IN QUEST OF TEA.

Taranaki Daily News, 7 February 1918, Page 8

IN QUEST OF TEA.

QUEUES IN LONDON. EXTRAORDINARY SPECTACLES. Tea is only obtainable now undfr acute disadvantage, writes the London correspondent of (he. Sydney Morning Herald. If, that is to say you are pre. pared to pay 4s (id, 5s or 0s per lb for the only tea purchasable you may, after great trouble, be allowed doles of it in quarter-pound parcels. ' The trouble is a matter of waiting an hour or two in one or the queues of people who on Saturday morning last presented one of the strangest of spectacles all over London, and not least in the West End. There, at the great and famous stores, whose mammoth stocks of goods give so little sign of shortage—at Harrod's, say,; or YV'hiteley's, or Sclfridge's—thousands' of people were assembled in far-stretching lines in search of tea, people who made as varied and as unusual a showing of this kind as London can ever have experienced. Fashionable ladies descended from their cars and carriages and took their places on board staircases already in possession of crowds. Amateur shoppers of the male species, intent after their favorite blend, found themselves caught within a swirl oi householders desirous of any tea at all and stolidly in pursuit of it. Priests and parsons, old and young, upper class and middle class of all sorts and conditions, were in those West End queues, and waited by the hour in hope of tea. It was a worse confusion than that of the sugar queues of a little while ago, and as bad as tliose of the potatoes before the thousandfold allotments of suburban London, and other sources, yielded potatoes in almost grotesqueabundance. It. was unusual, this queue of the tea, in tens of thousands of shops all over London —but I was fts much impressed with it at Twining's as any. where. Twining's is at the beginning of Fleet Street, opposite the Law Courts. It is one of these quite numerous London business houses which, in an age of fierce competition and incessant advertisement, seem to hove been left stranded, so high and dry are they above the whirling flood of the markets and the market cries. Rut they are not stranded. On the contrary, they are so securely established* as to be in no need of statement of themselves. Mostly they are very hard to And, for their means or access is more often than not a hidden alley or a mere crevice in, the great wall of the London Highways and their massive bulk of business buildings. Twining's is one such. If you cannot find Twining's for yourself, you will never find It, for Twining's makes no disclosure of its secrets. It merely writes over its narrow doorway there at the beginning of Fleet Street, "Established in 1710,'' and lets it go at that. Well, for these two centuries Twining's ha? sold tea In London. It sells only tciv and coffee. And the other morning the long-drawn-out placidity of Twining's was disturbed. For the first time, pro. bably, in its centuries of history Twining's opened its doors to find a queue ol peoplo waiting to invade it, as though It were a common shop and not a sanctuary. And worse —not only were people urgently in search of Twining's tea, hut Twining's had very little tea to give them. This, ,;lso, in all probability, for the first time in the long, unadvortisocl, hut never less than famous history of Twining'*, And seeing Twining's in such ease, I was fain to confess that we in very truth arc short of tea.