Address To Rotary Club On Crippled Children’s Society By Dr E. T. Dawson

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 50, 28 May 1948, Page 7

Address To Rotary Club On Crippled Children’s Society By Dr E. T. Dawson

Rotarians unanimously agreed last Tuesday evening, after listening to a particularly instructive address by Dr E. T. Dawson on the subject of the work of the New Zealand Crippled Children’s Society, that it was unfortunate the public was not more conversant with the wonderful work which was quietly and efficiently going on in the interests of the crippled and the maimed.

The address was one of the most interesting yet delivered to the club, and Rotary’s close association with the world movement for bettering the lot of the crippled ahd the malformed gave the subject additional point. From earliest times, said Dr Dawson, crippled and deformed persons had been outcasts —often associated with evil spirits and witchcraft. They had been persecuted throughout the Middle Ages and it was only with the rounding of the nineteenth century that a more humanitarian attitude was adopted by mankind in general. Dr Dawson claimed that the sympathy extended all over the world to cripples in general dated from the time a well-known American citizen founded the first institution for cripples, as a result of his own son losing both feet in a tram accident. From America the movement spread to Europe. Particularly in England and the Empire was it widely sponsored. The New Zealand group had been given a-mag-nificent boost in 1935 by Lord Nuffield’s splendid donation of £50,000. This had later been augmented by the making over of the beautiful ‘Wilson Home’ at Takapuna, by the Wilson family. Now the whole movement was strongly based and operating throughout tile length and breadth of the Dominion.

Discussing the work of the local sub-centre, Dr Dawson told of its growing from the initial group of three (Messrs C. G. Lucas, D. V. Saunders and himself) to the present efficient branch, which covered the whole of the County and which did everything possible to rehabilitate disabled persons by making them useful members of society and remunerative units of industry. Dr Dawson concluded his address by instancing numerous cases where disabled persons had actually surpassed normal workers in production in various industrial callings. One of their great advantages, he declared, was that they were not clock-watchers, and on the whole took a keener interest in their work, and showed a greater appreciation of craftsmanship.