The Sun SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 1928 LONDON’S GOLDEN GLOW

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 306, 17 March 1928, Page 8

The Sun SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 1928 LONDON’S GOLDEN GLOW

'THERE is nothing of its kind in all the world better than true * London hospitality. It has, like good wine that needs no bush, the lustre of purity, the mellowed piquancy of the right age, the bouquet of a wonderful spirit of kindness. And it goes to the heart rather than to the head and maketh strangers glad. This splendid hospitality, which sets London apart from her most illustrious rivals in the Old World and the New, is so perfect that, whenever the King and the Government of Great Britain desire to express the goodwill of a vast Empire toward men and monarehs of mettle and distinction, they call upon the Lord Mayor of London and the civic authorities at Guildhall to stage a generous pageant. They never call in vain. Tradition yields a response with noble completeness and one that always marches in line with modern needs and deeds of hospitality with the precision of pastmasters of pageantry. The great city itself provides the right setting for a play of lavish hospitality. London is not always a monstrous huddle of houses and humanity in fog and smoke, with a grey river looking darkly at a weeping sky. Who that has seen it transfigured by friendly sunshine will ever forget its charm or wish to remember again its periods of gloom? It assumes the fresh glow of beauty that made it beloved of roving conquerors in the days when the estuary of the Thames, like the mouth of the tawny Tiber, was the headquarters of Roman galleys. Then, and perhaps only then, in the light of a spring morning, a New Zealander, standing on London Bridge, will see, not the rains -of St. Paul’s but the wonderful London that Hood, the true Cockney poet (a Scotsman, of course, by descent) saw with ecstatic joy:— Gold above and gold below The earth reflected the golden glow , From river and hill and valley, Gilt by the golden light of morn, The Thames —it looked like the Golden Horn And the Barge that carried coal or corn Bike Cleopatra's Galley! Even in the best of London’s modern pageants some of the city’s bygone glories cannot be revived. Much of ancient London’s life and charm has vanished for ever, though some of it, intangible as a wraith, lingers still in the haunts of history. Processions nowadays must keep to the popular highways of the City of London. The days when gilded barges bore Royalty and its guests from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster, running the merry and sometimes coarse gauntlet of nine thousand watermen, have passed. An age of jazz and petrol would not appreciate the pageant that marked the Coronation of Anne Boleyn whose processional welcome to London was headed by fifty barges draped in crimson, while a company of virgins, robed in white and crowned with flowers, sang as they glided happily to Westminster Hall. Gone, too, are the free and easy days, before England worried about making “democracy safe for the world,” when kings and queens did not disdain, on great occasions, to visit taverns on Tower Hill and quaff an honest brew in regal conviviality. Still, the old city, whose civic ruler is next to the King in the rank of precedence and recognises no other overlord in the whole realm, retains the art of pageantry and perfect hospitality. It knows how to inspire demagogues to deep respect of dignity and wise power; it knows how to safeguard an Empire by the exercise of delightful friendship. One of the roads to India will be sentineled with King Amanullah’s happy memories of London and its Imperial hospitality. There is a lesson in London’s hospitable pageants for the inexperienced Dominions. It is of gold: the British taxpayer does not rudely whimper about the’expense.