Pomp After Brass

Five minutes to noon. Massed along the pavements of London's Ludgate Hill last week and down the Strand were thousands of excited school children, cynical salesladies, brokers, clerks. Noon. Bow Bells, all the bells of London, clanged in tingling cacophony. An escort of mounted police clattered up the empty street and the great procession started. The Worshipful His Lordship, the new Lord Mayor of London was on has way from Guildhall to take his oath of office at the Courts of Justice in the Strand.

In Greater London there are 28 mayors of as many boroughs, but the Lord Mayor reigns over "The City," London's financial district, which Britons still call "the richest square mile on earth," ignoring Wall Street. The King-Emperor himself cannot enter "The City" without the Lord Mayor's permission. Neither can British troops. At any hour of day or night the Lord Mayor may have private audience with George V or access to the Tower of London. His diamond sceptre recalls that London was a sovereign city before England had a Throne. In return for all this glory, to which he is elected for a term of only one year, the Most Worshipful the Lord Mayor is expected to spend three times his salary of $50,000 in banquets, pageants, shows. The new Lord Mayor, round and smiling Sir William Waterlow (not Waterloo), joint head of the potent printing firm of Waterlow & Sons, Ltd., spent at least $25,000 of his "pay" last week.

Fifteen brass bands preceded Sir William down the Strand. Between the bands lurched and rumbled dozens of gorgeous, ingenious, expensive floats. One series showed the progress of printing from the Gutenberg Bible to the daily tabloid, with Father Time seen at last frantically pecking the keys of a linotype machine.

The late King Edward VIIth's first automobile (a Daimler like George V's last) puffed and wheezed ahead of Captain Malcolm Campbell's 200-mile-an-hour Bluebird. There was a League of Nation's float and a Good Turn Truck on which a Boy Scout turned and flapped flapjacks.

Near the end of the procession and most important was the lumbering gilded coach of the Lord Mayor. Built in 1757, its panels decorated by the famed allegorical painter Cipriani, the Civic Coach is quite as imposing as the State Coach of George V. Six horses drew it. Seated on the festooned box was the splendiferous Lord Mayor's coachman, his fat calves gleaming in pink silk stockings, a plumed tricornered hat on his head, a gaudy rosette of ribbons in his buttonhole. From one window of the coach peeped the Civic Mace, out of the other stuck the Civic Sword. Along in glory on the back seat sat Most Worshipful Sir William, his robes of scarlet, black and gold, a cocked hat on his head and his heavy chain of office round his neck. In his hand he held a bouquet of sweet smelling herbs (hygienic relic of the Great Plague of 1664-65).

It was a glorious but not a comfortable ride. Two centuries have not improved the wheels and axles of the Lord Mayor's Coach. Jouncing, bobbing, bowing Sir William Waterlow was perspiring from the effort of keeping his equilibrium before he reached the Inns of Court.

In scarlet and ermine the King's judges stood full-wigged as august witnesses while the new Lord Mayor swore his great oath of office to the Lord Chief Justice of England, Baron Hewart, a prominent member of London's Beefsteak Club. After the oath, the Lord Mayor's procession wound back again to Guildhall. There at a banquet of 1,000 covers, costing $15,000, Printer Waterlow dined half the elect of London, including Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald. Half the cost was paid by the Lord Mayor's two fur-hatted High Sheriffs. Viands included roast swan and suckling pig washed down with finest burgundy and champagne from the Civic Cellars.