A YEAR ABROAD

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19773, 22 February 1927, Page 8

A YEAR ABROAD

DR. WALL’S IMPRESSIONS ADDRESS TO ROTARY CLUB. ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT. Members of the Waugaami Rotary Club enjoyed at trip through Europe by proxy yesterday. They were conducted there by Dr A. H. E. Wall, whose impressions of his recent visit were informative and interesting. “I went Home in a cargo boat,” said Dr Wall, “And I must say that it was the most comfortable I travelled in. We had good food, pleasant fellow passengers, a genial captain, a most obliging chief stewart, and unlimited d</k space. The three weeks from Wellington to Panama were delightful, the Pacific Ocean well deserving its name.

“The only things of particular interest to us were the albatrosses. They flew for hours and hours without any apparent muscular effort, certainly without any movement of their wings, just a graceful gliding movement with equal ease and swiftness whether with the wind or against it and as the ship was making 12 or 13 knots, their rate must have been about. 20 for they made circles round us. It is the nearest approach to perpetual motion I have seen and if the same principle of motion could be adopted in aeroplanes, the problem of flying would soon be ended. The Panama Canal most of you have seen, so that I need say nothing about it except that I was greatly impressed with the great locks and their silent working. To sec a huge oceanic liner raised 85feet in a few minutes made one realize the power behind. “When we landed at Colon at the north end of the canal the first thing I saw was a large notice almost in the middle of the road to f*iy that the Rotary Club met at 12 noon on Mondays, but unfortunately our boat sailed at 11.45 a.m. Spring In London. We arrived in London on Good Friday, a glorious wtarm spring day, and this weather continued for a fortnight. The trees in the parks and in the country were just bursting into leaf. Hyde Park was beautiful and a walk along Rotten Row or an hour’.s rowing on the Serpentine gave us an excellent appetite for breakfast.

I expected to find London a great deal altered after twenty years but the alterations were rather of details than main essentials. London Bridge, the Bank, the Mansion House, the Guildhall, St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey were just the same and so were the streets, such as Cheapside, Steel Street, and the Strand, though, the general plan, so to speak, had not changed, the superstructure had. In p’ace of the small shop where I used to buy my gloves for 2s 9d, socks for Is and boots for 3s 9d, I found large and new building with polished marble facings built by banks and insurance companies to hide their huge profits in the past year. I found the streets more crowded and more noisy, more dirty. Dogs and pigeons should be prohibited wherein the first make the pavement unfit to walk on and the second disfigure the buildings, such as St. Paul’s. The noise of the London streets is terrific and it is impossible to sleep in a bedroom opening on to one of the main thoroughfares. W’e tried it several times. Londoners seem to delight in noises, motors of all descriptions especially motor buse.s are built to make noise.

