MARK LANE

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 July 1927, Page 3

MARK LANE

A GREAT MARKET. IE a stranger in London were to ask me where he could find the best collection of truly English types of countenance, I should take him to the Corn Exchange in Mark Lane (writes Hamilton Fvfe, in the “Daily Chronicle”). Here,' in the heart of the City, in a region where cosmopolitans abound, where all languages are to be heard, you may any day see a large collection of men who could not be taken for anything but English. They don’t look like City men. They are countryside types. Here is one jovial, round-faced, inclined to stoutness. There is one sparely-built, keeneyed, with long, brown jaws and limbs Jooselv hung. Look around the throng: you find these faces and figures repeated over and over again. You can easily imagine such men on horseback, following the hounds or riding round the meadows at hay harvest. You can picture them eating hearty breakfasts and enjoying tankards of ale with their dinner and going to church on Sundays and sitting on rural councils. You feel that they represent a character which has changed little through the centuries since Norman and Saxon and Dane (with a dash of Celt thrown in) were fused to form an English race. Townsmen though they be, they are most of them, sons or grandsons of the soil. Buying and selling are their occupation, but the grain they buy and sell keeps them near the soil still, it Would seem. Some in this large, light, glass-roof-ed hall, supported by gleaming grey granite pillars, are actually tai met s. Look at the one with a. big, an immense “buttonhole”— though after a while I notice that a good many wear flowers in their coats, proudly, as if to say, “See what 1 can do in the gardening line.” The farmers have come up to see how prices fange or to buy cattle food, rather than to sell. Few of them offer their produce here. Some have their wheat crops purchased by bigmilling firms. Others sell to local dealers; it is the dealers who exhibit samples here. See, they have them set out on the shelves and tables which divide the Exchange into several aisles. Wheat and oats and barley in little bags, maize in all sorts of preparations, and palm kernels, oil seeds, pea and monkey nuts, which bring into the mind sun-baked landscapes, quivering in fierce heat, and seas of vivid blue. These substances are for cattle feed they are made into “cake.” A new feature in the Corn Exchange is this. A feature, that is to say, of the last twenty oi' thiry years. That is “new” for an institution which started somewhere about 1747, when the second George was king, and the population of this country was six and a half millions, less than that of the London area to-day. . For a long time the gram sold here was almost all British. We could easily feed ourselves in those times. From tlie middle of last century, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had kept out wheat from overseas, there came a great change. The market became international. By far the gi eater part of the produce now dealt in is imported. And this has gradually brought with it a change in the mode of sales. “I can recollect the time, says an old member, “when by the afternoon, the floor of the Exchange was pretty well ankle deep in grain. We all sold by samples. A buyer would take a handful, examine it, and throw it down That was the rule. It couldn’t be put back.” , , . , “Why? What caused the rule to be made?”

“Well, T suppose it was a precaution against a dishonest dealer taking out good sluff and putting bad stuff back inste id, to injure a rival. You’ll still see men throwing it on the floor, but there’s very little at the end of the day compared with what there used to be.” “Are samples not so much relied on now?” I asked. “They aren’t needed so much. You can get a certificate guaranteeing that you will get a certain quality. You buy by the name. Canadian wheat, for instance, is all graded. If you buy Number One Northern you get a Government inspector’s report telling you that the grain is what it calls itself. You can rely on that.” Then my informant drifts one way and I drift another. The whole place is like that, full of groups which continually change. Most of those who compose them seem merely to be chatting in a desultory way. Some, perhaps, are. But if you take notice you see a lot of business being done. Notebooks are in hand all the time. After a conversation about this, that and the other thing, a buyer will say in a low tone: “What can' you sell me these oats at?” He has been fingering them as he talked, letting them run through his fingers; pinching them between first finger and thumb. A price is named. Entries are made in the notebooks. So the day’s work gets itself done. There are many in the place who do not deal in grain. Here is a man looking for insurance business. That one is a wharfinger, who will undertake to land cargoes from ships in the Thames. Over there is a shipper ready to sell cargo space. And beside him is the agent of a firm which makes sacks and bags from jute. He will sell you anything in this line, from a neat sample-holder to wheat containers which two men can hardly lift. „ “Brewers used to come here, Mr Addington, secretary of the Corn Exchange, tells me, “and whisky distillers, too, to buy the grains that yield malt. But now the maltsters go to them, so they are seldom seen in the Exchange.” Maize, by the way, is largely used in distilleries now, as well as barlev. John Barleycorn has no longer undisputed sovereignty. Everyone knows the name of Mark Lane. The sound of it has gone out into all lands. And most people have a vague idea that it has “something to do with flour.” You can only realise after you have visited the Corn Exchange how Mark Lane links the farm lands of Britain, the prairies of Canada, the wheatlands of Australia, and the Argentine and Eastern Europe to your breakfast table and your tea table, to the bread you eat and the porride; to the milk and the butter and the eggs, since cattle and poultry foods are so largely dealt in here as well as the grain that nourishes us. Here in this dingy neighbourhood near the Tower of London, the produce of countless farms, far and near, is handled. Upon Mark Lane one can see great ships converging from the many parts of the globe. It is pleasant to think that our staple food is

dealt in by men so typical of what is, on the whole, the finest English strain.