A ROYAL BUYER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21126, 27 August 1938, Page 20

A ROYAL BUYER

Queen Mary has attended every British Industries Fair—excepting that of the year King George V died— its inception in 1915. Her Majesty is the holder of “No. 1” staff badge, the departmental emblem worn by officials of the Fair, and so great is her interest that she has made no fewer than thirty-five dteparate visits. In recognition of her interest in industrial craftsmanship and in the Fair, she recently received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, an award which has been made only to two other women—Queen Victoria and Madame Curie. Her Majesty can look back to the first “sample” Fair in 1915, when manufacturers were called together in London to see the kind of articles Britain was then importing from abroad and which, in the national interest, it was imperative that we should learn to make at home. That indeed was the origin of the Fair. It changed, as the result of changing need and circumstances, to a display of a wide range—“from powder puff to a power plant”—of British and Empire products. It is now the greatest national trade fair in the world. When Queen Mary first visited the Fair, it was not accommodated as It is now (in London and Birmingham) in three of the greatest exhibition buildings to be found anywhere. In those anxious first years with a war occupying everybody’s minds, the Fair found house-room where it could—in a museum, at the Crystal Palace, and, for two years, in a draughty warehouse at the London Docks.