OPINIONS and QUERIES
Page 32
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Advocate For "Get Together" Instead of "Segregation"
ALETTER reply to "Tantalus" will be sufficient, as I do not intend to take part in a long controversy and some of his assumptions deserve only brevity. If his method is to obtain material or information for future articles, I am not falling for it I
Having been careful to say that my opinion was based on the reasonably wide circle of my own contacts, without denying the existence of two views, I am content to leave the extent of that knowledge to those who know me, as against the discreet anonymity of your writer.
In one place he questions my knowledge of the " average " haulier view, then occupies a few more lines to say I am quite right about a strong volume of opinion. If he will care to read journals other than that in which he writes, he will gather a little about that strength; that it is not all C licensee opinion, and that such opinion is held by people whose contacts and knowledge are at least equal to his own and far superior to mine. As he assumed that I am in a state of nervousness, apprehensiveness, defence and apology, I can at least feel that I am in goodly company, with a desire to see a state of "get together " instead of segregation of interests.
I am aware of the'efforts made over the table to adjust certain differences—equally 'am I aware of the causes of the breakdown. I prefer the good prospects of a better future instead of raking the ashes of the past, particularly when some of the causes are being removed.
Your contributor assumes the C licensee was to blame for the formation and rapid development of A.R.0.—I wonder what their C licensee membership will think of .that. The C licensee is, tentatively, assumed to be to blame for the Bolton and Burnley separation, he mentions. Why should I enlighten him when the associations in question evidently did not think fit to take your Contributor into their confidence? Is the C operator also to blame for certain areas of two associations getting together?
Your contributor again introduces an argument on the freedom of the C licensee to extend his fleet. Everyone connected with road-vehicle operation has, or should have, sympathy with the restrictions placed on the haulier and the way in which the administration of the Act often affected him. But it has always been my contention that it is far better to raise a low standard to a higher level than to drag the higher down to the lower. I am.afraid that all that was done or might have been done to assist the haulier would not have prevented the passing of the Act of 1933. The nigger in that woodpile was not any class of road operator.
For a short answer to about 3 ins, of his column 1, I have yet to discover that a discussion of a haulage problem turns a National Council meeting of C.M.U.A. into a Donnybrook Fair.
Several other points seem to me to be slightly diatribetic, but in conclusion he tries to send a cold shiver down my spine to add to my" nervousness." In reply, I quote " Tempi& omnia revelat," which, roughly and briefly translated, can mean "Wait and see."
Northolt. C. COURTNEY ClikstP.