TOURIST INDUSTRY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22320, 18 January 1936, Page 2 (Supplement)

TOURIST INDUSTRY

VALUE TO BRITAIN ADDRESS BY PRINCE OF WALES The Travel and Industrial Development Association of Great Britain and Ireland had a field day recently, when it held its annual meeting and staged a programme of moving pictures throughout the afternoon and evening. At the annual meeting the Prince of Wales, who is patron, was the principal speaker. He complimented the association on its information bureau in Paris, which he had visit-ed.' The moving picture industry, said the Prince, had coined many new words, and one of them was "projection." This was exactly the aim of the Travel Associations —to project Britain on the world's screen—the best kind of advertisement they could have. Britain had a lot of things to sell.

"The association is probably much to blamo," ho added, "in creating homesickness by painting pictures of a country's life that is deep-rooted in tradition and tranquillity and is not ashamed, even in this realistic age, to be picturesque. The propaganda, if i may call it so, does not prevent us from taking! a proper pride in our historic glories and in the many picturesque ceremonies and customs that link the citizen of to-day with his forebears and attract the foreign visitor." The Prince said he was not forgetting the economic significance of their work. Professor Ogilvie had enlightened them as to the value of the socalled "invisible export" represented by the expenditure of oversea visitors to Britain. He had been amazed to learn that these visitors spent in 1934 no less than £25,000,000—-a sum not far behind the £23,000,000 which Britain obtained from the sale of wool and the £31.000,000 from the sale of coal. I» should be generally recognised that the tourist trade benefited, directly or indirectly, almost every industry. Lord Derby said that the whole or the £25,000,000 spent by tourists wfts left behind. None of it had to go out to purchase raw material. Such a fact.ho suggested, alone justified the £4UW which the Government at present gave them. , The films displayed to large invited audiences at one of the West End ture theatres showed what a wealth o subjects there are to photograph W Great Britain, and what a drawing power tiiese films would have in foreign countries and in other parts of Empire.