BRING HOME JOBS.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 301, 19 December 1931, Page 26 (Supplement)

BRING HOME JOBS.”

Lord Beaverbrook Speaks in Limehouse. BIG AUDIENCE GRIPPED. (Special to the “ Star.”) LONDON, October 15. Lord Beaverbrook went to Limehouse last night, conducted “The Red Flag ” for interrupters who wanted to sing that doleful ditty, exchanged jest for jest, made a speech full of “punch”, called for any number of questions and answered them pat—in short, took the East End by storm in the cause of Empire Free Trade. Limehouse is a testing place for speakers. Speeches made in Limehouse have a habit of sticking. There were many points in his speech last night which will stick. 44 Every Saturday night,” he exclaimed, 44 you and I, as consumers, pay the wages of a million men and women whom we employ in Denmark and Holland and South America. Let us bring home these million jobs! ” Limehouse has a way of its own of summing up a political cause- Last night Lord Beaverbrook’s audience was a piece of England which you could not match anywhere else (says a report in the 44 Daily Express”). There, in a body, were the solid merchants who handle every day the traffic of all the seas. Behind them, standing in row upon row, and crowding the gallery overhead, were the men of the docks, the stevedores and the wharf hands. Many of them were old sailors, who have sailed every sea of the Empire and the world outside it. East End Wit. They stood there exchanging the quick shafts of East End wit, chewing

their quids, sucking their stumps of cigarettes, shifting their caps from one ear to the other at every jest they cracked. They were great friends among themselves, but they were united in hostility to the platform. At the same time they were curious. They had been attracted to hear the cause of Empire Free Trade, and in particular to hear Lord Beaverbrook. They waited. The chairman made a little speech. Limehouse interrupted rudely and cracked jokes. Limehouse was taking a good look at Lord Beaverbrook. As he stepped forward to the front of the platform the inevitable happened. Someone started up that miserable ditty, 44 The Red Flag ”. That tune was never made for sailors’ lungs. They could not make it go. Lord Beaverbrook stood there waiting, and then he did an extraordinary thing. “Sing up!” he cried. “Louder!” He likes to see a thing done properly. In a moment he was waving his arms as if leading the community singing of 44 The Red Flag ”. “ Louder. ” he cried with a sweep of the arms. But it could not be done. It was so odd to see him leading the music in this particular song that the audience burst into laughter and silence fell. There was not silence for long. He had one interrupter after another. One loud-lunged docker bellowed continually without a word being understood. Lord Beaverbrook broke off his speech. “ Come up here, my good fellow,” he called, and went forward to bring up the interrupter to the platform. The docker was taken aback. He became stagestruck. He suddenly rushed to the back of the hall and kept quiet. Limehouse began to warm to Lord Beaverbrook. He was gripping his audience, and they listened as he put

the agricultural case with striking simplicity. 44 You and I as consumers,” he said, 44 are actually pasturing 1,400,000 cows abroad for our milk. We are actually keeping 40,000,000 hens abroad to lay our eggs. Plenty of Work. 44 There will be work for the dairymaids and for all the many workpeople who attend to dairy produce; there will be work for those who keep poultry and pigs when we bring all these foreign jobs home to England. 44 There will be plenty of work when we bring the cows home and when the chickens come home to roose.” When the interrupters broke out again and someone cried: “ What do you know about work? ” Lord Beaverbrook exclaimed: “ I know as much about the position of the working man as any person in this room.” In this way Lord Beaverbrook had come to mastering his Limehouse audience. For the rest of his speech he had a tranquil passage to declare his profound sympathy with the unemployed and to explain the policy with which he is fired, in the certain hope that if it is carried out it will bring solid work and good wages to those who are workless to-da\A One argument in particular made a direct appeal to the dockside audience. Lord Beaverbrook showed how his policy will immensely benefit the British shipping industry. He explained how the nationalist policy pursued by foreign countries has led to orders that none but American ships shall carry American coastal merchandise, that French goods must go in French ships, Italian in Italian, and so on. 44 One result is that 50,000 British sailors are out of work and 752 British vessels are laid up at the same time that 60 per cent of our import-

ed goods are brought to us by foreign vessels. “If we bring about our United Empire,” he exclaimed, “we can divert that traffic to our dominions and colonies and carry it in British bottoms.” Mr Edward Marjoribanks, late Conservative member and present candidate for Eastbourne, moved a vote of thanks to Lord Beaverbrook. The audience rose and cheered to the echo, and sung, 44 For he’s a jolly good fellow.”