TAKE PATRIOTIC HOLIDAYS WITHIN THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 300, 18 December 1931, Page 8

TAKE PATRIOTIC HOLIDAYS WITHIN THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

To-day’s Signed Article.

The Head of the Australian Travel Association Gives Sound Advice.

By

H. C. Fenton.

What’s all this talk of staying at home from patriotic motives? . The Englishman, the Scotsman, the Irishman and the Welshman have never yet stayed at home from patriotic motives. They have always roamed the world if they felt like it, in good times and bad. . That is why we have an Empire. The trouble is that the excellent example of the Duke of Connaught in foregoing his customary three months on the Riviera and that of other people in giving up villas and bungalows on the Mediterranean seaboard have been widely distorted in their significance and allowed to find expression in a general stay-at-home exhortation.

I am quite sure, is not the interpretation which His Royal Highness intended should be given to his winter holiday in Devonshire. He and you and I all know, of course, that in these difficult days it is unpatriotic to buy francs and marks and pesos and lira with our badly-needed pounds merely to exchange them for hotel rooms, taxis, tips, petits-chevaux and new, hats in foreign countries. But what, in the name of patriotism, is wrong with spending good British pounds, if we have them to spend, in any British country? The Empire which Britishers sallied forth in boom time and in slump to build now needs the Tom and Mac and Pat and David —not forgetting Rose and Kathleen and Jean and Gwynneth—of to-day to consolidate it. The Personal Touch. Between them Downing Street, Ottawa, Canberra, Cape Town, Wellington and so on have done their best to cross the t’s and dot the i’s and put the trimmings on a more or less workable Empire constitution, and Imperial Conferences have met to talk about it when pens and paper became inadequate. But the personal touch which has given “ rosbif ” to Continental dictionaries and “ chez nous ” to Tooting front doors is still woefully lacking between the man in Adderley Street and his kinsman in the Strand, the woman shopping in the Melbourne Block and her sister bargain hunting in Oxford Street. But if, in these days of social and economic earthquakes, Great Britain and her Empire are to stand solid as the world’s bulwark of civilisation against the forces of disruption, Bolshevism and worse, British peoples must bridge their little differences of thought, habit and environment that successive generations have widened, and learn to know each other and each other’s individual play as the scrum half knows the wing-three-quarter or the bowler exactly what the slips can do in any given circumstance.

Unreasonable Preference. Heaven alone knows why British people have in the past underrated their own countries and have largely preferred to move about in foreigners’. It may be because members of a family often tend to drift apart, but it’s high time we had a rapprochement. Most of us in the Dominions hang on tenaciously to the Imperial idea as to a family name and tradition, but sometimes the ties get strained as when we see Russian serf-produced wheat and butter undercutting our own in the London markets or when you regard some misunderstood step of ours as one of independence. A freer interchange of holiday and business trips during which we can all talk about these things and get each other’s point of view would obviate or at least minimise all the cross talk we sometimes shoot at each other from our respective corners of the world. Patriotic Travel. It isn’t, too, as if the Dominions were crude, uninteresting sorts of places to be avoided in one’s travels. British countries are unquestionably blessed with the pick of the world’s climates, scenery and opportunities for sport. All the Empire’s cities have their centres of culture, amusement and shopping, and there is sufficient difference between them to add piquancy. And nowadays, when Great Britain and the Dominions are either off or going off the gold standard or have depreciated currencies, the advantages as well as the patriotism of Empire holiday travel are obvious. Here we get back to patriotism again—-one is helping by Empire travel to keep British shipping going. The British shipping trade constitutes one of the most valuable invisible exports—exports which are badly needed to restore that worrying trade balance to equilibrium. No, it is not more patriotic to stay at home. (Anglo-American N.S. —Copyright.)