Foreign News: Wet Towel

During her years (1931-45) as Conservative M.P. for Wallsend, Northumberland, Miss Irene Ward found it necessary to make many trips to London. She used to leave the sleeper at King’s Cross Station and go straight to the railways-owned Great Northern Hotel for a morning bath and breakfast. Then, like a wet towel flung in her Tory face, came the Socialist government and its nationalization of railways and railway hotels.

Last week indignant Miss Ward, now M.P. for Tynemouth, told an audience of clubwomen in Newcastle how Socialism had interrupted her matutinal bathing. “One morning recently,” she said, “I walked into the hotel and asked for my bath. I was told that the baths were available for men only.” Undaunted, she swept upstairs alone, found four vacant bathrooms and took her a bath. “There was no towel,” she told the clubwomen, “so I had to dry myself on the bathmat.”

Dry at last, Miss Ward sat down to address a letter to Lord Hurcomb, chairman of the Transport Commission. “I told him,” she said, “that, as a taxpayer, I knew that I subsidized British railways, but I saw no reason why, as a woman, I should subsidize men’s baths. He wrote back a nice letter, saying that if I put myself in the hands of the hotel management in future I should be able to get a bath.”

The whole thing, explained a railways official later on, was undoubtedly the fault of a literal-minded desk clerk. Back in pre-nationalization days, he said, the hotel had a ruling forbidding women to barge in off the streets for baths. Miss Ward’s case, he thought, might fairly be called “an isolated incident [but] the one thing we were sure about all along was that she would get her bath, come what may.”