THE FRANCO-BRITISH EXHIBITION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9273, 27 June 1908, Page 7

THE FRANCO-BRITISH EXHIBITION.

r«»— •-? A DAMP AND DOLEFUL OPENING. " MUDDLE AND PUDDLE." [FKOM OUtt CORRESPONDENT.] LONDON, May 15. Heralded with a great flourish of trumpets in the Press, the FrancoBritish Exhibition opened its doors to the public yesterday afternoon. There was a note of chastened, pride about the whole affair. It was a day of piti" less rain and blighted hopes. The opening ceremony, which was to have been so brilliant, " went off " like a damp squib, and the one hundred and twenty-three thousand sightseers who went out gaily to see tho show^ came home muday, wet, tired and dispirited. These reflections may seem unkind, considering how the Exibition authorities must have worked to get the place into anything like order Tor the opening day ; but the fact is that the newspapers led the public to believe that the Exhibition was much nearer completion than it really is. Some days before the opening we had. the "Times" writing in, this strain.: " Of course an exhibition ought not to be in a condition of glaring unreadiness on the opening day. That has sometimes happened on these occasions, but it will not happen at Shepherd's Bush," This theme, with variations, ran through all the pasans of praise which heralded the coming Exhibition in the Press. And the opening day found the great show in just that condition of "glaring unreadiness 1 ' I which had been scented as impossible. It was a day of disappointments. At ! noon, when the invited guests were to !be admitted, the main entrance was still blocked up with scaffolding, and for three quarters of an hour some thousands of smartly dressed people had to stand in the muddy Toad waiting to get in, while tho rain cam© down and spoiled their pretty dresses and their silk hats. I must admit they bore the delay and discomfort with great cheerfulness, but the crush was co. great that several women fainted and nad to be carried off by the ambulance men. At last the scaffolding was knocked away, and the crowd surged through the turnstiles. The vestibule was a chaos of 6tep-ladders and wet paint, with workmen holding up the scaffold poles to prevent them being kooked down in the crush. We got through the turnstiles somehow, and tailed off down a long succession of empty halls, some of them still unpapered, finally emerging into the open-air Court of Honour. This "wonderland of fairy palaces' presented in the pouring rain a most woebegone appearance. It is a great open space surrounded by Indian buildings of florid architecture, with a wealth of domes and minarets, and in ' the centre of the court a large lake spanned by an ornamental bridge. The design is very picturesque, and in the sunlight, with a blue sky overhead, the effect should be striking and attractive. It is a pity t however, that the palaces surrounding the court should have been coloured a common-place yellow instead of being pure white. Seen on. a wet day, the effect was tawdry and dispiriting, and nothing could have been more incongruous than the mass of thirty thousand black umbrellas which filled th© interior of the court around the lake. The court quickly filled up, and many thousands of people were unable to see anything of the opening ceremony. They missed very little, for the ceremony was an absolute failure. Rain fell in torrents, and the forest of umbrellas spoiled everybody's view. When the Prince of Wales, standing on a balcony which overlooked the Court of Honour, declared the Exhibition open, a great cascade of water was supposed to flow down into the lake, and scores of thousands of electric lamps were to "burst into light" on the palaces sourrounding the court. But the great cascade was only half completed, and instead of a mighty flood there was a mere trickle of water. Nor did the lamps burst into light. A choir of 700 voices sang the " Marseillaise" and an old English madrigal, and the trumpets blew a fanfare; but the cascade and lights fiasco and the dripping umbrellas damped the spirits of the audience, and there was little applause. " ENGLAND'S MAY." From the Court of Honour the Prince and Princess walked through the rain to the Palace of Music, where the second part of the ceremony was to take place. JDuring the preceding hour the attendants at" the doors of this building 6pent their time in keeping people out and leaving them to wait in the rain, and the bulk of the audience were admitted only in the last few minutes. The result was that a great many ticket-holders were crowded out altogether, and it was a wet and muddy audience that assembled inside Madame Albani sang the National Anthem, assisted by a choir of 30C voices and the London Symphony Orchestra, and then the choir sang an ocle by the Duke of Argyll called " A Welcome Song," specially written for this occasion, and set to music fov Sir Charles Stanford. The opening lines •were : — Take you welcome, eomrad»s all! England's May Greets you . . . As England's May was greeting us at the moment with floods of rain and a eea of mud, the lines were scarcely felicitous. But they were kindly meant, so perhaps we may hope thai the French visitors refrained from oarcasm. ' The last lines of the ode fortunately refrained from 'remarks about England's May weather, and found « more resTx>nsive echo in the feelings of the audience : — Rivals! We give you Old England* ra-wwd, Fair day? in liar ■woosEand'J *ad sports on Bfti sward t Give welcome to Franc»; .Tolly Brians, advance! Here's a health to Old France--(rive -welcome tr> France — "Welcome! "Welcome! Welcome! Titan the Duke of ArevH read an address of welcome to the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the Prince renlicd in a brief speech, thanking the French nation and the British dominions overseas for their generous co-op-oration in the Exhibition, and congratulating all who were responsible foi "this marvellous and beautiful creation.'* Then we had the "Marseillaise" again, and finally the "Lohengrin " third act prelude, to the strains orf which the Royal party left for the Stadium. In this mighty and really magnificent arena, the largest _and most wonderful sports ground in the world, a programme of athletic soorte vras nobly earned out in spite of the dreadful- downpour .of rain,_and _ the Prince and Princess heroically sat for an hour and watched its progress. Meanwhile a vast horde of hungry and disheartened sight-seers, only c minority of whom had been able to se? the opening ceremonies, were scouring the buildings in search of something tc eat. The employees of the restaurants worked like heroes and heroines t« meet their ravenous demand, but were overwhelmed by 6heer force of numbers. While waitresses were trying tc guard the doors of an already overcrowded cafe, I saw people scrambling in through the windows. Thousands more wandered disconsolately about the grounds, and got wet and muddy for their pains. Thero is .ocj vf\t practically nothing to see. The Exhibition is at present a mere empty shell. The great palaces are littered inside with unopened packing cases and carpenters' materials. The "sideshows" are all unfinished. The " stately avenues " are in many cases mere cart-tracks, churned by r»nv and feet into sloughs of mud. Rr.bWsh heaps and scrap-iron and ponffoM nofefl encumber the ground. The colonial soction h narueniarlv backward, ntta