There are some fine cars in England but the great majority of cars that you see on the roads are small, noisy rattling machines that would not live many months on our New Zealand roads. The car manufacturers of England have in my humble opinion a long way to go to catch their outside competitors. As one man put it they have not woken up yet since the war, they are just rubbing their eyes. Apd from •what I could gather from business men the motor trade was typical of the rest. It is not the men only that are at fault but the heads of the firms and the heads of the departments. There is a general self-satisfied condition of mind throughout England that is most exasperating to a colonial. They consider their methods arc all right and that they have only to wait for the tide to turn for their trade to revive. I am afraid they will be left on the beach high and dry if they go on as they are. They were sending commissions to America to learn how the Americans could produce .such low-priced goods and pay such high wages. 1 read a book “The Secret of High Wages.” written by one of the Austins, of the Austin motor works, after a visit to America. He described the general manager of many English firms as a courtly old gentlman who drove to his office at 10.30, had lunch from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., land drove I home again at 4.30 p.m. What could you expect from a business with a head like that, and I believe it, is a fairly correct description. In fact (after my own experience in the Austin show rooms in Oxford Street. I feci fairly certain that their general manager is one of this type. An Ingenuous Suggestion. However Austin at the end of his book made a serious suggestion lor relieving unemployment and trade depression in England. He said the Government should spend many millions on the roads and reduce the motor tax considerably so that the demand and rfalc of motors in England would be greatly increased. This engenuous suggestion would certainly be good for the motor trade in general and Austin in particular, but very bad for England. It reminded me of the famous island where the inhabitants earned a precarious livelihood by taking in one i another’s washing. There is undoubtedly at present a lack of punch in the English commercial man to-day and I was surprised to find that it is still kicking when he gets abroad. In the Federated Malay States which produce nearly ail the rubber and the tin of the world, most of the mining is in the hands of Australian firms with Australian managers. These Australians get every ounce of tin out of their property and pay from 60 to 100 per cent, on their capital and laugh at the English firms who lose about 40 per cent, of their tin and pay 20 per cent, dividends. The English workman :s 4 not better than his boss. I saw three men take nearly a week distempering a bed room in the hotel I was staying at in Sudan. It took two days to put a glass on a watch. To decarbonise a inotor-car they wanted four days and then had not finished it. Chinchen of the National Bank told me tales of the difficulties he had i n having small Ol-

terations done in his bank. He confirmed my opinions that the depression in trade in England would continue unless everyone from the biggest to the lowest awoke to the fact that the cause lay in themselves. Then there is the high taxation. The cost of the local bodies spend money most lavishly. We complain of the same extravagance in New Zealand but I shudder to think what we would say if we had the English taxation to meet- I don’t wish to appear too pessimistic for I still have faith in old England and in Englishmen, but I do wish they would realize that they are drifting and not fighting. T know we have similar defects here, but to a minor degree, and if we want to help England and the Empire, and where would the Empire be without England, we must put our backs into our job and do it a bit better than we have in the past few years. The Beauty of England. I am afraid I am an amateur with no knowledge of business, but as I have said too much about the trade of England, so let me turn to beauty of England. On my way home I endeavoured to tell my family how beautiful the English country was, but. when we went motoring through it, I realized that I had only half described it. No country that I have seen is half as beautiful. We motored to the New Forest, stayed at an old manor bouse in Devon, overlooking the valley of the Axemen, Axminstcr. I shall never forget the view of that valley on a glorious summer evening. Devon is supposed to be the most beautiful county in England, but they are all beautiful. Whether we were in Devon, Cornwall, Warwick, Derby, or Westmoreland, there was that peculiarly English charm which you can find nowhere else. And from a farmers point of view the land seemed wonderful. The farmers talked of hard times and their poor returns, but when I .saw the land and heard the prices they were getting for their stock and produce, 1 marvelled at the low rents and the low wages. One farmer with whom I spent a day said that if a farmer stuck to the old methods he was bound to lose money. He himself was making money, but ho was milking for the London market with New Zealand milking machines, 150 cows in one herd and he did not house his cows winter or summer. I believe he was right,

at any rate his balance-sheet for the previous year which he gave me proved that he was on the right lines. Perhaps I should say a. few words about the general strike. From a visitor’s point of view this was very interesting. I consider that the British Government deserved all praise for the wonderful organisation which it. had prepared months ahead. I was working at the time with an American doctor and an Iri.sh doctor, and they were both astounded at the good humour of the London crowd. Everybody smiled and enjoyed the inconveniences they were put to. The Trades Union Council had miscalculated the possibilities of the motor traffic. Thousands of cars streamed along the roads bringing people to their offices to work. Anyone with an

empty seat offered it to‘a pedestrian. It was simply a feast of goodwill and good fellowship, and in ton days the strike collapsed. If the coal miners had gone back to work like the rest I believe more good than harm would have been lhe result. Personally we profited by it for we were able to go to theatres which we would not have been able to obtain scats for at all under ordinary circumstances. Theatres in London are always crowded and you have to book weeks ahead to obtain seats.

