LONDON NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 3, 4 July 1938, Page 10

LONDON NOTES

THE PALACE GATES

EVERYDAY LIFE

THE AVERAGE CITIZEN

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, June 8.

New Zealand visitors to London who have walked down the Mall to see Buckingham Palace have not failed to notice the immaculate guardsmen on sentry duty at the main gates. What they have probably been less ready to notice is the unobtrusive "bobby" watching the inside of the arch. His duty is to see that the centre gate is used by nobody except members of the Royal Family. This is one of several important points that a band of over a dozen policemen have to watch in turn. They are under the charge of an inspector, and their station is at Wellington Arch, on Constitution Hill. Private motorists often attempt to "crash" the Palace gates, but to the credit of the alert men in blue, none has yet succeeded. The quarters at Wellington Arch, familiarly known as the King's Police Station, are shortly to be modernised. The cost is estimated at £1500. LONDON SWORDSMITHS. Recently the King presented a set of Royal swords to the Tower of London, an incident which prompted the query whether swordsmiths are still to be found in London. A search'led to Chiswick, where a firm'founded in 1772 is still forging first-class weapons. Many of the craftsmen have been there for years, and their fathers before them. Swords, it seems, are as carefully made today as they ever were, and the various processes by which a rough bar of steel finally emerges as a polished blade are the elaborate work of hand and eye which still cannot be so perfectly done by machinery. One of these swordsmiths, who refuses to abandon the traditional "sweat cap" which he wore as an apprentice, remembers forging Queen Victoria's Jubilee sword, Kitchener's sword, a State sword for King Edward VII presented to him by an Indian potentate— it cost £10,000 —and even an executioner's sword for China. "SANDY" AGAIN. Edgar Wallace comes to the London stage again shortly in a new version of his famous "Sanders of the River." Under the title of "The Sun Never Sets," the story has been adapted by Mr. Guy Bolton with the collaboration of Wallace's daughter, Miss "Pat" Wallace. Miss Wallace—who, in fact, is Mrs. Frere-Reeves—makes her debut in the theatre, but she is no stranger in Fleet Street. Indeed, the big photograph of her father on her desk is inscribed, "To my fellow-journalist." What prodigies of journalism excited ' this I tribute are not, however, known. Miss j Wallace divides her time between | Albany and a cottage high up above Romney Marsh. There she possesses not only a great outlook over marsh and sea, but a donkey called Lily Pons Asinorum and a long-haired dachshund known as Lucy Grey. A WORMS-EYE VIEW. The Londoner's worms-eye view of: his city was held up as an "awful warning" by Mr. F. J. Osborn, honorary secretary of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, at its conference. "The average Londoner," he said, "knows only two little spots of London and the tunnel between them; he forms no mental picture of the metropolis as a whole. He is conscious of the office or factory where he works, and the eating-place close by where he gets his midday meal. He is conscious of the suburb or the tenement in which he lives and the "pubs" or cinemas in which he spends his leisure, and the long journey between them is represented by the interior of the bus, tram, or train in which he sits, or frequently stands. It is almost literally a worms-eye view.

"Lots of wonderful things are nominally available to him, but apart from the cheap amusements, such as the cinema and radio, most of London's specialities are too expensive for him, and if any large number of Londoners became able to afford them they would become so overcrowded that he would not want to go."

Just the same, the worm does not appear to be turning! London's population of some 8,000,000 odd is expected to increase to over 10,000,000 in the next 25 years.