Who Went To The "Proms"?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 107, 11 July 1941, Page 5

Who Went To The "Proms"?

UEEN’S HALL, which was bombed recently, was the resort of the same, ordinary people of whom Lincoln once said: "God must have loved the average man; he made so many of us." A witty woman journalist once watched the arrival of, and then mingled with, a Queen’s Hall audience as it descended from buses, came up from the Underground, tink-

tinked out of taxis, or approached at an earnest pace on shanks’s ponies. There were people from the ends of the earth (including an occasional New Zealander or two), ome were from the outskirts of London town, many carried suitcases, thereby ree vealing that their coming hadn’t been a mere question of "strolling along and having a spot of music." Our. journalist thinks every Prom audience consists of quite practical folk, who wouldn’t give two hoots if Beethoven had never lived, and only one if he did. " Heavens," she asks, "are these the unmusical English?" Boiled shirts and lace dresses; plus-fours and tailor-mades; hair of every colour and length, natural and unnatural, on both men and women; flannels ditto, loud checks, pretty flowered cotton frocks; the gracious silver heads of English ladies; quantities of pretty girls, and a peculiar rarity of lipstick. Ours not to reason why. These lovers of music comprise many sorts and conditions of men.- (" Queen’s Hall-The Home of the ‘ Proms." 2YA, June 22.) ..