Put sixteen persons, besides the driver, on top of a 'bus, and you have a something that looks topheavy enough to turn over at any moment. But they never do turn over. The outside seats are the favorites, and people wait for the next 'bus rather than go inside.
The male Londoner climbs up, gets his seat, and loads his pipe, and goes to smoking. He may be seated beside a lady or a little girl, but that is no matter; the British Constitution guarantees the right to smoke ad. lib. on top of a 'bus, and the Briton must have his rights. The lady in the next seat can climb down if she doesn't like second-hand smoke from cheap "shag."
The ride on top of a 'bus is often very pleasant, I must admit, when once you are comfortably seated, if you do not worry about the chances of breaking your neck in getting down. You have a fine view of the streets and the people, and of whatever you pass. The fact that you make part of an advertising pageant need make no difference. Every 'bus is plastered all over with signs of infant foods, patent milks, plays, soaps, and patent medicines.
But what, when it rines, as the Cockneys say? Is not the top of a 'bus uncomfortable on a riny day? Bless your 'art; that is hall provided for. On most 'buses there is a rubber apron attached to each outer seat, and you have only to draw it around you when the shower comes.
And that is not all. So wonderful is the march of improvement that we now have what we call the umbrella 'bus. There is an umbrella attached to each seat, and when it rains you have only to hoist your umbrella. Who would have thought of such luxuries fifty years ago?
The messenger boy, or the errand boy, is happy as a King when he gets a front seat, lights his cigarette, and takes out his penny novel or his pink newspaper. He is to have a ride of two or three miles for a penny or a penny-ha'penny, which his boss furnishes. Susie, the working girl, with her rosy cheeks and her heavy English shoes, evidently enjoys it. "Arry, the clerk, in his silk hat, and conscious of his seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, considers it a luxury. But to an American who, in the dim and shadowy past, once took a ride in a cable car or an elevated train, the London 'bus seems a fit companion for the Tower or the ruins of Melrose Abbey.
Beastly Underground Trains.
So, nothing is left but that unspeakable thing, the underground railway--or the main sewer, as Londoners call it. I suppose there is not as outrageous a means of transit in any other city in the whole world. It is not worth while to waste adjectives upon it; the word vile describes it thoroughly. The only good thing about it is the fact that the employes, like most Londoners, are almost invariably polite and attentive. It would be a sorrowful thing for New York if we were to take to building railroads under ground.
Many Americans no doubt remember the pictures of the London underground that were published in one of our prominent magazines a few years ago. There were fine, high arches, lights glittered everywhere, and happy-looking travelers waited for the sumptuous trains to draw up. But the artist who made the pictures must have had a fine imagination, that lifted him high above the sordid regions of fact.
To travel by the underground, you go into a dismal-looking station and apply at the "booking office" for a ticket, taking it first, second, or third class, as you prefer.
Before you have made many journeys you learn that there is very little difference between the first-class carriages and the third, all being equally bad, and all going by the same train. But there is a considerable difference in the cost; what costs a shilling first class costs about a sixpence third class.
A man at the top of the stairs punches your ticket as you go through the gate, and you look down several long flights and see far below dim figures moving about in the haze. In some conditions of the outside atmosphere it seems impossible at first to breathe the foul air of the tunnel. It is an air that you can see; and you feel it the moment it strikes the lungs. The predominant smell is sulphur, mingled with coal gas, smoke, and damp.
The sole light in the daytime comes through a series of small brick arches, that run up slanting to the air above, and what little can steal down the stairways. The long platform consequently is dim and ghostly, and it is nearly always dirty, though brooms are cheap enough here. Beyond the end of the platform, in both directions, is the black tunnel, totally unlighted.
Traveling in Dark and Smoke.
Presently there comes a shrill little whistle, and in a moment you hear a rattling of wheels and axles that leads you to suppose, till you learn better, that some disabled old engine is being taken to the shops. But it is no disabled engine; it is a train--perhaps your train. They all have that peculiar rattle, as if they were about to fall apart.
You must be careful, however, about taking the train, for several sets of trains run over the same tracks, some going in one direction, some in another. You hurry up the platform to ask the only guard in sight, and he tells you; and if it is your train you begin to look for a "carriage."
If your ticket is first class, generally the nearest carriages are all labeled second class, or third. As the train is about to start, you take the first carriage you can get, no matter what its calss; and next instant the porter goes along, slamming to the doors. There is no one to direct you to the carriage in which you belong. If you have a third class ticket, you may enter a first class compartment with impunity, running the risk of some railroad detective in plain clothes asking to see your ticket and arresting you for fraud.
"All right!" the guard shouts. The engine gives another shrill whistle; and off you go, into the darkness. Engine and cars are both ridiculously small. There is one tiny gas jet in the roof of the car, and that is the sole light. There may be six or eight people in the compartment with you, or you may be all alone. The deeper you go into the tunnel, the thicker is the sulphurous smoke.
You are at perfect liberty to get out wherever and whenever you please. No one will interfere with you in the least, nor is there any one to give you information. The names of stations are never called, and you do not see the guard till you get out. It is your business to know where your station is. There is a sign at each station telling what it is; but the sulphury smoke covers the windows with a film, and you cannot see without opening the door--and even then seeing is hard work, in the dim light.
