Blooming Black Market

British railroads last spring and summer ran 365 special trains, assigned 8,000 goods vans (Britain's little boxcars) to carry nothing but flowers from country to city. To free these cars for war hauls, the Ministry of War Transport has decreed that flowers cannot be shipped by train this season.

The Ministry decree, and city prices, created a blooming black market. By last week flower prices in London were: tulips, $6 a dozen; carnations, $8 a dozen up; violets, once 10-c- a bunch, now 60-c-; daffodils up to $2.50 a small bunch. A pussywillow, once given free to a good buyer, now costs 20-c-.

The effort to nip this unfolding market in the bud has actually endangered the sanctified privacy of Britons. Police on the Great Western Railway have been seen to eye gentlemen with bulbous suitcases. There has been talk that officers have gone so far as to think of requesting British citizens to open their packages. Last week, when the King & Queen visited Midlands factories, the Queen was handed an orchid bouquet. The King smilingly warned the Queen: "Be careful, if you take those flowers on the train--you don't want to break the law."

Not breaking the law, but giving it a neat trim, is a new bicycle express supplying the lush London market. Pedaling between Penzance and London, cyclists leave Cornwall and cycle 120 miles, hand their flower load to another team, which covers the next 120 miles; a third team pumps the remaining 65 miles to London. The cyclists' reported individual earnings: $80 a week.

British flower farmers have dug up their precious flower bulbs and have planted root crops--swedes, turnips, mangel-wurzels, oats and onions. But some fields still blaze with flowers, and black marketers from the city offer high prices. Snorted one Cornish farmer: "Maybe there were a few who took the chance of making an easy pound when it was offered to them, but the rest of us sold nothing to them 'foreigners.'"

An 80-year-old farm laborer in the Scilly Isles, scattering oat seeds where tulips once grew, last week spoke for Britain: "We planted corn like this in the Bible 'way long before they thought of flowers on the islands. It's good to be doing it again."

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