route of the procession was a grandstand-for. the occasion, and the pavements were crowd-ed-all tlieway. The library at New ; Zealand MJouso was an excellent point of vantage,, and many New' I'Zealand: 1 (visitors''assembled, there to.see a sight that many "of them will perhaps never see again." A number of visitors '.wore the guests.of Sir James and" Lady Parr, and saw, the.procession from]the -High Commissioner's room. These.. included Mr. and-Mrs. Coates, Mrs. H.■ D. Fulton, Mrs. Tully, Mrs. A. B. Roberton, and Dr. H. A. H. Gilmer and his daughter. After-j-warcls they took te"a with; Lady Parr. Others at New Zealand House-included Miss A. Hadfield, Miss Cargill, ■ Mrs. and Miss Carey, Miss Burden', Mrs. and Miss^ Iremonger, Mrs. G. Mulgan, Misses Gil-* mer, (2); Mr. and Mrs. Wright, Mr. and Mrs.- Magill, Mrs. Mulgau, Mrs. Atwood, Dr. and Miss Meadowcroft, Miss Roberton,'Mr. and Mrs. J. -Watson; Mr. sad [Mrs. Campbell Sard, 'J&ft, and Jfts.

I and Miss Harper, Mrs. D. Shale, Mr. and Mre. Denton, the Misses Ralston, Miss | Hales, Mrs. Blackie, Mr. and Mrs. Ludbrook, Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Reid, Mr. T. Horsley, Mr. and Mrs. G. Crompton, Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Macalister, Dr. G. Macalister, and Dr. Crilmer. A few were given windows at the prospective home of New Zealand in London, a little way nearer to Charing Cross, and some,others were invited by Messrs. T. H. Hamer and Co. to use their windows. 85, Fleet street.