SUNDAY TENNIS AT MILFORD

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 129, 22 August 1927, Page 8

SUNDAY TENNIS AT MILFORD

Sir, — I learn with amazement, in these enlightened days, that the Takapuna council has prohibited tennis in Kitchener Park on Sundays, because members of the local Baptist Church have protested. Apparently the feelings of the congregation, outraged by reason of other folk acting contrary to their ideas of Sunday observance, are so much more worthy of consideration than the equally legitimate aspirations of the tennis players, that the latter must be deprived of their facilities. But since the councillors in their medieval wisdom consider their duty is to legislate in the interests of the Baptist Church as against other sections of the community, why stop at issuing a ukase against Sunday tennis? The beautiful borough beaches are desecrated each fine Sabbath by hordes of non-churchgoers, who picnic and bathe in a most abandoned fashion. In

consistency, the council should place a traffic inspector on guard at each beach entrance and refuse admission to all who cannot produce proof of Church attendance, or promise to behave with becoming sedateness. Then there is the scandalous Sunday motoring on the concrete roads, and again a prominent Baptist minister declared recently that cinemas and sin are synonymous. Why not ban these baleful haunts of iniquity from the borough and allow the halls to be open only for loan meetings on week nights and revivals on Sunday? What! The ratepayers might in turn rise and abolish their reactionary representatives? Well, in that lies food for thought .and action, by the dispossessed tennis players. A.E.C,