GOOD SAMARITAN

Hokitika Guardian, 19 June 1933, Page 3

GOOD SAMARITAN

EX-OONVICTS OFFERED CHANCE. FOR FRESH START IN LIFE. The story of the remarkable activities of a wealthy Londoner, Mr Arnold Hamer Hull, who is spending his days and fortune providing a fresh start in life for ex-convicts, r was told ill the. Sunday Chronicle recently. Air Hall reclaims men from j crime and brings them back into society'by running a business staffed by the men. themselves. His theory is: Give a n.un a job and a chance to make good, and he will become a good citizen again, and help to reduce the 12,00.) population of British prisons. So successful are Mr Hall’s, plans that lie is opening larger premise,?. Once these men were criminals, men for whom society had no further u.e. To-day they are fighting their Way back to self-respect again. It was a visit to a prison about ton years ago which made Air Hull their friend. ..He was a man of independent means, with a country house, an estate, a yacht, and the mastership of a pack of foxhounds. He says the stories, he heard convinced him tliat something must be don, 3. about discharged prisoners, so he decided to devote his life, to their welfare.

Eight years ago. Air Hall opened a smpll basement bushier,s in Earl’s Court, London, -and employed one man. Then lie took a shop in Kensington where, altogether, .he has . employed about 50 ex-convicts who have worked for him for a while and then gone on to other jobs. “Nowadays I get anything up to five men to see me every day,” Air Hall said. “The man who has been in prison is not i?ome kind of • animal different from the rest of mankind. He is a man like you or I. Give him the chance of getting a foothold in life again and he will go straight. “It is lerribly difficult to keep straight. Yet here is an extraordinary thing. I find the ‘old lags’ are the best material.

One of the men Air Hall helped at the beginnign fell out of work: six months 1.7g0. He had 27s a week to keep a wife and four children, but he is not going back to crime.