Rates and taxis
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
The tactics of the Government last Friday in diverting the anxieties of Members of Parlia- ment from the state of the. pound to the iniqui- ties of the London taxi service struck me as ex- tremely ingenious and, indeed, worth while. For one thing is certain : we are now in the eyes of the world Saturday's children, and will have to work a lot harder for our living than we have got into the habit of doing. Among the people who will have to work harder are the London taxi-drivers. Flying back from Glas- gow on the Sabbath day I found Heathrow in its usual state of 'infinite regress,' as the philosophers might put it. I was misdirected and was put on the wrong bus. When I dis- covered this and got off, I wanted to get to that part of the immense complex where I could get a bus to Cromwell Road. I had two bags. I was and am lame. There were no porters. Being the Sabbath day, there were hardly any services of any kind. There was no one to ask for information from except the amiable em- ployees of a petrol station, who candidly ad- mitted they knew very little about it, but thought there were buses over there—raising their collective hand towards the horizon.
I began to move in this direction with some difficulty and was overtaken by a brisk young man carrying a large press camera. I asked him how to get to the London bus, and he said, 'I am going that way. I'll direct you.' Seeing a cab rank, I asked, 'Could I take a taxi in?' 'Good God! They will rob you. It will be £3 at least: Follow me. I'll carry a bag.' (He did.) I followed him and reflected again on the out- rageous toleration of the absurd six-mile rule in London. Somebody in the House of Com- mons pointed out that this dated back to the days of Dickens. It may date back to the days of Boadicea; but it is an absurd rule for a great capital city which will have to live by tourist earnings more than it has done in the past and will have to deserve tourist earnings more than it does at present.
Of course, the horrors of the six-mile limit were not new to me. In July I had to cross London from Highgate to Camberwell to see a new-born grandchild. This cost me thirty shillings—surely a very excessive charge. I have to argue only too often with taxi-drivers about whether a certain journey is inside the six-mile limit or not. I contrasted this situation with the situation in New York. It is now four or five years since I discovered that the simplest way to get to Kennedy (or, as it was then called, Idlewild) Airport is to take a taxi. The regular New York taxi fares apply. There is no grumbling about not getting a passenger back (this is a racket which is particularly maddening). I can go from my club on East 66th Street to Kennedy for not much more than it took me to get from Highgate to Camberwell. The advantages of this system are very great: I have not got to go down town by one taxi to the East Side Terminal, change there, have my lug- gage moved to a bus, and then go out to Ken-
nedy Airport. Why this system was never applied in the London area would baffle me were I not beyond baffling.
There are, of course, great drawbacks to the New York taxi service, such as the geo- graphical illiteracy of so many of the drivers, but the New York police keeps a more vigilant eye on taxi-drivers than the London police nor- mally does, and in any argument with a New
York taxi-driver I have been backed by a New York policeman who turns up with astonishing promptitude because such disputes tend to hold up the traffic. Of course, if New York were a great tourist centre for foreigners, something would have to be done about the abominable taxi service at Grand Central Station and Penn- sylvania Station. This is much worse than any- thing at any London station, and even worse than the service at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris. This is perhaps an aspect of the running- down of the American railways system in which everybody seems to be throwing in their hand.
Since I am on the future needs of the tourist traffic, perhaps I could complain again about the London telephone service? I am not com- plaining about the service provided by the post office, although this is not nearly as good as that provided by AT and r in New York. I am complaining about the very bad service pro- vided by hotels, restaurants, clubs, government departments. It is still astonishing to phone up one of these organisations and get, ulti- mately, a reply in the form of 'What?' The number of young women in these jobs who do not know that they should give the number or the name of the organisation you are con- tacting is excessively large.
One day last week I wanted to get in touch at one of the most exclusive, expensive and famous London hotels with a great friend of mine just arriving from New York, one of the most important figures on Wall Street, whom I wanted to see for social, not financial, reasons. In the circumstances, he was, of course, extremely busy. It took about ten minutes to get through to him, and this was not neces- sarily a result of my incompetence in dealing with the telephone, because I turned the job over to the porter at the Reform Club, who at last, with a great deal of irritation, managed to stop this hotel, which shall be nameless, from continually cutting me off from communicating with one of the hotel's richest guests. We want a great deal more abrasive, ruthless, purposive direction at this level as well as higher up.
I shall, however, end on a more cheerful note. I recently had reason to contrast the taxi service in Oxford, which is deplorable, with the taxi service in Cambridge, which is admir- able. Going on a late, very crowded afternoon train to Oxford, we were met by one taxi. I had .so wait twenty minutes before my turn came for one of the very small number of taxis which slowly appeared. At Cambridge every important train has a flock of taxis waiting for it. Of course, sometimes the demand is greater than the supply. This problem is insoluble. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered that there should always be two taxis (then a novelty) on the rank at Potsdam so that no one should ever have to wait. For some reason or other, this system did not work. But at Cambridge taxis seeking to take passengers away come back very quickly. More than that, the drivers are polite, seem almost gratefully surprised when given a tip (there is none of the London sullenness), and should be imitated in London, Oxford, Glasgow and other places where I have been victimised lately.
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