Roll, Britannia!

At London's Waterloo Station a crowd of 4,000 was waiting. They broke through barriers, eluded panting bobbies, swarmed around the waiting automobile of the newly arrived guest from the U.S. Singer-Bandleader Bill Haley regarded the fans through the windows, his cat's eyes rolling heavenward. "Fantabulous," said he, a step or two ahead of his pressagent.

Haley's reception was indeed fantabulous up and down England, which, far more than the U.S., is now in the grip of the rock 'n' roll frenzy. In fact, rock has lately shown signs of becoming fashionable. Once the identifying oddity of the notorious Teddy Boys, it is now played at coming-out balls and high-toned birthday parties (including the Duke of Kent's, who was 21 last October), in the ballroom of Claridge's and in the drafty Victorian splendor of Balmoral Castle itself, where Queen Elizabeth last summer requested a showing of Haley's movie Rock Around the Clock. The Queen's former dancing teacher. Marguerite Vacani, instructs her aristocratic pupils in its mysteries, and it has become a passion of Princess Margaret, who last week was reported sitting in a London theater with stockinged feet propped on a railing, wiggling her toes in time to the rock 'n' roll in The Girl Can't Help It.

In his current English tour Rock 'n' Roller Haley has reaped the profits of the craze. Haley and his Comets played to packed houses for four days in London, are now zooming through the industrial cities of the north. At one rocking session Bassist Al Rex was so carried away by the shrieks of 3,000 fans he ripped his pants straddling his big fiddle, played on anyway. Haley's disk of Rock Around the Clock has become the first record to sell a million copies in Great Britain. And even the more dignified of the British papers have stopped viewing him with sober-faced alarm. Said the Times last week: "Mr. Haley pounds his guitar without mercy . . . But there is nothing sentimental or morbid about his songs. His pelvis wriggles, not with care (as does that of his rival Mr. Presley) but with purest joie de vivre."

Thanks to the echoes of his English success, the U.S. career of onetime Hillbilly Singer Haley, 31, has picked up speed. He has scheduled a major U.S. TV appearance, expects to play Las Vegas. The credit for his new good fortune he attributes solely to the perception of the British teenager, who has embraced rock 'n' roll slang as enthusiastically as he has the music. An Oxonian departing the university has been overheard saying goodbye to his dean in the words: "See you later, alma mater."

The dean's approved reply: "In a while, bibliophile."

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