Cup Week and Coventry
LTHOUGH it is unpopular in these times A to tell stories with a moral, the newspapers managed to tell one indirectly on November 16. In one column the cables said: Correspondents declare that there is nothing in Madrid or Finland, and that there was nothing even in London, to compare with the devastation of Coventry in the all-night German raid. . . The spire of Coventry Cathedral to-day stood like a sentinel over the grim scene of destruction. In the same issues, the newspapers reported: The heaviest betting since 1922 was recorded by the two electric totalisators at Addington and Riccarton in Cup Week. The real meaning of this incongruity is hard to come by. It surely does not mean that New Zealanders are insensible to the wreckage of lives and property that is going on over most of the old world. It certainly does not mean that New Zealand is richer now, spending £458,352 on the results of horse racing, than in 1932, when all we could manage was £196,315. It surely does not mean that all New Zealanders have forgotten their obligation to the future when they spend all this on nothing at all but pleasure while "thousands of weary children trudged from the city . . . laden with their meagre possessions." It surely does not mean that we fail to understand the meaning of war because we have not yet ourselves been bombed. It surely does not mean that New Zealand is still busy getting and spending while the youth of New Zealand marches into the dark years at seven shillings a day. No patriot would like to think those things of his own people. No one, most definitely, will believe it is the duty of a democratic "government to command _ its people to be serious if they still want to be diverted from unpleasant thoughts. Perhaps the Cup Week balance-sheet only meant that the world is still going round, bringing the sun with it every twenty-four hours. But we must remember that we have not yet experienced our own tragedy. It would be a shocking commentary on human nature if it found us on the racecourse, __
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 75, 29 November 1940, Page 4
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360Cup Week and Coventry New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 75, 29 November 1940, Page 4
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