LANCASHIRE IN LONDON

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1686, 22 June 1904, Page 76 (Supplement)

LANCASHIRE IN LONDON

A CRYSTAL PALACE CROWD,

(From Our Own Correspondent.) * ' LONDON, April 29. Stom.e thirty thousand men of Lancashire left their dolleries and mills on Friday night and poured into London by train to see the “coop-tie.” For the benefit of the uninitiated I may explain that the “coop-tie”—as Lancashire calls it—is the final liiatch to decide the Association football championship of England and the holders of the championship cup. The final is always played at the Crystal, Palace, and the colonial visitor who neglects this opportunity to see a mighty football crowd misses one of the most striking and characteristic sights of the year. On this occasion lavo Lancashire teams contested the final, and so two rival armies from the County Palatine flocked southward in their thousands. The railways ran excursion trips' to London from Manchester- and Bolton for eleven shillings return per head, and it took eighty trains to cope with the traffic. _ The excursionists travelled all night, arriving at the London termini from 3 a.m. onwards and sleeking forthwith the friendly shelter of the nearest “pub/" Out again after breakfast —all but the stragglers—they drove round London in procession of brakes and omnibuses, seeing the sights of the metropolis. Bough-looking customers most of them were, but eminently good-natured, with cloth caps pushed well: back, a huge nosegay of flowers' and ferns adorning each jacket, and with pipes in full blast they set all London agape! Their energy was prodigious. By noon many of the visitors had seen more of the sights of London than some of its oldest inhabitants. Two Lancashire men who went out to the Palace in The same railway carriage as myself' Had been, through Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower, and both Houses of Parliament before noon—-and two other men in the carriage,, both Londoners, confessed that they had never been 'inside the Tower or the Abbey.in their lives! : * ■; And now the scene changes to the Crystal Palace football ground, a grassy arena from which the banked-up turf rises steeply to form a great amphitheatre. Imagine a crowd of between sixjty, and seventy thousand people, packed together upon these slopes;*.but.-unless the sight has been once seen imagination must fall short of the reality.' It is impressive by sheer force of numbers. Each unit seems so absurdly 5 insignificant to'such a multitude. and yet the combined effect is overwhelming. The crowd on the opposite slope is wedged so lightly that—save for the front row —all you can see of them is their faces; and the mass looks for all the world like a great bank of flesh-coloured flowers. “AIL flesh is grass”—you think of '- it when you see a mass of faces rising tier above tier and swaying to and fro li)ce long grass in a breeze; a crowd in which individuality sinks to nothingness, and humanity in the mass shows forth merely as so many hundred 'yards of face ! But the multitude is very nnich alive. Let me give you an idea of what it eats and drinks in the course of an afternoon at the Palace. Last Saturday’s) crowd polished off 40 lambs, 250 chines of mutton, 200 rumps and 60 foreribs of beef; it made short work of the 120,000 pieces of bread and butter and such trifles as 45,000 pieces of cuke, 20,000 buns, and 25,000 soonesi; it cheerfully welcomed “Little Mary’s” worst enemies in the shape’ of. 6000 sixpenny pork pies, 2000 sausages, 'and 20,000 French pastries—but .0 would take too long to enumerate the eatables required to feed the hungry multitude. And the sound of popping corks —120,000 of them—may be left to the imagination. It is estimated that the crowd spent <£34,425 at the Palace on Saturday, of which as much as <£31,025' is attributed to the thirty or forty thousand visitors from the north. The expenses -of the Lancashire lads on drink is put down at £3OOO. No wonder that, a few of them elected to “take it lying down.” Stretched out on the grass at the feet of the multitude, while the cheers thundered above them and the match they had come so far to see shaped its eventful course, they slumbered peacefully. But not so the groat, army of • their fellow-provincials. Their lungs gave lusty aid to .this side or to that, and the sound' of their cheering was as the noise of many waters. Long after the match the voice of the thirty thousand might bo heard in London’s busy streets. Far into the night the qui'et squares of Bloomsbury, on the road to Burton station, would resound with unfamiliar yells. The’"coop-tie” was over; Lancashire was' going home. I haven’t said much about the match. But then, it was Association football, and in t-liat branch of sport I have to confess as the Prime Minister did on Saturday, that I am merely “an admiring ignoramus.” Besides the crowd was much more intersting than the match!