The Stratford Evening Post, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1912 MRS GUPPY’S PROTEST.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 27, 25 September 1912, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post, WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1912 MRS GUPPY’S PROTEST.

Strange situations have arisen owing to the action of some of those who oppose Mr Lloyd George’s Insurance Act, and there is much protest, turmoil and revolt in many quarters, Possibly, however, nothing more curious has happened than the action taken by Mrs Guppy, whose “protest” is immortalised by the “Manchester Guardian,” under the title of “Mrs Guppy’s Thistle” as follows:—In the county of Surrey lives Mrs S. D. Robinson Guppy, who has protested against the Insurance Act by discharging her eight servants. Whether Mrs Guppy dislikes paying threepences or dislikes her servants paying them we do not knoiv, nor does it matter; it is the method of her protest that demands a faithful chronicler. When the eight servants were gone, “for some weeks Mrs Guppy and her three young children did all the housework, the garden work, and the stable work themselves.” Then new servants were found, all exempt from the operations of the Act; they were very young or very old—the gardener, the cook, and the coachman are all over seventy. Such is the “protest.” But observe how this horrible plot becomes a blessing to everything it touches. First, what could bo better for Mrs Guppy and her children than personal acquaintance with the work the servants usually perform; what more disciplinary than the housework, more wholesome than the gardening? And then the aged coachman, cook, and gardener. Why, Mrs Guppy has struck a hearty blow at the cry “Too old at forty” she is finding work—not the same work, one hopes, that was done by the ablebodied eight?—for these venerable people in the evening of their life, and she must be awakening hopes of a fresh career in the breasts of Surrey centenarians. But then, there are the eight to be thought of; they, it will be said, are out of work. Mot for long, if at all, we should imagine, if one .may judge from the loud lament in all the towns that the supply of servants is wholly inadequate to the demand. Mrs Guppy lias really done something to make good a serious shortage. Finally, since her intention was to do none of these good things, but only to ‘defeat” the Act, the community has the advantage of observing with what foolishness some fortu-nately-placed people behave through not being able to see beyond the end of their noses. Who shall say that iigs may not bo gathered from Mrs Guppy’s thistle?