Arrived at your destination, or perhaps a few stations beyond it, you give up your ticket to the man at the gate, and he thanks you for it, and you climb the long flights of stairs into comparatively pure air, and feel thankful that you have escaped.
Our elevated roads and cable roads are not quite perfect, but they are half a century in advance of any transit facilities to be found in London.
WILLIAM DRYSDALE.
|
The above is the 4th in a series of over 40 New York Times articles by reporter William Drysdale describing his European tour in 1897 and 1898. The 2nd article in the series can be read on the London News page, the 7th article from the series on the England News page, the 29th and 30th articles on the Paris News page, and the 31st article on the France News page.
The British pound was worth about $4.86 in 1897;, and, by retail price index, £1 in 1897 was equivalent to about £77.99 in 2006. In the old British monetary system (prior to decimalisation) there were 12 pence (pennies) in 1 shilling and 20 shillings in 1 pound, therefore 240 pence in £1. A penny from 1879 would have been worth about £0.32 in 2006 money.
The Federal Reserve Bank's estimated consumer price index shows that $1 in 1897 was equivalent to $25.82 in 2008.
TIME Magazine, March 31, 1947, p. 29:
FOREIGN NEWS: Ein Tywysoges [cover story-- see photo of cover]
...HRH Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor... has learned, among other things, never to yawn in public officials' faces.
Last week, as Britain's Royal Family wended their triumphal way through Africa (largely for the purpose of introducing Princess Elizabeth to her polyglot future subjects), she was often tempted to yawn. For weeks she had been through an endless procession of official receptions, tedious reviews, soporific speeches and tiresome dedications...
To many a dusky African subject of King George, Queen Victoria is still remembered as "The Great She-Elephant across the Big Water."...
Since Victoria's day her Empire has come on troubled times. The Crown itself has lost its last remaining ounce of direct political power.* But what the Crown has lost in weight, it has gained in glamour. Princess Elizabeth, who will be the next wearer-- unless her parents, most improbably, have a son-- shows no more sign of greatness than the young Victoria did. She is not required to be great; she is expected to be gracious.
Britain's heiress is called "Princess" by right of her royal birth, but she has no title in the peerage, and is rated a commoner by law. She is medium tall (5 ft. 4 in.) slim, (cameras give her a falsely hefty look), full-bosomed, with brown hair, a creamy, fair complexion, blue eyes, and white teeth (a shade oversize). She has neither her father's shy reserve or her mother's dazzling charm...
To all appearances Princess Elizabeth is exactly the daughter that plain, conscientious King George and matronly Queen Elizabeth deserve...
For all her understandable boredom in South Africa, Elizabeth has inheirited from her parents the instinctive ability to do the right thing. At a Girl Guide (Girl Scout) review in dark Basutoland, it was she who spotted a bus full of Guides kept well apart from the rest. Despite the anguished cries of officials, she promptly went over to talk to them. They were the Girl Guide troop from a leper colony. Next day everyone in South Africa knew what the Princess had done.
In Buckingham Palace, just as she might have in some U.S. Middletown, the heiress to the throne had her own troop of Girl Guides, the 7th Westminster Company, organized by children of Palace staffers. The Queen gave the girls a company flag, and in time Elizabeth worked her way up to be patrol leader... "Here," she once told her chatterbox sister Margaret, "I am not your sister, and I'll permit no slackness." Margaret, too, can be critical. "Lilibet," she once said, "that's the fourteenth chocolate biscuit you've eaten. You're as bad as Mother-- you don't know when to stop."
From the first, Elizabeth's father and mother (Papa and Mummie) were determined to keep their daughter's life as free from the shadow of the Crown as possible. But in Britain, as in most of the Empire, Princess Lilibet was the private darling of every household...
...her sense of importance was in no way diminished by a kindly, doting old Sovereign whom she called "Grandpapa England."...
Statuesque Queen Mary, still the greatest influence in Elizabeth's life, was never one to tolerate arrogant nonsense as she shepherded her small relative through London's museums and theaters. Once when Lilibet tugged at her impatiently because there were crowds outside "waiting to see me," Granny Queen whisked the proud Princess home via the back door...
The Pinkle-Ponkle. ...every day from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, [Elizabeth] studied history, grammar, literature and arithmetic with her Scottish governess "Crawfie" (Miss Marion Crawford).
To give an added regal polish, there were lessons in French (from a French countess), German, art, and dancing. As time went on, the Vice-Provost of Eton, erudite Clarence Henry Kennett ("Shee-Kay") Marten (later knighted and promoted to Provost), was called in to brush up the Princess' constitutional history.
