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Marriage or Liaison?

15th December 1950
Page 54
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Page 54, 15th December 1950 — Marriage or Liaison?
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Whilst the R.H.E.'s Acquired Undertakings Withdrew from the R.H.A., Membership of N.A.F.W.R. by Pickfords Continues. This Position Needs Solution, as It May Split the Two Associations.

SOON after it was first set up, the Road Haulage Executive decided to part company with the Road Haulage Association, and acquired undertakings were instructed not to renew their subscriptions. Freeenterprise hauliers, on this occasion, may have felt like Mark Antony • when his patron, the god Hercules, deserted him to slow, elegiac strains of music. On the other hand, the relief may have been mutual, and the withdrawal tactful as well as tactical. It saved the R.H.E. the unpleasantness of being shown the door, which may well have happened before long.

One curious point is that the R.H.E., under the transparent disguise of Pickfords, has retained membership of the National Association of Furniture Warehousemen and Removers. The reason is not easy to discover. It was thought at first that as furniture was an excluded traffic, there was less likelihood of friction between nationalized and free-enterprise removers. This explanation nolonger satisfies, when one notices to what extent even furniture carriers apparently depend upon permits.

Into the Fog

The degree of freedom that the Transport Act allows them is not at all certain. So obscure is it, in fact. that one may ask whether membership has been continued by the R.H.E. so that it may act as interpreter to the remainder of the N.A.F.W.R. If so, the plan has not been very successful. The long-distance activities still allowed to the furniture remover without a permit, so far from becoming more clearly defined as time goes on, retreat further and further into the fog as successive commentators add their varied opinions to the growing pile, and puff their doubts into the thickening darkness.

Perhaps the experts have misjudged the literary quality of that masterpiece enigmatically entitled the Transport Act. Like all great works of art, it may be designed to affect its readers at more than one level. Each part of it may have a surface meaning (if we be lucky), and several hidden meanings.

In the present instance, the first step offers little difficulty. The Act states, at one point, that the 25-mile limit will not apply where "the carriage is an ordinary furniture removal." This beautifully compressed statement is as packed with meaning as a Shakespearean sonnet. Even the sinister railway-train rhythm (read it aloud two or three times, and you will see what I mean) plays its part in the cumulative effect.

To the lay mind, the main intention seems clear. No permit is needed to carry ordinary furniture. If a permit can be obtained for extraordinary furniture, the remover should be perfectly happy. Admittedly, the distinction may at times be difficult. I have seen some extraordinary furniture in my time, but it by no means follows that a magistrate or a Licensing Authority would share my taste.

However, some esthetic compromise could have been made. The N.A.F.W.R. might have set up a committee of arbiters. Where the commentators have gone astray Is in attempting to find a greater degree of certainty B20 in the appropriate section of the Transport Act itself. It is true that, after the first brief statement, the Act returns to the subject at a much later stage, where a reference to "ordinary furniture removals" is included in a series of gnomic utterances quaintly headed "inter pretation." What has misled the experts is that, in most editions, this passage is printed as straightforward prose, whereas reference to the author's manuscript (if it could be found) would undoubtedly show that the correct medium was a kind of extremely blank verse, as follows: " ordinary furniture removal" means the removal of furniture or effects, not being part of the stock in trade of the person to whom they belong, from or to premises occupied by that person ta or from other premises occupied by him or to or from a store, not being the store of a person from whom he has recently purchased

or hired the furniture

or effects or to whom he has sold or is about to sell the furniture or effects.

Set out in this. way, the intention of the passage is

clear. It marks one of the rare occasons when the Act remembers that, as well as the Commission providing transport, there is a large body of users who have to put up with the transport which the Commission provides.

Ghastly Upheaval The choice of the word " ordinary " immediately ,becomes clear. .-The lines quoted are an injunction to the operator that he must not altogether ignore the customer. They say, in effect: To you, it may be an ordinary furniture removal; but to the owner of the furniture (or effects) it is a ghastly upheaval, an incoherent, to-and-fro medley.

That, at least, is the impression the passage conveys to me much more readily than any means dependent on the rules of grammar or of logic. It is scarcely necessary to point out that in poetry, to-day. one does not expect to find a precise meaning, or, if there, it is so well disguised that the experienced poetaster knows better than to go hunting for it.

I realize that my theory is unlikely to attract many supporters. The same may be said about most of the explanations of the-furniture removers' position. There is no certainty what furniture may or may not be carried outside the 25-mile limit. In fact, many of the original permits now held, or formerly held, may be for work that a later legal decision will show does not require a permit at all.

At the moment, the R.H.E. seems unwilling to concede that anything except the most straightforward removal job is excluded traffic. Revocation of original permits has revealed this, and has equally brought into prominence the rift in the N.A.F.W.R. lute. It has produced the somewhat disturbing spectacle of an association soliciting favours from one of its own members.

Now is the time to reconsider the position in the light of the new circumstances. The decision of the R.H.E. to continue its legal union with the N.A.F.W.R., while merely establishing with the R.H.A. what has become a slightly disreputable liaison, has created an anomaly likely to become more, rather than less, significant.

The N.A.F.W.R., it will be remembered, took part in the discussions resulting in the celebrated merger early in 1945. The obvious destiny of the Association was to become a functional group of the R.H.A., as happened in the case of the National Conference of Express Carriers. for some reason, negotiations stopped short of this final step. It was agreed instead that furniture

removers should be free to join both Associations. certain services should be exchanged between the two bodies, and the R.H.A. would not set up a separate furniture removers' group.

This arrangement has worked reasonably well so long as no important point of principle has separated the two bodies. Unfortunately, the presence of the R.H.E. within the N.A.F.W.R. may become such a point. Many furniture removers, like most other hauliers, do not wish to allow the nationalized transport undertaking to have a share in their counsels.

There is no satisfactory solution of their problems at the moment, although they may belong to two Associations, and pay a double subscription. They disagree with the policy of one Association, and the other is debarred from giving them the special service they require. Their dilemma involves a principle the settlement of which should not be too long delayed.


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