Local & General

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 6, 1 July 1949, Page 4

Local & General

Generous Gesture The fact that Mr and Mrs Grace Senr. judged the costumes and also donated the cash prizes which were awarded at the recent Coster Ball. .. held at Taneatua was particularly * appreciated by the committee, whoy expressed their thanks for the geh*A erous gesture. />

New Station Opens Tomorrow At 8 p.m. tomorrow the new Hamilton broadcasting station IXH will come on the air for the first time when it will be opened by the Minister of Broadcasting. The station will operate on 1310 kilocycles, 229 metres and should be received favourably in the Bay of Plenty. Future evening programmes of IXH will be printed in the Beacon.

Pipe Band Dance Complete success attended the St Andrew’s Highland Pipe Band’s dance on Tuesday evening. The Caledonian hall was well filled with a gay and friendly crowd, who thoroughly enjoyed a well-chosen mixture of old-time, modern and Scottish dancing. The competition prize, a crochet bag, was, won by Miss H. Laurie.

It Really Happened! A large organisation asked one of its employees to work a couple of hours after his tea. He said it would be quite all right with him provided the firm rang his wife and let her know. Although the toll call was put through .the wife was not contacted. Imagine the employee’s surprise when a fortnight later a debit note was handed to him for “toll call” . . . ONE PENNY.

Good Old Days The cost of a war in 1543 is recorded in Ayr Burgh. Scotland, as follows: Cleaning spears, £4/9/3; the cutler new heads on spears, £1; wheels on guns, 6/-; trumpet drum, £l/2/-; John Rolland, for new skin on drum, 7/-; to the pursuant who brought a charge against English, 2/-; the boy who warned the coming of the Irish, 6d. War’s total expenditure, £7/6/9.

Super-Supersonic Speeds Secretary of the Air Force W. Stuart Symington on September 25 announced attainment by U.S. fliers of speeds “hundreds of miles faster than the speed of sound.” He also mentioned a jet bomber that outpaced its jet fighter escorts, which is going some. Air Force officers confirmed the fact that'a tiny test plane, the Bell XS-1, had flown at the incredible speed mentioned by Mr Symington.

Ram-Jet Missile Speed The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics revealed on September 28 that great strides had been made in supersonic speed engine research, which included a ram-jet test missile clocked at over 1600 m.p.h. in drop tests. Application of the engine is expected to be limited for some years to guided missiles and bombs, since it does not attain actual efficiency until it reaches double the speed of sound.

Cowshed Burned Down

Burned to the ground last Saturday morning a cow shed on the farm of Mr G. H. Checkley, Thornton, is believed to be a complete loss. The value of the shed and N machinery destroyed is thought to be some hundreds of pounds. _ Mr Checkley was away on holiday when the fire occurred and the farm was being watched by neighbours so that it was some hours before it was discovered. The cause is unknown. First Dog Licences Most people grumble mildly when they pay for their dog licences. But the grumbles aren’t so violent as those which greeted the first dog licences, introduced by Pitt to help pay for the Napoleonic Wars. Income tax was another one of his bright ideas! For months, both Pitt and the banker who had thought of the idea —a Mr Dent —received hampers daily. The hampers contained dead dogs. Our forefathers reacted to taxes more violently than is the case today.

Grim Custom Dies Abolition of hanging, with drawing and quartering, is one of the purposes of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill which was given a second reading in the House of Lords. Until the bill becomes law, drawing and quartering is still technically legal in Scotland, though it was abolished in England in 1870. The last occasion when the sentence of drawing and quartering was imposed was in Stirling 120 years ago; but so great ,was the public outcry that it was never carried out. Instead, the men' to whom the sentence applied were hanged and beheaded.