Roundabout
Traveller's joy
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN The main difference between the two is that whereas Take-a-Guide aims almost entirely to provide driver-guides of irreproachable back- ground who are exclusive to themselves, London Visitors specialises in knowing where to get a whole range of services which it does not pro- Nide directly, like baby-sitters or a box of silk- worms or centre-court tickets at Wimbledon. London Visitors was started a couple of months ago by a Mr. Gray, who reckoned that there was no existing agency with a wide enough scope for the really puzzled traveller; but one of its leading spirits is a brisk factotum named Ambrose, whose remarkable talents include ex- perience in catering, dancing instruction, and con- tact work in Marseilles, to say nothing of routine trainings in guiding and publicity. Take-a- Guide is of longer foundation, and was built up from small beginnings among Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates who discovered that their suave knowledgeability was a commercially saleable asset. Its guides have to be well in- formed and are put through a stiff course; one gathers, from their prosperous-looking spokes- man, that they are also supposed to have well- pressed trousers, an air of confidence and to be able to simulate—or even feel—a keen young interest in the subjects they expound.
In spite of their rather different briefs, both seem to lay on a good deal of unorthodox sociability on the basis of social contacts. Take-a- Guide has fed a Frenchman into a grouse-shoot and taken Americans hunting, though for these extra services it hand-picks its strangers. 'If it's a little chap from Brooklyn who's just bought a pair of riding breeches and wants to hunt with the Quorn he just couldn't go.' It once fixed up a visiting Saudi Arabian Prince with a country-house visit, a London flat and a doctor for his ailing daughter. It emphasises that it is not an escort service (`No one can be more sus- picious than the American wife if she thinks you are'), but it is prepared, on occasion, to pose as a friend; for example, in the case where a girl hired a guide for a day in the country to stop her family thinking she had no social life, or when it takes tedious Empire relations off the hands of busy residents. London Visitors has laid on wine and cheese with undergraduates, beer with the right journalists for a visiting Dutch writer, and could have inserted a Canadian into a Buckingham Palace garden party, though in fact it persuaded him instead that he didn't want to go: the party being only for emergent nations and the Canadian, as he readily appre- ciated, having emerged already. Neither firm seems to have any trouble laying on lunch v. ith a Lord.
There arc apparently certain general charac- teristics to be observed among the clientele. French and Italian visitors are less apt to tip well than Americans, though Americans are not all as rich as everybody thinks they are. London Visitors has it on good authority than Scan- dinavians can't be taken to rude floor-shows, Germans can't be dragged away from them, and Italians, though avid to go, shock easy and have to be led away early. There are a great many northern businessmen who simply wan, a Soho evening; nothing, so far, has been done for the visiting businesswoman (an open field here, I'd have thought), but London Visitors does run shopping parties for Midland women alarmed by stories of the wicked city and justi- fiably afraid that a shopping weekend will cosf twice as much as it should even before they start to shop. Take-a-Guide divides the Americans who are 80 per cent. of its trade into two types: the ones who more and more want to stay away from herds and ask simply for an interesting day built on the guide's own know- ledge, and what it calls the Tick-Off Tourists, who just sit in the bus and notch their passports: for these it actually provides a tick-off card, listing such places as '10 Downing Street (Churchill, Macmillan, Eden),' 'Old Bailey (Murder and Death),' Orators' Corner (Free Speech)' and 'Keats Grove (Ode to a Nightin- gale).'
Perhaps these ingenious organisations are most 'I'm sorry, Senator, but Boston Baked Beans have been voted of the menu by a combination of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats.'
interesting as a symptom of the way in which more and more things are being laid on as paid services which used to come into the entirely private category. These agencies for knowledge, for expertise, for social contacts are of the same species as marriage bureaux, gift-wrapping ser- vices, plant hire and the women who take debs through the season for a couple of thousand quid. If it all keeps up, one gets the feeling that the only way to exercise individual initiative without help of the fixers will be to become a fixer oneself.
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