ROUGH ON SEMPLE & CO.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1047, 7 January 1913, Page 4

ROUGH ON SEMPLE & CO.

A miner’s wife of Waihi writes as follows to the Christchurch Press : "My husband was a Waihi miner for sixteen years. We had a very comfortable home there, and he was receiving good wages. We have a small family, and the children were well educated and everything was going on very satisfactorily until such time as Semple and Parry started with their advice to the miners to strike. What is the result ? We are all more or less ruined by listening to the harangues of these men. My husband, being a member of the union, was obliged to strike, but I am glad to say he took no part in ‘slanging’ the willing workers or opposing the constabulary in carrying out their arduous duties. lam thoroughly ashamed to own that it is the truth, that some of the women ihere were the greatest offenders, and their language was of the very lowest and foulest I have ever heard, and I was bred and brought up in a large mining district in the Old Country. Here we are stranded in Christchurch. My husband has got some work to do, but not the good wages he earned in Waihi, and I have got some needlework and washing to do to keep the family going, Ibut we have lost our home, furniture and garden, which took us sixteen years to make, all through the meddlesome interference of Parry, Semple and others."