Postscript . .
By CYRIL RAY
AN incensed Highlander has
written to tell me about a BEA flight last month from London to Aberdeen—an unexplained hour's delay in leaving; the connection from Edinburgh cancelled; the train to Aber- they were 'fifteen minutes ahead of schedule' (though they should have been home and in bed hours before); and back home by half-past four in the morning—except for those who had to find transport in Aberdeen at that ungodly hour to travel farther still. And, says my correspon- dent, no apologies.
By the very same post, a letter from another reader who, like me, is an admirer of Joe Lyons, but who wonders why he can't get a cup of black coffee at a Lyons help-yourself teashop. The only explanation he can get from the firm itself is that 'the urn has two compartments, one holding white coffee and the other hot milk,' so that he can either have white coffee whiter, or white milk browner, 'but no other variations.'
No doubt my colleague Leslie Adrian can advise us how the consumer can protest most effectively at this sort of indignity and fatuity.
What I'm concerned about here is to point out to my many Socialist friends on the one hand, who always put this kind of nonsense down to bloody-minded big business, and to my few Tory acquaintances on the other, who blame everything on to the inept and timid bureau- cratic tools of nationalised corporations, that the only thing BEA and Joe Lyons have in common is size.
, You can suffer the same sort of treatment (I have) from the Czech Government Tourist Board and from Shell, from Selfridges and the Soviet Union. I know very well that only big corporations can run airlines and oil companies, and that a chop at the Grill and Cheese is as good as it is and as cheap as it is only because Lyons are as big as they are. But the price you pay is that in organisations of that size there's often nobody on the spot who can take a decision (Oh, make him a cup of coffee!) and be prepared to take the responsibility too, if he has to. Often, there isn't even anyone who can explain, because the decision has been taken by someone he doesn't know, in an office hundreds of miles away, or SPECTATOR, SEPTEMBER 14, 1962 who's prepared to apologise, in case this Is: regarded as an admission, and he gets his knuckles rapped when the lawyers' letters begin to fly. (Just as we're told by our insurance companies never to say it was our fault when we knock a pedestrian down, or run i stationary car.)
I know there's no turning the clock back
a - — that this is the age of the merged Public company, the nationalised corporation, the international cartel-- and I haven't an idea in my head as to how we can mitigate the miseries that ensue. It's just that I wish now and again that those big executives at the remote head office who take decisions about cups of Otle! and aeroplanes to Aberdeen were as easy to ge' at as the little man round the corner used tn — and as anxious to please.
Like the very topnotch barbers, bootrnakers, bookbinders and men's tailors, leading Pick' pockets are deploring (according to the Police Review) that young people simply won't take t° the profession: they 'lack the application and discipline necessary to become proficient.' I can't help shaking my greying pow over the modern generation, I really can't: hardly one of the shiftless crew seems to take thought fordiei morrow. If only they would read their Sam Smiles, to learn what glittering prizes can bc, won by hard work at learning a skilled trade' Or, come to that, their Mayhew, who wrote exactly a hundred years ago that 'fifteen °dr twenty years ago many of those accomPhshef pickpockets, dressed in the highest stYle fashion, and glittering in gold chains, studs arid rings who walk about the Bank ofEngland ari along Cheapside, and our busy thoroughfares, were poor ragged boys walking barefooted aal°11: the dark and dirty stews and alleys of We5,,, minster and the Seven Dials . • . step by step th,43 have emerged from the rags and the squalor t° higher position of physical comfort.' And the only pickpocket he actually inieri: viewed—the son of a We.sleyan minister, hare dentally—said that he had never done a , hard day's work in his life (I think he mean' it to manual work: he must have applied himsel'ong his training) and that never knowing how. the they would be at liberty strengthened ion attachment between _gentlemen of his profess' et and their doxies, 'who, I believe, have a strongied liking to each other, in many cases, than Mae( people.' Those idle apprentices had better think agaiti. hohbY Many an honest man who pays for his s clothes with gastric ulcers and divorce vl4)and settle for high fashion, a happy sex life
never a hard day's work.
'061W' This is my last 'Postscript' for the SP( ut 3 and I am not so churlish as to leave with° of tug of the forelock in the general directiornt of editor, colleagues and readers, and some sn and farewell gesture to my many friends tong admirers in the public-relations profession oil may they flourish, and long may 010 On hs after I have left, sending me glossy Plic"grilP 't I All° of their clients' products to this address. esDe venmair Colleague.' going on addr a essing P.
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