After motoring through Scotland we came back to London and at the end of August left for the Continent. We wont first to Paris and spent a few days seeing the sights, such as Ver-

sailles and Tantanbleure. Coming back from the latter place we passed through Barbizin and were, shown the field from which Juliet, painted his famous picture of the gleaners. The, French people rather annoyed me for they are greedy, grasping, and barely civil. “Tonjour la politesse” is a phra.se that has lost its meaning in the France of to-day. Some day the Germans will cross the French frontier again, and T trust that England will stand by and let them come. The ingratitude of the French is beyond my prehension. Germans Expected Back. The Belgians were more pleasant to deal with and from my conversation with some of them they appeared to be convinced that the Germans would come again. From Brussels we went to Ypres to sec some of the battlefields. and thought how interesting it would be for some of you who were there during the war. What I marvelled at was that there was so little evidence of the great struggle. Along the famous Menin road peple were still living in hutments, but the rest of the villages and towns were entirely rebuilt in brick, the fields were covered with crops and the only evidence of the Great War were life cemeteries. All are beautifully kept, and the war memorials, such as the New Zealand Memorial on the Messi nes ridge. The town of Ypres is entirely rebuilt except the Clothe Hall and the Town Hall, which are still in ruins. At the Menin Gate the English are building a magnificent triumphal arch. Hill 60 is still in a dishevelled state, and here we found the peasants still digging for bodies, for which they receive the sum of 10 francs—ls pence at the then rate of exchange.

From Brussels we went to Amsterdam, through Holland, which you know is extremely flat. On each side of the railway as far as you could see were beautiful level fields with the wellknown Holstein cattle. Drains or canals run across the country in pareJlels and act as fences as well as drains. Windmills were everywhere and I found that a great number of these were there solely for pumping water out of the drains. This was very noticeable near the Zuider Zee, where the land is several feet below sea level. I was told that the Zuider Zee was being dyked and drained but it would take 25 years to complete the work. It was here that we went to the island of Marken. The inhabitants still dress in the bright Dutch costumes. It is said that they do this for the benefit of visitors, but I am sure that it is not so, for all they got from the party of Americans that we met there would not repay them for the trouble. From Amsterdam wo went to Cologne. On the way we saw the Kaiser’s present residence at Doorn. From Cologne we went up the Rhine to Weisbaden. The Rhine is very beautiful from Born upwards. On most of the hills are the ruins of castles. It must have been an unpleasant place in the old days. Weisbaden is a very pleasant town and the forest of Nurnberg, where we spent many hours, was delightful. One thing we noticed

about the forests in Europe was the absence of bird life. In fact the first morning in New Zealand when we woke in the hotel in Auckland wo were struck by the swoet singing of birds. It was swetter than any we had heard in our travels and wo felt we were really home again. At Weisbaden we saw British and French soldiers and one British Tommy amused me by saying how ho longed for the Palais de Danse at Hammersmith. Ho and the barber who cut my hair in Cologne were the only two discontented men I met in Germany. The barber had spenty twenty years in a barber's shop in tho City of London, and he and his wife and daughter longed to return. To tho superficial observer the German people appeared prosperous. They were well dressed and a great number of them overfed. The hotels give you excellent food and excellent attention, while the trains were the best wc travelled in. At Nurnberg I remarked to the head waiter about tho excellence of the fish, and asked how they were able to get such good fish so far inland. He told me it came up by night train and later I learnt that in Germany they run a fish train through the country at night, and at certain towns a truck of fish is dropped as the train rushes on. The fish are packed in wet moss and oxygen is pumped through to keep them alive so that they arrive at their destination quite fresh. Nurnberg is. an interesting town and like York in England still has its old fortified wall intact. While we were wandering round the old castle I heard New Zealand being mentioned by someone in a party of sightseers and I was astonished to see a man named An.sley who used to live in St. George’s Gate, Wanganui, a stone’s throw from my own house. He was with a party of the Universal Brotherhood on their way to Prague where they were endeavouring to put a stop to strikes, wars, etc. I wished I him every success. Three Weeks in Vienna. Vienna was our next stopping place and we stayed here three weeks, but as I was busy I did not have much time to look about. In Vienna the people are poor, and they are not ashamed to tell you so. They reminded me of Rachel weeping for her children and would not be comforted. Rothberger. tho secretary of . tho Rotary Club, the head of a large clothing establishment, said that the local Gov- ■ ernment of Vienna was socialistic and rates and taxes were so heavy that owners of property did not receive interest on their capital. He openly-

