FILLING IN TIME

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 613, 18 August 1933, Page 3

FILLING IN TIME

WORKLESS CITY DWELLERS GO ON SIGHTSEEING TRIP. A scheme to enahle jobless city dwellers to see the heauty of the English countryside this summer is being effected by the Midland Regional Group of the Youth Hostels' Association, in co-operation with Birmingham social workers. Some 30 members of the club for unemployed at the Society of Friends' Occupation Centre, Kingstanding, Birmingham, spent a week in June at Kildewydd. This is one of the more distant of Birmingham's Youth Hostels — a large old mill near the foot of Long Mountain in Montgomeryshire. Transport from Barmingham to Kildewydd was provided for the men; they were asked to pay only sixpence eaeh for the week's accommodation in the hostel and 3s towards the cost of their food. Arrangements were made with the Labour Exchange for their unemployment pay to he continued during their absence from home on condition that they return immediately if work was found for them; the balance of the pay was needed for their families to lfve on during their week's absence. Six or seven members of the Youth Hostels' Association, most of them students from Cardiff and Swansea University Colleges, volunteered to accompany them — paying full Youth Hostel fees and providing their own food — and to share with them the housebold chores, as well as singsongs, ramhleSj and sports. It is intended that this should he the beginning of a widespread movement to give factory woi'kers of the industrial Midlands, during unemployment, a, taste of the eountry life of which many of them knew so little.