A PROBLEM OF PROPERTY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 441, 5 December 1947, Page 29

A PROBLEM OF PROPERTY

Written for ‘

The Listener

from London

ROUDHON, who said that ‘f" property is theft, would probably have. joined the recent correspondence in The Times on the Albert Hall seats if he had had the opportunity. It all began with a letter signed by Sir Adrian Boult, P. Raymond Cooper (Secretary to the Bach Choir), Harold Holt (the concert promoter), and Thomas Russell (Chairman of the London Philharmonic Orchestra). "They said that when the acoustic screens are in. position, only 5,000 seats are available for a musical concert, with standing room for 1,000, and that of ese, 1,300 (or more than a quarter) privately-owned and beyond the reach of those who rent the hall, so that’ people who are turned away from "sold cut" concerts afterwards learn that many seats were empty.

They were allotted a century ago to people who put up, the money for the building, and now (said the four signa-

tories) some were in private hands and were being sold in competition with the concert, promoters. It even happened that at charity concerts members of the audience who had bought very expensive seats were putting money into the hands of speculators, not of the charity they meant to help. "This would seem a suitable moment to reconsider the propriety of continuing to allow a quarter of the seating capacity of the only full-sized concerthall in London to be governed autonomously by a group of private citizens," their letter ended. ; It was followed at once by one from Dr. G. F. Herbert Smith, who is on the Albert Hall Council. He supported the letter and even said the private rights were selatively more extensive than the signatories had made it appear. And he suggested that the hall ought to be governed now by a public authority, subject to reasonable compensation to the

seatholders. He hoped that "the Government may be disposed to take appropriate action, since it is too much to expect that the seatholders will voluntarily surrender their rights." "Dangerous Doctrine" Then followed the case for the defence. Seatholders wrote to The Times, saying that they always made their seats available to the box-office if they weren’t using them, or that they gave them to deserving individuals; and one said that he "almost always" surrendered his tickets for charity concerts. The essential point in the case for the defence came of course from those who pointed out that there would not even have been an Albert Hall to-day but for the subscribers who made its erection possible; that their rights, which they got in return for a subscription of £100 or more, and which they renewed by an

annual payment ofr £3 to the hall council, had been granted by an Act of. Parliament, and could only be abro-

gated in the sameway. The suggestion that because the original holders were dead their successors held only a shadowy right was described as a "dangerous doctrine,’ applicable to things of greater importance than seats in the Albert Hall. As the defence stiffened, the attack was pressed. Steuart Wilson wrote a letter naming a company known as Seat Venture Ltd., which had stated its objects on August 21, 1945, as being (among other things) "to carry business as owners, proprietors and managers of seats, stalls and accommodation in the Albert Hall and as ticket agents, etc., at other theatres." Ang someone gave the figures which showed the difference in takings when a charity concert was given on two days, one of which was one of the 10 days in the year when seatholders may not exercise their rights. The charity bene-

fited by a much larger sum on the day of the "free let," as it is known — when _ seatholders could not claim their seats. The brightest letter came from Charles B. Cochran, who trotted out the old joke about the Albert Hall echo ("In some seats practically nothing can be heard; in others, every note is heard twice, so that many people have .the satisfaction of hearing two concerts without any extra charge"), and said that when he was manager of the hall he had sought legal opinion about the seats. Learned counsel had informed him that seatholders could cart their seats home with them if (continued om next page) —

| LAW AND PROPERTY

(continued from previous page) they chose, and boxholders might live in their boxes or _ convert them into bathrooms. His first encounter with obstinate seatholders was when the well of the hall was covered by flooring for a ball. Two holders insisted on their rights for that night, and a hole hdd to be cut in the floor to give access to their seats "where they could, unmolested, enjoy the patter of dancing feet overhead and the strains of the orchestra as it descended through their little mousehole." Two ladies sat there

throughout the evening. Cochran said the competition of seatholders was a serious matter, and testified that he had seen seatholders standing on the steps of the hall selling their seats for highpriced sell-outs. "The Times" Sums Up No further letter came from the initiators, and The Times gently closed the _ discussion with a leader that was sympathetic to the rights of musicians and their premoters, who have to make music pay, but at

the same time said there was no reason why a seat in the Albert Hall should not be inherited in the same way as a diamond necklace, or be considered a less legitimate object of purchase than a brewery share. Some days later the Albert Hall Council held its next meeting. One of the evening paper reporters went along and came away coining a bright new phrase for what he’d met when he got there. He called it an Iron Curtain, Next day The Times carried a sevenline paragraph saying that the Council had discussed the question, had endorsed Lord Lucan’s letter, and decided to take no further action. (Lord Lucan, President of the Council, had pointed out the legal rights of the holders, and said that letting contracts always showed clearly what seats were contracted for; the rent charged was less in proportion to cap-, acity than it was at any other hall in London. In general he had defended the seatholders on "sound" lines.) And that is the end of the matter for the time being. It was no time, however, before The Times was called on to settle another tricky Problem of Property. A man about to catch the 5.58 into Winchester found a pheasant, dead but still warm, on the locomotive; in the emotion of the moment he showed it to the driver, who said, "My mate wants it"; and then bereft of the bird, the finder wrote asking The Times to tell him whose bird it really was. The Times, full of sympathy for the unhappy man, examined the matter carefully. It found that the man who spotted the pheasant had very faint rights because not having been a passenger at the time it was killed he was a non-belligerent; that the engine-driver and his mate could not claim that they were aiming the 5.58 at the pheasant; and that the executive staff of the Southern Railway might be said to have solved, by their judicious planning, all the problems of time and space that had to be overcome before the 5.58 could bag the pheasant-and to

hit a flying pheasant requires the utmost precision. From this point, by a piece of legal argument, as watertight as it was witty, The Times proceeded to prove that the pheasant belonged to the directors of the Southern Railway (notwithstanding the legal question of intention) and said that the bird should be frozen until all the railways are taken over by the nation on New Year’s Day. "We can then decide, by a Gallup poll or some similar means, how we should like it cooked." Meanwhile, however, everyone supposes that the envine-driver’s mate’se

wife has decided that matter for the nation, and perhaps by now is swotting up Proudhon in a seat at the Albert

Hall.

A.

A.