Westward Ho! for $ $ $

Time & again since war's end, Britons have been told that they had rounded the corner to economic recovery. Time & again, they have found that just around the corner was another crisis. In the face of each new crisis, Britons worked harder than ever before; industrial production boomed to 40% above the prewar level. But Britain was finding it increasingly hard to get dollars in exchange for its sweat and toil.

This year, British exports to dollar areas, after a year of steady climb, turned sharply downward; for the first two months, exports were 13% below the last quarter of 1948. If the trend continues, Britain will still have a dollar deficit when ECAid is stopped in 1952. "It's no longer a matter of production," explained the Board of Trade's President Harold Wilson. "It's now a matter of selling."

Realistic Tears. Harold Wilson last week was in the thick of Britain's biggest, bravest dollar-export drive to date. At the British Industries Fair (in London's Olympia and Earl's Court arenas, and in Birmingham's Castle Bromwich), $40 million worth of goods from 3,000 busy factories were on proud display. Nothing was spared to impress thousands of foreign buyers who dropped in to see the wares. Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary appeared and smiled benignly on the bustling scene. Under fluorescent lights, on 26 miles of counter, lay samples of nearly everything Britain produces--from jewelry, and tennis rackets strung with nylon, to men's suits made of plastic fabrics and dolls that could take a swig from a milk bottle, blow bubbles and weep realistic tears. A group of British models displayed highly exportable bathing suits. Britain's Socialist government begged British businessmen to get in there and pitch a good, hard, competitive game. The New Statesman and Nation's Sagittarius drove the point home on a high and clarion note:

Forth goes the call to the mercantile adventurers!

Sweep the wide Atlantic in the quest for golden gain.

The Board of Trade is veering

To support of privateering,

And it's Westward Ho! for dollars, and the Marshall-Truman Main!

Frustrated Exports. Have Britain's modern "mercantile adventurers" the stuff to sweep the dollar main? Gone were the days when Britain faced no real competition on world markets. As one energetic Briton said last week: "We must get out of our carpet slippers and don swashbucklers' boots." But the British were not doing much swashbuckling. As the sellers' market was fading, U.S. sales resistance mounted. British prices were too high for the U.S. market; Austin Motor bravely slashed the prices of its cars from $75 to $1,000, cutting its profits to ribbons. Other British automakers groaned: "We'd better get out of the American market." As their contracts with U.S. buyers broke down (2,561 cases since last July), browbeaten businessmen ran to the Board of Trade's "Advisory Panel on Frustrated Exports" for permission to unload in the British market.

Go Out There, Man. One big trouble: Britain was falling down badly when it came to salesmanship. It was easy to arrange a trade fair--however dazzling--and wait for buyers to show up. The British might have done better if, in addition to holding their fair, they had sent an army of hard-hitting salesmen to invade the U.S. Many fine old British industries, such as pottery and cutlery, which do a steady but limited trade with the U.S., often have no sales program; they merely wait for orders. Other enterprises send salesmen abroad who do not know their way around the U.S. market.

Worst of all, British industry fails to produce the kind of goods that are most likely to sell in the U.S. "If we in Britain," mused one imaginative Board of Trade official last week, "were to grasp the principle of selling the Americans something they haven't got and won't bother to make under their mass-production methods, there's market enough to bridge the dollar gap, and more."

Most British businessmen complain of stock difficulties--the high cost of raw materials, the heavy taxes they bear to maintain Socialist Britain's welfare program, and that old devil, the U.S. tariff. Some Americans, among them ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman (TIME, April 11), hold that this complaint has a sound basis; they believe that by agitating for higher tariffs and trying to thwart British trade, U.S. businessmen are actually working against their own interests. They believe it is up to the U.S. to help British and other European exporters through their troubles by allotting them a larger share of the dollar market.

Many Britons thought there was another way. A British leather-goods manufacturer, like a Drake of commerce, last week cried to his griping colleagues: "How can we not sell in the States? Remember that vast country has half the world's spending money in its pockets. Go out there, man, and get some of it!"

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