will not be. anything like pw*6KtabU for another inontH. ■■ !- )^ v THE NEW ZEALAND PATOitON. Australia and Canada are patting up fine pavilions, but the .New Zealand building is very disappointing.. It ss only abotit one-fourth the' size of tne. Canadian pavilion, and in it is ugly and insignificant^ Peg-haps it is not fair to judge it; Deib^a- the workmen have finished its ©jS&truction, but at present it is a mere"barnlike structure, with only ; v .a^xqjr o* cheap-looking pillars on eitKef* side to relieve its nakedness. It was erected by the Exhibition authorities^" SMit is they who are responsible for its ugUne3B; but the dominion would;;. I tlunk, ... have been well advised to money and put up a building Vri? its own. They could then have had "their own design and their own materials, and the building would haye y?been ready long ago. The Exbibitlojtv^eoplo promised .to have the New Zealand building completed by the-- end of March. It is now tho middle bs ? May, and the work is still unfinished. Tne result is that none of the.: oasca of exhibits can be opened yet, aad-'irhes I visited the New Zealand pavilion yesterday the interior was.izi.jß; state of chaos. A , valuable month will be lost before it is in proper working order, owing to the delay or $he b,nild- • ers in completing their share "d?*' the work. ■ - It 13 useless to attempt to describe the Exhibition at present. It ia the merest skeleton of an exhibition,, and many weeks must elapse before it w decently presentable, riot, half of . the r exhibits are on the ground yet, and not a tenth of them are unpacked. No one expected the Exhibition -to bar ready on the opening day, for nthes© things never are ready up 'tb^-fSmfe. \ But few indeed expeoted to. find It" sof very backward. One drenched*^Anti» podean summed it up rather aptly ye*- > terday as "muddle and puddle. t And , this poor weary scribe, after stunibliiiß ■ ab^ut the mud-heaps of the colonial 6et!tion for >the best part of snVhottr 1 in the rain, is fain to endorse that N sorrowful conclusion. v