BUSY ENGLISH PORTS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 216, 10 August 1940, Page 7

BUSY ENGLISH PORTS.

LIE DIRECT TO NAZIS. (British Official Wireless.) Received August 10. 11.30 a.m. rugby, Aug. 9. Assertions on the German wireless—for listening to which there is no penalty in Britain—that harbours on tho South and East Coasts of England are closed and the Port of London itself is dead have sent newspapermen scurrying down to London’s dockland to see for themselves what is happening. Their reports appear in the Press with photographs of what they saw. They found great activity, and the lightermen and dockers to whom they spoke of those Nazis stories dismissed them with ridicule. One reporter’s enquiries brought forth the intelligence that since the war began the Port of London has not known a day when ships have not come in. The News-Chronicle’s representative found the docks crowded and busy. He watched timber being unloaded, and got covered in flour when he moved to where cargo from Canada was being transferred to barges.

JTo found considerable i-eassurance . regarding the country’s food supply as he saw cranes unloading frozen meat from New Zealand in great stacks of 95 carcases each. Sitting on a barge piled high with boxes of dried fruits from Africa, an Evening t Standard reporter was told by a docker who has worked for 35 years in the port that “ships are coming in all the time, and even with the control of foodstuffs the unloading process is in no wav slowed up—the ships are away again in a brace ot shakes.” This same journalist describes how “wo drove’ past miles of warehouses and factories teeming with life*. Down on'-a quayside there was great activity. Stevedores and tallymen were working nineteen to the dozen discharging and checkins cargoes.”The 8.8. C. is establishing powerful radio stations at Singapore costing probably £250,000 for mufti-lingual broadcasts, which are expected to begin in a few months as a counter to German propaganda.