NEWS OF THE DAY

Evening Post, Volume CXIV, Issue 120, 17 November 1932, Page 10

NEWS OF THE DAY

Tlie Public Debt. New Zealand's Public Debt at 31st March last stood at £205,724,341 5s 3d, according to tho report of the Public Debt Commission presented to Parliament yesterday. The' amount of the Public Debt repaid ioi redeemed- during the year -which, enddd on 31st March last was & 1,264,330,. and , the amount of the debt repaid or redeomed since the commencement of the Bepayinent of the Public Debt Act, 1925, - was £7,510,293. , Examinations. Now Zealand University examinations which have been conducted during the past three weeks in the Winter Show Building, John street, finish tomorrow. Next week candidates will sit for the Senior Free Place examination, and immediately following" will come the matriculation, ov University, Entrance, examination, beginning on Ist December. Proficiency tests have already been commenced in the primary schools. No junior and senior national scholarships are to be- held this year. The Ambulance Service. . . The report of the superintendent (Mr. P. Boffo) presented to to-day's meeting of the Free Ambulance Board, showed that for the month ending 31st October the service had attended to 456 cases-r72 accidents,' 38 "transports," 1 slight case, and 2 serious office cases. Tho. Cars travelled 4770 j iles during tho month. . The number of cases attended to date ;is 33,730, and 335,826 milos have been travelled by the cars. A Garden Suburb. "There are three things a visitor to Lower Hutt notices immediately," said Mr. H. P. Kidson at th© rose show at Lower Hutt yesterday, "first that the Borough Council does not grudge spending money on flowers; second, that the individual gardens are unexcelled, and, third, that the district has a real live body in its horticultural society." Mr. Kidson spoke of the good work done by the executive of the society. ' The Beauty of Roses. . , "This.is a story with a moral,".'remarked- Mr. H; P. Kidson when opening the Hutt Bose Show yesterday. "I went," ho said, "aa many better qualified than I have done, to a well-known encyclopaedia to see what it had to say about roses. I found all sorts of things which it would never do to say here. For instance, I read how Cleopatra decorated herself with garlands of roses and used attar of Toses to make herself more attractive, with the result that Mark Antony and even the great Caesar himself lost their heads. We do not want that to happen here. The moral is not to go to booksl, but to the roses themselves if you want to know 'about the beauty of roses."

Left to Themselves. When the men who had been looking after sheep on Campbell Island lvcro brought to Bluff in August of last yvur, the sheep were left to themselves, remarks an exchange. The lessees of the island have never returned, and the strange position arises that over 4000 sheep are now on an uninhabited island with the shearing season in. full swing. Thp area of the island on which the sheep graze is 48,000 acres. Toll Bridge and Ambulance. It is unlikely that the Wellington Free Ambulance will bo called upon to pay toll charges for the use of the proposed Paremata bridge. At the monthly meeting of the Ambulance Board this morning, Mr. B. L. Button said that when the matter came before the Hutt County Council he did not think there would be any difficulty in arranging free use of the bridge for ambulance cars. Clock For Free Ambulance. Im memory of her father, Mr. Lance George, who died in England in July last year, Miss B. C. George has presented an electric clock for use in the new Free Ambulance building. At the monthly meeting of the Ambulance Board to-day, the chairman (Mr. C. J. B. Norwood) said that the. clock would be the permanent timepiece- of the service. The late Mr. George had been a friend and helper of the. Free Ambulance since its inception, and a suitable inscription would be placed on the clock. A motion conveying the thanks of the board to Miss George was carried. London's "Safer" Streets. * London's idea of safer streets was mentioned to a "Post"'reporter by Mr. A. Anderson, of Lower Hutt and Petone, who has just returned from a trip abroad. He quoted figures issued by Scotland Yard and published in the "Daily Telegraph," which showed that in April, May, and June, 1931, 35,410 street accidents had occurred in. 'London, causing injury to 15,140 people and death to 345 people. The question was asked: Were London streets getting safer? because the figures for the same three months in 1932 were:—Number of accidents, 31,032; persons injured, 14,012; persons killed, 273. '^Pedestrians form again by far the largest class of victims, while drivers and occupants of motor vehicles are the smallest," said the "Daily Telegraph.'' Memorial'to Teachers. ' The gates erected at the East avenue entrance to the Auckland Training College as a memorial to'teachers who fell in tho Great War were opened yesterday afternoon by Major-General W. L. H. Sinclair-Burgess, general omcer commanding'tho New Zealand militaryforces, after the consecration by .Archbishop Averill (states the "New Zealand Herald"). A half-holiday was observed in cifey and suburban schools to mark the .occasion. About -354 teachers from the Auckland district went to.the front, and 52 were killed or reported missing. The gates, which have been constructed by the provision of Auckland teachers at"a cost of about £-700, form an impressive and dignified approach to the college. A road from the gates to the main entrance of the building is being constructed. There are six columns of Portland stone, three on each side of the roadway. An unostentatious design, similar to that of the Cenotaph, lends the- work an austere dignity. An inscription on one of the two niain pillars reads:—"These gates stand in proud memory of teachers of this province who in the hour of national danger took'their place in the front line of battle and in the end yielded their lives for the land and peoplo they loved." On the other is written: "That the memory of those who suffered and achieved and gave may never fail, these gates are erected by their fellow teachers." The bronze gates proper, which hang from pillars 14 feet apart,, are of particularly fine quality and workmanship. On them are "two laurel wreaths,' with the dates 1914-1918. '/;■■•■• ; ..-. >.: ; Factors Not Taken Into Account!. '•;•■' Dr. C. E. Beeby, of Canterbury College, told some excellent stories of the results of lack of appreciation, of the importance of the mental outlook of the employee in business and industry, while speaking to members of , the Chamber, of, Commerce last evening. He told, for instance,; of .trouble in a great overseas factory, 'which trouble being analysed, was shown to have its origin in the-piling indignation of girl workers at having to wear safety hair nets, eight .hours a. day, which as one of them said, "made them look -^-rfrights in the sight of the men in. the factory." Seldom, he said, were strikes caused by , one particular grievance, but nearly always by the mounting annoyance resulting from a series of minor matters, touched off at last by some equally small matter. He spoke also of an up-to-the-minute American factory he had visited, windowless, artificially lighted; ventilated, and heated. Mechanically it was perfect, but to Jthei employees it was appalling in its completeness of separation from normal life. Mr. J. P. Luke, the chairman of the meeting, spoke of the ;i samo aspect later in the evening, and recalled that "during his war work in England he had been charged witjj the investigation-of reasons for the failure of a munition factory.to produce at its rafed capacity. There were several factors to be rectified, and one, of them was the antagonism between the munition workers and the voluntary workers who fan the canteen. Mr. M. G. C. McCaul likened such big-scale troubles to family rows, and their analysis to the remorse of father in the tram after the row, when he realised that he had not ruined the morning and most of the day for the whole family because the youngsters would not sit up straight, but because that was the last of a series, of twenty petty annoyances over a fortnight.