ARTICLE

No License for Derek Wiscombe

APRIL 01, 1958

Derek Wiscombe, in the town of Jarrow [England], has built up a delivery service with a horse and cart. But the horse has aged, as we all do. Derek, how­ever, has saved up enough money to buy a lorry. Recently, he went before a Traffic Commissioner’s Tribunal to ask for a carrier’s license so that he could move and carry furniture.

And then the vested interests got to work. The nationalized Pickford’s objected to the grant of a license. Derek, they said, was "too enterprising." Not more enter­prising than Pickford’s had been in the remote past! For Pick-ford’s began with a single horse and cart! Nobody, it seems, must follow the trail that Pickford’s blazed — least of all a boy of 17!

Then — and here I quote from the Recorder of 16 November:

". . . a big firm called Tyneside Removals objected on the aston­ishing ground that Wiscombe is a person who will work round the clock, and would be a threat to our business if he were granted this license. In five years he might replace us in this town.’ "

In the Britain of today, hard work has become a dirty phrase. The thing to do is to shuffle by somehow, and to suppress anybody else who is willing to work. The country is sick and failing from this prevalent outlook; and it will perish from it unless we undergo the salutary change necessary to revive the virtues of our fathers.

It might have been supposed that the Traffic Commissioner’s Tribunal would have been very outspoken on this matter. It could have said to Pickford’s — "Do you thus scorn the base ladder by which you did ascend?" It might have said to Tyneside Removals — "Is your concern — large and well-established — so fearful, so inefficient, so distrustful of its own capacities, that it fears the com­petition of a boy of 17, whose only sin is that he is prepared to work hard? Could not your men work as hard as he is willing to do? Must the whole machinery of the modern, mighty State be invoked to prevent this lad swapping a horse for a lorry?"

There might have been made by the Traffic Commissioner’s Tribunal a parable of this case, a parable of universal application in this, our England.

But what did the Tribunal do? It refused Derek Wiscombe a license. That will teach him that the unforgivable sin in the eyes of nationalized industries and big private firms is to work too hard. What, in the light of this case, be­comes of the conservative belief in the virtues of private enter­prise?

Lord Hailsham goes around ringing bells. But I recall a verse from one of the poets, which suit­ably adapted seems not inappro­priate here:

‘Twould ring the bells of heaven

The wildest peal for years

If Commissioners lost their senses

And people came to theirs…!

From the column by "Diogenes" in the British weekly, Time & Tide, November 23, 1957.