As a student, Elizabeth was always systematic rather than brilliant. She learned to play Schumann, Chopin, and Beethoven capably and accurately on the piano, although she preferred Bing Crosby recordings. Her drawings, like the horse she executed on linoleum for Granny Queen's Christmas, were painstaking and thorough. Very different were Sister Margaret's drawings of an imagined character called the Pinkle-Ponkle, who hovered vaguely over towns. "If her were to come down," Margaret replied to all critics, "he'd find worm sandwiches and caterpillar jam-- green jam." Like her father, Elizabeth worries a great deal over Margaret. "Wherever did you learn such slang?" King George once asked his younger daughter. "Oh," said Margaret, "at my mother's knee-- or some such low joint."
...Devoted to horses, (she pretended her legs were a team and called them Flycatcher and Harmony), [Elizabeth] had her own pony at four. Her backyards were the family's vast estates: Victoria's Balmoral; Birkhall, her parent's house in the Highlands; and Windsor Castle.
...It was all very cozy as long as her father remained Duke of York. Then in 1936 came the death of Grandpapa England and the eleven hectic months that ended in Edward VII's abdication. Feckless little Margaret Rose was disgusted. "Now we'll have to move to the Palace" she said. "And I've only just learned to spell York and now I'm not to use it any more." But Elizabeth's eyes were round and solemn as she spied a letter on the hall table addressed to "Her Majesty the Queen." "That's Mummie now, isn't it," she said in an awestruck voice.
Two years later the country went to war...
Yellow Glare. At 18 the heiress to the throne came of age, imperially, ready to assume the Crown if her father died. As a private person she would not come of age for three years. The question of her official debut could be put off no longer, and in 1943 the wartime Princess was officially introduced to her people in the vivid, yellow glare of the blast furnaces in a Welsh tin-plate mill. Miners, factory girls, housewives and dock hands turned out by the thousands to cheer her on a two day tour. Denied the privilege of hailing her as the Princess of Wales (she is still only Heiress Presumptive, on the suppostion that a male Heir Apparent may be born to claim the title of Wales), the Welsh bestowed upon her their own homespun title, Ein Tywysoges-- "Our own Princess."
...In stage center, Elizabeth blossomed as she had never had in the back row. Reporters called her a natural, and radiomen crooned in delight when, at the end of her first broadcast, she added a homey little touch by asking Margaret to say goodnight to the British evacuees abroad...
Like her Uncle David, the Duke of Windsor, Elizabeth loves horses (she rides superbly), racing (if possible, she never misses a race when the royal stable is entered), swing music, nightclubs, and having her own way. But Elizabeth's rebellions are those of any headstrong, well-reared child suffering an overdose of family. "I'd like a car of my own," she told a friend recently, "but there's so damn much family talk about which make I must have that I don't think I'll ever get one." Her greatest insubordination to date followed the King's official announcement that the Princess would join none of the women's services. Elizabeth had other ideas, and not long afterward the King meekly announced that his daughter had been granted a commission in the A.T.S. (British WACs). As Elizabeth, dungaree-clad, her pretty face smeared with grease, learned how to drive and dismantle Army trucks, the Empire beamed with approval.
Fundamentally Elizabeth is a dutiful and levelheaded daughter who enjoys reading the latest best-sellers (For Whom the Bell Tolls was a favorite), knitting (she hates sewing), and gossipy teas with Margaret and a few girl friends before an open fire at the Palace...
Prince Charming? ...Britain's cooing matchmakers have been at work on her. When the Princess took to nightclubbing, the speculation, abetted by trigger-fingered columnists, increased tenfold, until any sleek young lord seen dancing twice with Lilibet was a marked man. Since she seldom sits one out (she is a gifted and tireless dancer), the field was enormous. But during the last year it has narrowed to a single contestant: a well-scrubbed, curly-haired lieutenant of the Royal Navy, who was born sixth in line to the throne of Greece.
Prince Philip of Greece is the nephew of Elizabeth's cousin Lord Mountbatten, with whom he has lived all his life... King George can approve his daughter's marriage only with the consent of the Cabinet, and so far Philip's connection with the Greek regime, remote as it is, has been a slight hitch. But last week, as plain Lieut. Philip Mountbatten, Prince Philip was granted his British citizenship, and event that hitch seemed to have been overcome. When Elizabeth is asked about her engagement, she replies with a coy, "For that you must wait and see." But the Empire is quite prepared to welcome Philip as future Prince Consort, and expects the announcement any day now. It may come on her birthday.
...Princess Elizabeth's 21st birthday party in Cape Town will be the last grand ceremonial of the African tour. There will be more salutes, more reviews, more fireworks, and another grand ball. There will be state presents for everyone: a gold box full of diamonds (to put on his Garter star) for the King, and engraved gold tea service for the Queen, 17 graduated diamonds for Margaret-- and for Elizabeth herself, 21 graduated diamonds interspersed with baguettes to string on a necklace. For Elizabeth that day will mean also a rise in income from £6,000 to £ 15,000 a year, and the chance to manage her money...
*The Crown's sole positive duty is now "to consult, to encourage, and to warn." But the King can still-- theoretically-- without consulting Parliament, disband his country's Army, sell all the Navy's ships, dismiss most of the civil servants, pardon all criminals, close all churches, create every citizen a peer, pick his own Prime Minister, and declare war on anyone he chooses. In practice, no King-- or Queen-- would dare do one of these things.
| |
|
