BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 1948 THE ROYAL VISIT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 57, 18 June 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 1948 THE ROYAL VISIT

Last Tuesday the Auckland Harbour Board approved a scheme, calculated to cost between £4,000 and £5,000, for waterfront decorations for the Royal visit. At Wellington recently a sum of over £40,000 was mentioned as the probable cost of decorations and celebrations there. While it is no part of this newspaper’s business to criticise city local authorities, such extravagant use of public money can hardly go comment-free anywhere, and has been freely discussed amongst private citizens here. We are, told daily that Britain and Europe are on the verge of starvation, if not actually starving. We are in the final week of the United Nations Appeal for Children, and have had a series of harrowing statements concerning the state and possible fate of overseas children placed before us. It is indeed fitting that Royalty should be welcomed right royally. Loyalty to the Crown, visitors from overseas often say, is one of the striking things about ■this country. In that regard, we have • sometimes been called “as English as the English.” But that very loyalty, that very respect for the ruling monarch, should lead us to believe that he would be the very last person to want to see money that could be turned into consumer goods squandered on ostentatious pomp when his countrymen, their wives and children, ,and his neighbours and their wives and children are starving. As was suggested by a correspondent in a city newspaper recently, it would be more fitting in the present circumstances—and probably more pleasing to the Royal visitors —to welcome them with archways composed of food parcels for Britain. In that regard it might also be said that the most pleasing of all possible, waterfront sights to the eyes of visitors from England’s present, austerity would be to see British workmen turning around ships to save British dollars and take food back to the heart of the Empire. If we want to demonstrate our loyalty, let us be practical about it. 'Hungry people can’t eat decorations, but £45,000 would buy a lot of food. Moreover, from all that is known of the warm-hearted humanity of the visitors, it is a safe deduction that they will appreciate our welcome to them more for its sincerity than its cash cost.