MILLIONS IN POVERTY

Hokitika Guardian, 28 December 1928, Page 6

MILLIONS IN POVERTY

APPEAL FOR MINERS. (United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright). LONDON, December 25. While England was making merry over Christmas to-night, the Prince of Wales made a dramatic radio appeal on behalf of the millions of sufferers on the coalfields. The Prince painted a dark picture of the conditions in the “black belt’’ of unemployment. He told of the ragged children and of hopeless mothers, also of fathers who had once been intelligent workers, but reduced now to idleness and misery. He then made a. personal appeal to all the listeners, saying:—“Before I go from you., to-night” lie said, speaking with deep earnestness, “I make one practical suggestion. It is that no Christmas gathering break up without a concrete, effort to. muster help.” The result'of the appeal is still unknown, but cheques are already beginning to conic in to the Lend Mayor of London. The Prince arrived in evening dress, escorted by a few officials of the Radio Company. He said : “I wish you all a very happy Christmas evening. I don’t appear in the nature of a wet blanket, but I do ask you to think for a moment of the sufferers.” The Prince of Wales in his broadcast, appeal from 2 LO said:—“There are a. quarter of a million workless miners, with three times as many 'dependents, who have been without wages for months. Because distress is concentrated • in districts seeminglyremote, do not let us think at this time of the year of taking the lino of least resistance, and put it out of mind and out of sight. I implore you to think what long anxiety and fear they have undergone, seeing the only trade they know slipping away from them and the spectre of want over nearing them, then actual privation, and lastly helpless distress and starvation.”