FATHER OF SEVENTEEN CHILDREN.

Taranaki Daily News, 25 November 1920, Page 8

FATHER OF SEVENTEEN CHILDREN.

COMPLAIXR OF THE COST OF A LIVING. A father of 17 children, nine of them under the age of Hi, made a despairing appeal to the Auckland Prices Investigation Tribunal in a letter received by that body on Monday (says the Star). The price of candles, of fencing staples, and particularly of flannel, a specimen of which was enclosed, was declared by the harassed parent to pass the bounds of all reason. Flannel at !).< (id a yard, he intimated, made the covering of his progeny a matter of impossibility. Unscrupulous and callous storekeepers, lie roundly asserted, "were depriving his 'little ones' of covering and even of a sullicieney of food." In (hose circumstances lie called upon the Board of Trade to "think and act." To spur it to action he gave excerpts from the family pedigree, including the list of the children in order of age. He added particulars of his family history, from which il appeared that a nephew, the son of a church dignitary, had fallen in the South African war under circumstances which led the London Times to observe (bat he and Irs live companions had left behind them "a memory of imperishable glory.'' And not content with all this, the aggrieved correspondent went on to point out thai in the event of another war his numerous family would be at the Mute's disposal—provided, of course, they could be kept warm and fed in the interval, which if was almost impossible to do if storekeepers, those "sharks in human form," did not give them a "square deal." The Prices Investigation Tribunal rose to the occasion. They decided that the afflicted parent would get justice so far m they could giv« it.