BRITAIN ON WHEELS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1942, Page 4

BRITAIN ON WHEELS

MANY FORMER MOTORISTS AFOOT BUT COMMUNITY SERVICES MADE MOBILE. IMPRESSIVE AND EXTENDING LIST. X (By Mclita Spraggs, in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) A curious transformation has taken place on the highroads of Britain. Whereas many of the folk who used to ride in motor-cars are now on foot, all sorts of normally static institutions are bowling along on wheels. The pre-war pleasure motorist is footing the sidewalk because, from July 1, he no longer is allowed a petrol ration. But canteens, kitchens, employment exchanges, laundry units, post offices, libraries, cinemas, art exhibitions, hot baths for children, and various other amenities have become mobile and find their way to the most remote districts to serve scattered populations, or to operate in districts where services are dislocated. In some cases they are fitted with producergas equipment to conserve petrol supplies. A loud-speaker on a van in a London district recently announced the latest recruit to this army on wheels. It was Britain’s first mobile employment exchange. The vehicle pulled up at the curb in a busy shopping thoroughfare. A voice, through the microphone, announced: “This is a mobile unit - of the Ministry of Labour and National Service. We are appealing for women to do part-time work in this district, morning and afternoon shifts. Come and talk to the woman officer.”

CANTEENS & THE THEATRE. Mobile canteen units and rolling kitchens are many and varied in Britain these days, ranging from the super turnouts sent over by friends in the United States to the converted ice-cream vendors’ tricycle run by the Women’s Voluntary Services as an emergency measure to save petrol. Portable canteens have been set up on long-distance trains to provide light refreshments for service men and women at prices similar to those in .their own canteens.

Art, Music, and the Theatre have “taken to the road” in a much wider sense than before the war, chiefly under auspices of the Central Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, Government-sponsored body to foster culture in wartime.

Even sections of the Royal Academy are going on tour this year. Sixty works from its summer show are to be included in exhibitions taken by C.E.M.A. to provincial museums. Smaller art collections go to the Forces, and particularly to the more remote Army and R.A.F. stations. They also are lent to factory canteens, workers’ hostels, clubs, and churches. Travelling theatre companies are booked, more than ever before, to tour in the great stay-at-home vacation programme arranged for Britain this year. The Pilgrim Players, under the presidency of John Gielgud, revive the traditions of the strolling players of Elizabethan days. This company—said to be the first to present exclusively religious drama since the Middle Ages —is comprised of professional actors and actresses who aim to play to those who do not ordinarily get an opportunity of going to the theatre in war time. They perform in garages, village' l -halls, schools and bombed churches. Their repertory includes “The Way of the Cross” from the French by Henri Gheon, “The House by the Stable,” a modern morality play by Charles Williams, and James Bridie’s “Tobias and the Angel.” NOTABLES ON THE ROAD.

Among the many other well-known players “on the road” for C.E.M.A. are Dame Sybil Thorndike and Mr Lewis Casson who tour industrial towns and villages presenting plays by Shakespeare, Euripides, and Bernard Shaw. Travelling music-makers, who go from place to place teaching. folk . to make their own music and encouraging them to organise folk-song and folkdance festivals, are sent out by C.E.M.A. in co-operation with the English Folk Dance Society. Concerts by travelling musicians for London dockers given in settlement halls and canteens in the East End of London, proved so popular with the riverside communities that the well-known singer, Miss Mary Hamlin, followed them' with a series of talks about music and singing with demonstrations for those who wished to become music makers themselves. Enthusiasm with which the dockland workers took to the study of music led C.E.M.A. musicians to visualise a return to the London of Pepys’ day, with “riverside rights” and restoration of the water music which was the customary accompaniment of the harbour traffic in the seventeenth century.

SHOPS FOR WAR WORKERS. More prosaic, but equally welcome, are the composite mobile club vans which visit serving women’s units. The personnel, in addition to arranging social and cultural evenings, varying from poetry readings to sports competitions, run a shop, cinema, library, and posting box from the van. The store, which sells more than 100 different articles, is particularly useful to women, who are too far away to visit town shops regularly. In considering Britain-on-wheels, one cannot ignore the growing community of all-the-year-round caravan dwellers. In war time this is not' a vacationing body. Its members are chiefly war workers —women from the. Land Army, soldiers, and airmen, civil defence workers and Home Guards —all of whom find mobile billets enable them to establish themselves quickly in the spot where their services are most urgently required. In response to appeals from the War Office and the various Ministries, many of the 20,000 private caravans in Britain, have been handed over to the Government, but some civilian folk, failing to find house accommodation in evacuation areas, are living in their caravans.

Top of the market in these petrolless days is the horse-drawn caravan. Though the gipsy folk have large numbers of such brightly coloured mobile dwellings, I learn, they are not induced to forsake their traditional form of residence, even for the tempting prices offered for these homes-on-wheels.