The spectacle of the patients in the isolation hospital playing cricket and tennis in its grounds while they were being kept by the rate-payers appeared to be another aggravating element to the unbelieving Gloucestrians, who have suffered with the rest of us an intensive anti-waste campaign since the war. Nor could those honest citizens find any accommodation in the country or by the seaside for their annual holidays. All doors were closed to them the moment they admitted residence in the affected city. Cricket teams cancelled their fixtures - with Gloucester. A National Federation of Employers who proposed to hold a conference there removed it to Cheltenham. Sharpest blow of all, charbones and motor exeursionists avoided it. The charabane craze has created' a boom in antiquities and\ cities boasting fine cathedrals, fragments of Roman walls, and abbey ruins, have experienced a golden harvest since the war. Gloucester has shared this boom and the spectacle of charabancs scurrying through the city without stopping, while the terrified excursionists held their noses in their handkerchiefs has broken the hearts of the honest burgesses. In their anger they have turned on the newspaper correspondents who are in the city reporting the progress of the epidemic and accused them of being the cause of all their tribulations.
One correspondent was turned out of a local hotel and advised to get back to London. Perhaps this incivility provoked reprisals for it was followed: by derisive comments in some widely circulate ed newspapers on the intelligence of the Gloucestrians who were described in one sheet as resembling the inhabitants of "the village that voted the earth was flat," and in another as Gothamites.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.