QUEUEING BECOMES AN AUTOMATIC PROCESS IN ENGLAND

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 July 1947, Page 8

QUEUEING BECOMES AN AUTOMATIC PROCESS IN ENGLAND

Here in England queueing at holiday time seems even worse than normally, writes a correspondent from London. When people were trying to book train seats and boat passages for Whitsun, I saw women queueing to form a queue, paradoxical though it sounds. Outside one booking office people were trying to form up, but a policeman continually shifted them on with the instruction, “Qtieueing starts tomorrow at 7 a.m. Go away.” The queuers moved on, but not too far. Keeping their orderly lines, they slowly shuffled round the block and came back again, only to be shifted once more half an hour later. When I passed the office six hours later, the queue was still there, grown much larger, and still slowly shuffling up the street in order to conform with the police instruction to “keep moving.” “Ingrained Habit”

The queueing habit is so deeply ingrained in the English now that they do'it automatically. On the beach at a south coast resort on Whit Monday I saw a queue of at least 500 people waiting' their turn to buy an ice cream. It meant a wait of at least 45 minutes in the hot sun to purchase for a shilling a small slice of the floury, unsweetened concoction that passes for.ice cream in rationed Britain. But two holidaymakers out of every three seemed to think it worth while. As one used to the bright colours and general informality of attire on a New Zealand beach, I was amazed at the formal dress of fully 75 per cent, of the visitors. In all the thousands on the beach I did not see one person wearing shorts. Only a handful of teen-agers wore coloured shirts without ties. The majority of men wore three-piece suits, in dark colours, and seemed to spend the day solemnly promenading up and down the sea front.

There was far more organised entertainment, however, than New Zealand beaches offer. A military band gave three concerts a day on the seafront to hundreds of visitors who paid 6d an hour for the privilege of sitting in deck chairs on the sand. Two pierrot concert parties performed on a stage in front of a striped canvas marquee. And in the evening a local company, with an orchestra of six, played popular classical ballets to a vast and contented audience beneath the stars.

Back in hot, dusty London, at least one borough council remembered the poorer children who did not get away from the bricks and mortar for a seaside Bank holiday. Holborn Council put on an open-air concert, with clowns and dancers on a canopied stage, in heavily-blitzed Red Lion Square, where once Rossetti, Morris and Burne Jones lived. Several hundred poorly-dressed children were there; screaming with laughter at the antics of the clowns and enjoying themselves to the full in the late afternoon sunshine. This is the sort of imaginative idea that makes a great city a human place to live in.