“ TOO AWFUL FOR WORDS.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 909, 25 October 1910, Page 3

“ TOO AWFUL FOR WORDS.”

RIFE IN BACK-BROCKS RAILWAY CAMPS. Auckland, October 22. The revealing searchlight of the thoroughly candid critic was thrown upon the lives of men in some of the railway co-operative camps by the Rev. G. C. Cruickshauk at the mission meeting in connection with the Anglican Synod last night. As a worker in some of the English slums, he said, he thought he bad seen some life that was “pretty hefty,” as he phrased it. In the railway camps he knew there were some very fine men, and he would never characterise a whole community of men by one term ; but on the whole he had never seen lives so degraded as he bad seen in the back-blocks co-operative railway camps in New Zealand. It was too awful for words. The men in these camps could knock out 10s or 15s a day with ease. There was nothing to stop them drinking, for they knew they could be sure of three meals a day, and they debased themselves in a way that one would never see in the worst slums in England. They lived in tents 10ft. by 12ft. It rained 3641 days a year, more or less, and they had absolutely no recreation during their long leisure hours, but to twiddle their thumbs. One of them had told him to pass the time they had eveu read the advertisements on the jam tin labels backwards. Almost anybody would drink in those circumstances. It was a scandal that those men should be allowed to live such a life without any provision for their recreation. If he had had the money to do it he would have started a temperance cafe himself and run it under church aus] ices among the camps, and that would have saved many a man. Continuing his remarks, Mr Cruickshank said that many of the railway workers were the scum of creation, but the greatest difficulty he and his fellows had to contend with was the sending of remittances from England. He implored his hearers, if they ever had a black sheep in the family, not to let him become a remittance man. That was the biggest curse that could happen to a man. One of the speaker’s friends had known a remittance man who had an order payable to bearer for and he had many before that. Mr Cruickshank said that there was great need, not only for more clergymen, but for lay workers to go into the back-blocks.