BRITAIN'S GREAT BAZAAR

Northern Advocate, 7 April 1931, Page 8

BRITAIN'S GREAT BAZAAR

WORLD’S LARGEST NATIONAL ,EA [R. NEW ZEALAND IN THE EMPIRE’S MAIN STREET. 1 (From a Special Correspondent.) LONDON, February 8: “Your Empire Marketing Board slant] is the most richly representative thing of its kind I have seen in the world,’’ was the comment made by a Swedish tea-buyer after visiting the Empire’s great display at the British Industries Fair, opened this week in London and Birmingham. New Zealand and seventeen other Empire countries (or groups of countries) have spread out their wares to attract the eyes of buyers from all nations who come to visit the largest National Fair in the world. Anyone who has visited the East remembers the native “bazaar’’—a haphazard jumble of richly coloured cottons, bowls of sugar and sacks of salt,, bananas and bicycles; the variety of smells as mixed as the wares; and animating all the air of activity, bustle yund business. The bazaar is a nerve-cell of trade, complete in itself yet mysteriously linked with thousands of others to form a compplicated, sensitive nervous system of commerce. An Empire Bazaar. The Empire Marketing Board’s stand at this vast Fair (with its fifteen miles of stands) reminds one forcibly of a bazaar from which the smells and the noise have been subtracted and a new dignity added by the fine design of the Pavilion, for which Mr Charles Holden (one of the leading British architects of the modern school, who was responsible for the well-known new “ Underground ’’ j building) is responsible. The Malayan warrior who guards his stand in native dress with a formidable spear, the black officers in charge, of the Gold Coast and West Indian stands, add colour to the illusion. Ground-nuts and copra from Ceylon, cinnamon and spices from India, sugar-cane from Mauritius all bring a breath of the distant tropics to the nostrils, in spite of the snow that has been falling outside from cold February skies. The Empire displays are arranged on each side of a main street running the length of the pavilion. A stroll up and down this street is the most romantic walk in the world. The giant harvests of the great Canadian wheat fields, or Australian wool stations,,' down to new-born products like Cyprus Turkish delight or Mauritius cigarettes, are concentrated in two lines of crowded counters. ! In half-an-hour you can get a bird’s-eye view of £304,000,000 /worth of trade —the sum total of the overseas Empire’ exports to the United Kingdom. New Zealand’s stand has the usual attractive display of butter, honey, cheese and lamb. Butter is sold in small samples and people who buy it to take home can taste the reason why its sales have been multiplied four-fold since before the war. Jars of honey are also on sale. In the central avenue are benches where visitors can‘sit to watch the Empire Marketing Board’s daylight cinema projector showing films of Empire production scenes. Sealskins" for the Queen. Contrast is the essence of the Empire. Opposite New Zealand, the most Southern Dominion, is Newfoundland, the most Northern, and a newcomer to the Empire Marketing Board’s hall. Sealskins, salmon and cod liver oil are her products. When Her Majesty the Queen visited the Pavilion she was so struck by the beauty •of the furs that she ordered some to make up into collar and cuffs for a coat.

Over 200,000 seals are killed every year and now these soft, warm skins are on the market at 30/ a piece, so that a first quality fur coat, I was told, could be had for £2O. The inquiries have been so brisk that by the second clay all the skins on the stand had gone as samples to interested traders. Thousands of tons of salmon, brine-frozen by a new process, ; are now being imported into Great Britain from the Newfoundland fisheries, and Her Majesty also ordered some for the Buckingham Palace kitchens.

Next to the seals and salmon are Mauritius sugar-canes and a new exhibit —acacia seeds which are boiled for cattle feed. On the other side is the East African display, where Her Majesty accepted two Uganda baskets for her knitting and a Kenya cedar pencil.

Ceylon, with Newfoundland, is also a newcomer. She displays beautifully worked silver and brass trays and boxes made by village craftsmen who inherit their from the days of the Kandyan Kings, Southern Rhodesia devotes her stall almost entirely to tobacco. Malaya shows how to use pineapples with steak and kidney pie and with filleted sole. The Gold Coast justifies its mime by explaining that £600,000,000 worth of gold has been mined since its discovery in the ,15th Century. The End of the Slump. The Fair contains 1100 answers to the pessimists whose ghoulish gloating tlfct British industry is “down and out” is too much heard in the land. There are 1100 exhibitors and the stands occupy nearly 300,000 square feet.

The Fair promises to be the record yet held. On , the first day it was visited by 1000 home buyers and 450 foreign buyers—an increase of 100 per cent and 65 per cent respectively over last year. On the third day there were 500 overseas and 15,000 home buyers. Never before has there been so striking a display of the ingenuity iand variety of British industry. Practically every stand boasts a novelty. Hard times and bad trade are the finest stimulants to thq Brit ish manufacturer. They make him think hard, and when he does that the results are new designs and improvements and inventions that still give a lead to the rest of the world. A list' of new “features of the Fair” issued on the first day contained over 150 items. They ranged over every imaginable type of article from muleskin gloves to reed or steel furniture, elephant hair wrist-watch straps to “baby” grands and allsteel pianos for the tropics, artificial silk unbreakable gramophone records to a “robot eye” which can detect colour shades invisible to the human eye. Hollywood’s cinema lenses are made in Britain. Canning machinery is exhibited by one firm which makes 50,000,000 cans a year for British packers who export canned home-grown fruit and vegetables all over the world. In the Cotton Textiles Exhibition, held separately at the White City, there are two miles of cotton goods. They range from fabrics st> fine and beautifully printed that they are indistinguishable from the finest silk, to cotton which is used in tarmac road surfaces. There is a large theatre for mannequin parades and over 400 different designs of afternoon frocks and bathing suits, tennis dresses and beach pyjamas, are paraded several times a day. The Empire l Marketing Board has a stand showing exhibits of raw cotton from seven Empire countries.

A third section of the Fair is the Artificial Bilk Exhibition at the Albert Hall, where new fabrics and designs show how scientists can put the silkworm in the shade. On the first day a buyer who had previously done done all his business on the Continent placed an order for tear miles of British artificial silk.

The Fair is a magnet of British trade. Orders are pouring into Olympia and the White City. Empire buying is becoming daily a greater reality. The immediate success of the Pair proves that Great Britain still leads the world in design and quality in spite of foreign competition and world depressions.