PROBLEM IN BRITAIN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 January 1943, Page 4

PROBLEM IN BRITAIN

THE DISAPPEARING EGG-CUP. EXTRAORDINARY WASTAGE. The announcement by the L.M.S. Railway Company that it has lost 25, 000 cups in a single week recalls a prewar problem which puzzled Mr Robert Graves, the poet and writer, says a writer in the “Manchester Guardian” Miscellany. He never could understand why the yearly consumption of white china egg-cups per head of the population of the United Kingdom came to 52.4. It seemed to him a ridiculous figure, implying that every man, woman, and child in these islands smashed, hid, or otherwise disposed of one china egg-cup a week. What Mr Graves wanted to know was where are the fragments of these weekly fifty million egg-cups? Would the dustbins of each street of 130 housewives reveal on collecting days the remains of 130 eggcups? The idea seems silly. And (as Mr Graves pointed out) if tea-shops are mainly responsible for the disappearing egg-cups “one would expect every time one entered a tea-shop to hear a continuous crash of china and find the floor knee-deep in broken egg-cups.” Yet “statistics cannot lie,” and there is no doubt that' the figure of 2,500,000,000 annually disappearing egg-cups was correct. Mr Graves, in spite of varying desperate suggestions, could \not solve the problem, which, in fact, remains unsolved, if not absolutely insoluble.