HANDS AND MACHINES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 16

HANDS AND MACHINES

ENGLAND IS_ RICH, by Harry Hopkins; George G. Harrap and Co. Litd., English price 18/-. HIS is an exploration "after Daniel Defoe" of the England of the towns -not of the countryside. The material was collected in the course of many journeys and in periods of residence in most. of the towns from which scenes are described. Starting in the Midlands one is taken north to Liverpool and on through Cumberland to the Border; then south again and east to Newcastle and Jarrow, and thence into the York- | shire valleys that lead into the Pennines. The title-England is Rich-is based on observations of innumerable small and large, and often curious industries, and the way. in which British manufacturing enterprise has successfully turned from hand craft and manual or steam power to machinery and electricity. For example, Josiah Wedgwood left the family pot-bank at Burslem to build model works at’ Etruria; so, nearly two hundred years | later, the present generation have built | anew in the country south of Stoke:

glass and concrete; no smoke, no kilns; semi-automatic machinery and electric tunnel-ovens. This is no mere traveller’s tale. We go to High Wycombe---not to see the old Guildhall and other "ancient monuments," but to look at the chair-making industry, based on the beechwoods of the Chiltern hills, and once a_ handcraft, but mow largely mechanised, Ercolani’s Windsor chairs, modernised, streamlined a little, coming off the conveyor rollers at the rate of three a minute. But how many curious hand-crafts still survive-chain-making, for instance, by women, too, at Cradley Heath. And do you know what a "bodger" is, or a "big-handler’? Most of us know the meaning of shoddynoun and adjective-but how many know what "mungo" is? There are numerous excellent illustrations.

L.J.

W.