said that their only chance of salvation was to join Germany-, and no doubt that is what will be done eventually. I went twice to the Rotary Club in Vienna and enjoyed it. The president told me SO per cent, of the members .spoke English, and they spoke it well, so that con vernation was easy and interesting. In Vienna the main meal is in the middle of the day, so that tho Rotary lunch became tho Rotary dinner, and a very good dinner it was. Beer is the usual beverage but anp kind of liquor is obtainable as the meeting is held at one of the best hotels. The Vienna Club wished me to convey to you their best wishes. They were impressed with the fact that it took rnc six weeks to travel from New Zealand to Europe. It is a small club but a very cheerful one, but like the London club they do not indulge in singing. They say they do not wish to adopt all the American ideas.

From Vienna wc went to Venice, a whole day’s journey. I wanted to stop half way, but Cook’s, through whom I arranged my travelling, said there wa.s no where to stay. This was not correct for there wa.s a beautiful place up in the Julian Alps where we could have stayed in comfort. Before I loft Wellington the German Consul told me not to miss the journey from Vienna to Trieste or to Venice, for the scenery wa.s superb, and so it proved. The train climbed up the mountains to 6000 feet, winding round gorges and chasms with the hills covered with trees with their variegated autumn tints, while high above were the snow-capped Alps.

Wo reached Venice after dark and were taken to one hotel in a gondola. Venice charmed us with its gondolas, canals, quaint narrow streets, the Rialto and the Rialto Bridge. But tho glory of Venice is St. Mark’s Square, with St. Mark’s Church, and the Dage’s Palace. Delightful sunny days added greatly to the charm. St. Mark’s Church, with its glass mosaic fixtures, is the most beautiful church 1 h*ave seen, though St. Peter’s, in Rome, is more magnificent and grand.

From Venice we went to Florence and saw the picture galleries and the church. My son, aged 12, said on the second day that he was sick of Madonnas, and I agreed with him. Florence would be well if you had time to study the pictures but to see it in two days was impossible without a. feeling of surfeiting. Rome was our next stopping place, and was full of interest. It was a mass of ruins and relicts of the ancient Roman Empire, and to those who know their Roman history it would be wonderfully instructive, but I felt that I need to be a Roman Catholic before I coaid appreciate all the churches I was shown. From Rome we went to Genoa and saw the leaning tower of Pisa on our way. In the latter part of the journey the railways have been electrified as the line is one long succession of tunnels. Genoa is a busy shipping town with little interest to the tourist, so wc moved -on to a small watering place on the Italian coast called Alassid. Here we spent three delightful days bathing. Our hotel was on the beach, so that we walked out of the hotel into the sea. These three days were the most enjoyable of our two months on the Continent.

Our next move was to Nice and from there we drove along the famous Corniche Road to Monte Carlo and looked in at the Casino. This part of France is always full of sunshine and people are most gracious; quite different from those we came in contact with, in Paris and Marseilles. The Italians, on the other hand, were most polite and attentive. “At Marseilles,” concluded the doctor, “we caught our boat for Port Said. ’ ’

The club’s thanks to Dr. Wall were expressed by Rotarian John Ball, who said the speaker’s impressions had given them a valuable insight into economic conditions abroad. He hoped they would hear Dr. Wall again. (Applause).