Roundabout
Winnie The Moo
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
THE stands at the Boys' and Girls' Exhibition at Olympia were so various that it seemed as if the organisers had simply rung up two hundred girls and boys and said, 'What are you doing now?' and acted on the answers. 'I'm doing my stamps,' said one. Practis- ing ballet steps . . .
cleaning my bike . . . cooking . . . dreaming about being old enough to wear a bra . . . playing with my toy trains. One, I suppose, must have said, 'I'm trying to catch a train,' for even BR has its stand.
The chief difficulty for the organisers appears to have been that boys and girls are such a mixed lot to begin with, that a show for them presents the same sort of problems as a Men and Women show. (One of the organisers staunchly referred throughout to the Kiddies, though what kiddies would want with a make-up demonstra- tion, brassieres, and a career in the regular army was hard to say.) It was hard to understand why some of the stands were there at all: one selling (or rather failing to sell) cream; another one offered cookers to Mums who, one imagines, would hardly be in a state of mind to appreciate the idea. And some of those whose raison d'être was obvious enough appeared to have completely forgotten who their audience was: the National Book League stand was understandably deserted displaying such jolly trifles as A Book of Type- faces or The Outline of Literature, price 42s.; on another stand a colour cut-out claimed that it was 'Popular in the schools' (that would be enough to put off anyone, I'd have thought), the road- safety poster was headed with Signs Prohibitory and Mandatory, and in the catalogue the National Coal Board begins a recruiting advertisement with the words: 'Coal provides 75 per cent. of the total energy requirements in Britain. Because the demand for ,coal will be high for many years to come . . .' and sentences hardly calculated, I should have thought, to rivet the young..
Where there was greatest seething of blazer against blazer, there was always something on display that moved : model railways; gyroscopes; a British Transport stand that had cars and lorries moving realistically at snail's pace around a scenic set. Possibly the most thoroughly popu- lar was the pet stand, where cages, at the back housed rats (restive), pigeons (furious), an assort- ment of rabbits (nervous) and tortoises (tor- toises). There was a stand where Mr. Therm en- gaged both boys and girls in a cookery competi- tion, their efforts being relayed by closed-circuit TV. For girls alone, there was a ballet display and a fashion show. 'It's better than last year,' said a tubby eleven-year-old from Deptford. 'More dresses.'
But the star of the show was undoubtedly the Personality who opened it. 'It's not Ronald Shiner,' insisted the press officer. 'He's just help' ing; it's Winnie.' Winnie is in fact a cow. Product of a Wilts-wide talent hunt, Winnie was found only a few miles from the dairy firm's head office in Trowbridge: 'She was just a cow—just one Of the herd when we found her,' they said. With her smudge-rimmed eyes and jersey brown coat (washed nowadays with egg shampoo), she was chosen to represent Winnie Wilts, the firrn s mascot; she was the first cow ever to arrive as 3, passenger at Paddington station. Milker ana mother, Winnie's career comes first; she has had several calves and is expecting another in Oen. ber, 'but we're not stressing that.' The secret.of her success is simple: she was the cow most like the cartoon advertisement already launched under her name.
Winnie's stand was simply helping to raise money for spastics (apart, of course, from thd milk publicity) and there was a similar absence of overt commercial pressure on other stalls. The gnashing of tigers' teeth in the jungle that accota' panies teenage sales was hardly heard. Regard' less of their doom, the little consumers PIO' The real disillusionment of children nowadays is not the day they find out about Santa Claus but the day they realise that a twelve-minute soic in Whiff° will not banish wash-day blues or 011" sightly spots; the day they disbelieve their first advertisement. But for most of the milling school' 'You'll like Pater, though his conception of olacr space is SO rather three-dimensional: children at the Exhibition, this awakening was Still a long way ahead. Over their heads, the war between teachers who want them to learn to Paint and firms who want to sell them automatic Painting by numbers; between the parents who leant them to make do with last year's football and the firms who want to sell them a new one goes on; it doesn't bother them. The real fight for their money comes later; not till the girl is 1144-grown come the serious attempts to make 11.er, like Winnie. as much as possible like the cow in the advertisements.
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