PERPETUA LUX
SIR,—My attention has been drawn to Mr, John Betjeman's paragraph ' Naked and Ashamed ' in your issue of November 26. I entirely agree with hint in his horror of., custard tea and cardboard toast, but why
blame modern electric light ' for these disasters when the fault lies with people who choose the wrong kind of lamp from the variety which modern industry has made avail- able for different purposes '? I can assure Mr. Betjeman that there is a kind of fluorescent lamp which makes tea look like tea, and toast like toast.
1 cannot really believe that Mr. Betjeman's crusading fervour leads him to the view that a lighting fitting suitable for ' the vast dark- ness of Westminster Cathedral ' would be equally suitable, even on a reduced scale, for a modern living room with a light-coloured ceiling nine feet high. Many people might also wonder whether the greater consumption of electricity occasioned by the use of numbers of low-powered lamps was attractive. As for ' those crinkly glass shades from which the old-fashioned lamp burst like a flower,' they were perfectly satisfactory for the old- fashibned lamps which gave hardly any light, but if he tried modern lamps in them the extra light would burst forth like a bomb, to his great discomfort.
If Mr. Betjeman really cannot find anything between pseudo-Elizabethan, plastic-modern fittings and white globes, one is tempted to ask —where has he tried '? But I think that in this case he has been more interested in exercising his adjectives than in instructing his public.—Yours faithfully,
E. B. SAWYER
The Electric Lamp Manufacturers' Association of Great Britain
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