From The Times: February 21, 1920
To the Editor of The Times.
Sir, Will you allow me to enter a protest against a new abuse of the advertisement system which has grown up during the war and should be stopped before it extends farther? I allude to the practice adopted by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway of placing large and exceptionally ugly advertisements on the inside their compartments. We have long been familiar with the photographs of the scenery of their lines. These were not merely unobjectionable, they were even delightful. They were followed by photographs of hotels, often pleasant enough in themselves, but obviously a fatal precedent. And now we have soap and shirts and cigarettes, and are forced to sit staring for an hour at an assertion which is very likely false and is, in any case, one which we have no desire to hear. And, indeed, the law would protect us if anybody tried to force us to hear it; we could “abate” him as a nuisance. But there is as yet no protection for annoyance inflicted upon the eye. I submit that the case of a railway carriage owned by a monopoly and representing the only means of travel open to the public is one which the claim to protection is clear and undoubted. There is no parallel between such advertisements and advertisements in newspapers. One does not look at the same page of a newspaper for an hour on end; nor is one obliged to look at any particular newspaper at all. But if one has to go to Brighton there is no alternative to the Brighton Railway, and no escape from the horrors it inflicts on its passengers. I hope your powerful influence, which helped the Scapa Society to get the Advertisement Regulation Act passed into law, and the members of both Houses of Parliament who passed it by immense majorities, will bring pressure to bear on this company to withdraw these offensive plates and abandon advertising inside its carriages. If such advertisements are endurable in the Underground railway in which passengers seldom remain more than a quarter of an hour, they are quite unendurable in carriages in which one may have to spend two or three hours.
Your obedient servant,
GB Longstaff
President of the Scapa Society, 25 Victoria Street, SWI.
thetimes.co.uk/archive

But it was a good life...

I wonder who he thought PAID FOR HIS CHEAP RIDES...