BIRD'S EYE VIEW
Page 54
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
By The Hawk Stokes Hall The Prime Minister, I feel
sure, must have enjoyed Sir Donald Stokes' speech at the opening ceremony of the £1 m. Hall of Residence for Leyland Motors' students and graduate engineers at Leyland last week. I quote: "A firm is only as good as the people in it. There is no real problem today in getting hold of the most magnificent and sophisticated machine tools, nor is there any real difficulty in getting hold of the money to promote our business, but there is a very real problem, not only here but throughout the world in finding young people with drive and enthusiasm, who have fire in their bellies and that spark of excitement which enables them to go all over the world promoting and fostering the sale of British goods."
The building—which bears exceedingly favourable cornparison with a top-quality hotel—has been called, appropriately enough, "Stokes Hall."
Too Many Crashes I gather that the Travel
Trade Association is up in arms about the number of coach crashes which have taken place recently on the Continent involving British holiday-makers. This, apparently, is one of the items to be discussed by that association at its November conference in Ostend.
The alarmingly high number of crashes, some of them fatal, have been attributed to the fact that Continental drivers are often forced to drive throughout the night from, perhaps, Ostend to holiday centres as far away as Barcelona.
According to Mr. Sidney Smith, this year's TTA conference chairman, speaking at a pre-conference meeting last week, the fault lays partly with British agents who c26 cut the price of their inclusive holidays too finely, forcing the Continentals to operate illegally. Mr. Smith suggested that a complete revision by British agents of prices and schedules for coach tours was necessary.
LTB Publicity Describing the long delay on
the first day of Fleetfine operation on London Transport country bus route 424 (reported last week), Derek Moses tells me that he was most impressed with the way the general public took to the new vehicles. Almost all intending passengers seemed to be expecting a new bus—they also knew that they had to get on at the front, not the back.
Conversation with a conductor revealed that drivers on route 424 each had two hours' driving experience behind the wheel of the Daimler Fleetlines before they entered service. Presumably during this time the buses carried posters advising the public of the pending introduction of the vehicles on the route. Whilst waiting for his bus in Reigate, Derek was passed by a new RML (in red livery!), which was also on driver-familiarization duties. It carried a large poster in one of the lower-deck windows to the effect that this was one of the "new 72-seater Routernasters. which would shortly appear on routes 409, 410, and 411 ".
What a pity it is that staff shortages prevent LTB from operating as efficiently as their advance publicity.
Language Trouble 1 am told by both our tech
nical editor Tony Wilding and staff photographer Dick Ross that the Frankfurt Show is the most exhausting of the European commercial vehicle exhibitions. The difficulty is that exhibits are spread in three main halls and there are quite a number of widely spaced open air exhibition sites—the distance between the farthest vehicles stretches to something like half a mile.
One thing that does not help in covering such a Show, they tell me, is the complete lack of any information in languages other than German. And the lack of information in the organizers Press office makes for an interesting comparison with the Earls Court Show. Many criticisms are levelled at the SMMT but none can be for the way in which this body organizes the information services at Earls Court. The Press room there is crammed full of informative literature in about a dozen foreign languages provided by the SM MT. The same applies to the publicity departments of British manufacturers who provide an excellent service to overseas journalists.