AUSTRIAN REVOLT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19835, 26 June 1934, Page 14

AUSTRIAN REVOLT

OUTWITTING MRS GRUNDY ‘‘Mrs Grundy” had a busy day on the Vienna bathing beaches recently. The indignation of the once merry Viennese at restrictions on their amusements became so great that plain-clothes police had to be called in to stop a “dance riot” with threats of twenty-four hours’ imprisonment, says the “Daily Telegraph.” Owing to the great heat the bathing beaches had a record number of visitors for so early in the year. On Gansehaufel Island as already reported, the sexes are now sternly separated at the gates by orders of the new regime in Austria. But 6,800 bathers paid for admission in the expectation of enjoying themselves as in the past. Husbands and wives were at first indignant at being made to pay for two cabins. The real trouble began, however, over the prohibition of dancing. Thousands of bathers crowded round the bandstand and shouted in chorus, “We want dance music again. Down with the new Puritans.” They were toid that the Clerical-Fascist Government had forbidden dancing on the bathingbeaches. Thereupon the bathers began to make their own dance music by whistling popular tunes and dancing to them. Plain-clothes police were sent for and broke into the merry crowds, shouting “Anyone who refuses to stop dancing will be arrested on the spot and imprisoned for twenty-four hours.” The bathers moved off to the meadows and, under the guise of gymnastics, began leaping about to the rhythm of old folk-dances. On other parts of the beach inspectors of morals got to work on bathing costumes with an imaginary, if not an actual, tape measure. Three women were cautioned for wearing too flimsygarments, and other women in divided costumes were ordered off.