Out and Home.—By "The Extractor."
Page 15
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I ventured to send to Mr. Albert E. Newton, of the ),/ aCIALIM Oil CO., Ltd., ain:mgst other people, a card breathing the best of Christmas wishes, and containing in addition an aphorism supposed by many people to be somewhat typical of the Yorkshire character. He sends me a kindly greeting, in response, together with a most flattering portrait of himself, a luncheon basket and it molorcar, and he endorses the card with the words of another Yorkshire saying, which at this unsullied time of the year possess some interest : " Here's to us, all on us, ivery one on us, and me an' all."
I don't remember snow so blinding, so stinging, and so impassable, since the famous Tuesday in 188r, in which halcyon days I hailed frost and snow with a delirious unmixed joy ; nowadays, the only useful purpose it seems to me to serve is to show more vividly the justifiable ascendancy of motor traffic. How the motorbuses and the taxies revelled in it and showed their scorn for the slosh and sleet, while the poor quadrupeds (and bipeds too) were slithering helplessly from pillar to post. The low temperature brought coals into urgent demand, and the horse-drawn carts with that commodity were hung up in every direction. 1. happened to call in for a chat with Mr, H. B. C. Underdown, the chairman and managing director of Commercial Cars, Ltd., and he told me they could have hired out so vehicles for conveying coal alone in those two or three awful days; but, naturally, they are not engaged in contracting. I noticed, too, that the electric trams were running very badly, or not at all, I was travelling by one of them, along the Clerkenwell Road, towards Cite Road, and we made three stoppage: .;:f five or six minutes each, with nothing in the way of traffic to justify it. In answer to my enquiries, the conductor said the snow got down the centre conduit slot and shorted the electric current, and They could do nothing to p:-4..ve11t it; meanwhile, it did ime's heart good to sett the maligned motorbus progressing grandly through
the lot.
One manufacturer in connection with the motor business had just missed an extensive contract when he remarked to me that it was no use disguising the fact he was depressed over it, but that if he had received the contract at the price quoted by the successful competitor, he would be depressed still more; in fact, his friend the enemy was surely in the same position mt. Pyrrhus of old when his friends tendered their congratulations to him regarding his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, and when his own troops sustained terrible slaugh ter, Pyrrhus said despondently : "Yes; but, if we have such another victory, we are undone."
The Editor has handed to Inc the following effusion, which I give in full. I think I know the sort of individual " Anti-Scorcher " is; the afternoon of a holiday would be soon enough for him to get anywhere, and then it would probably be to watch a game at football. " I generally turn to the Out and Home ' page in TnE COMMERCIAL MOTOR for more than one reason. I speculate sometimes as to which ix-,rt of the country the Extractor ' will turn up at next (I notice he selects attractive places), and then again I find myself wondering, as he is prone to giving precious autobiographical notes, if, some day, he will enlighten us as to which dame's school he attended in his boyhood, what tobacco he smokes, and whether he likes meat well done or
underdone But I did not commence to write this with the intention of being flippant. I was allured into sending you a line by the paragraph, in your issue of the 3ist in which Extractor' describes what he is pleased to term an ' odd taxicab experience.' Your Editorial footnote puts the case very clearly : there would be no infraction of the law for a gentleman holding an ordinary license to drive the taxicab temporarily in a case of proved emergency,' but there seems little doubt that an inordinate desire to reach a golf course before any other member would be regarded by any right-minded magistrate as specially puerile. lt is obvious that Extractor ' and his friends, as they were purely on pleasure bent, should have assisted the taxi driver to get his motor right, and then allowed him, the proper responsible man, to resume his place at the wheel.—Yours faithfully, ANTI. SCORCHER. "