London, Feb. 18.
Two sections of the British Industries Fair will be opened at the "White City" (London), and Birmingham on Monday, and the third section at Glasgow in the following week.
Mr. F. G. Kellaway, head of the Department of Overseas Trade, in the course of an interview, said the Fair was the largest and most representative exhi ion of British trade that had ever been assembled.
The Department of Overseas Trade had issued 60,000 invitations to overseas buyers in 112 foreign countries, British Dominions and colonies; and 95,000 invitations to jame buyers. Seventeen foreign commercial missions had also been invited. He hoped the Fair would mark the turning-point in British trade.—Reuter.
British Trade Looking Up London, Feb. 18.
An optimistic view of British trade was taken by Mr. F. G. Kel-away, head of the Department of Overseas Trade, in the course of a speech at Luton. He said the reports he received showed that the tide was turning, particularly in regard to the inter-Imperial outlook. The prospects of inter-Imperial trade were more promising, in fact, than the prospects anywhere else in the world. The Australian market had been closed for some months, but there were indications that that state of affairs would soon be changed. The same applied to Canada and South Africa. It was impossible to speak so confidently in regard to India, but there were indjcations that trade with India would improve.
One reason, said Mr. Ksllaway, why we had lost markets was that our high cost of production was making competition impossible. That was not due to high wages, but to the fact that we did not got fair return for high wages. Great Britain had lost contracts worth 10 millions sterling because exporters and merchants were unable to give a definite date of delivery, owing to strikes and threatened French Mineral Production Paris, Feb. 22.
The Minister of Public Works has published statistics of the production of combustible minerals during 1920. In the aggregate, last year's output exceeded that of 1919 by nearly 3,000,000 tons.
The production of oil reached 24,503,000 tons, of which 9,749,000 tons came from the northern oil fields in the Department of Pas de Calais. The St. Etienne Basin contributed 3,565,000 tons and the Strasbourg oil-field 3,175,000 tons. The output of the Sarre Basin, not included in the above total, was 9,418,000 tons. 3.4%, The production of lignite is given as 971,000 tons—a slight increase over 1919.
The extraction of "iron ore amounted to 13,871 tons in 1920, as compared with 9,430,000 in 1919. The greater part of this—8,075,000 tons—came from the Met2- Thionville area, while the Briey-Longwy district produced 4,131,000 tons.—French Wireless through Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.