OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 July 1939, Page 8

OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

“THE SHEEP FARMERS’ UNION”

(To the Editor)

Sir—Many thanks for your liberal space alldt.tod to “Other People’s Ideas" in your daily paper. It would be an advantage to many dairymen if they were to take more interest in the guaranteed price than to leave their welfare in the hands of the “Sheep Farmers’ Union.” These birds have been haggling at the Government so much lately that it looks as if the Government are getting entirely fed up with hearing and reading that the guaranteed price for butterfat is not wanted Who said so? Only those rail-sitters that don’t milk a cow. Why don’t they stay at home and work their farms, instead of harping over something that does not concern them? I might here state that there is a movement on foot in the Wairarapa to start a Dairy Farmers’ Association, the same as they have down South. It is very necessary, just at the present, to let the public know that the great majority of the dairymen are well satisfied with the guaranteed price. It stands to reason and anybody with common sense would never want to go back to the old order of smash and grab. I know it is very hard for the speculators and Tooley Street to lose £4,000,000 a year. It must give them a headache to lose that lot every year and no wonder they don't love Mr Nash —the best friend the dairy-farmer ever had. I hope every dairy farmer Will wake up and air his views in the Press as publicity will carry weight. It is no use letting the Opposition try Io smash the only thing that has been a blessing to the struggling dairy farmer. If the sheep farmer and large run-holder would help the Government to create closer settlement by cutting up some of their idle land, this district would be giving its unemployed useful productive work. Hoping some other cow cookies will take up their pens and defend the guaranteed price system and tell the “Sheep Farmers’ Union” and the financial gangsters to mind their own business. —I am, etc.,

DAIRY FARMER Masterton, July 17.

THE LATE MR DANIELL (To the Editor) Sir,—ln the course of conversation with Mr Charles Wilton, one of Masterton’s very few surviving secondgeneration pioneers (some of whose narratives of early Wairarapa personages and events I hope to be allowed to relate in your columns), I mentioned my intention to attend, on the same evening, the Charles E. Daniell Memorial Service in the local Methodist Church, the building in which I had first come under that estimable citizen’s influence soon after his arrival in New Zealand, when he was conducting a series of social evenings for the youth of Masterton in those otherwise loose-ended days “I think I can safely say that I met and spoke to the late Charles Daniell and his good lady the very first Sunday they ever spent together in Masterton,” said Mr Wilton. “It was somewhere at the top of Renall Street, I met the two of them, each carrying a child in their arms —a boy and a girl—and they seemed glad of a rest, on their journey further afield to see some friends of theirs, living on the Upper Plain, when they hailed me with the usual old time salutation “Good day,” which naturally led to my getting into general conversation with these apparent newcomers to our town.

“Mr Daniell seemed very anxious to hear my opinion of his chances of becoming a permanent settler in the district, with very little of this world’s goods beyond a stout heart,’a strong and willing pair of arms, and a knowledge of the building trade which he hoped, sooner or later, to turn to good account. Meanwhile, any kind of a job would not come amiss to him, until a better arrived. “I regretfully informed him (says Mr Wilton) that he had not only struck Masterton,, but the whole of New Zealand, at the very worst financial period of its progress-inter-rupted career; the result of the huge Sir Julius Vogel railway building loan for New Zealand having been fully expended, and no sight of a further loan of any sort, to provide work for the thousands of workers —manual for the most part and therefore landless and homeless—who had emigrated to the colony to build these railways and their bridges, in the possible hope of something better turning up later on.

"The failure of the Colonial Bank, and countless other unforeseen things happening as a result of its direct and indirect effect upon even the financial positions of the settler-shareholders, for the most part expecting it. at least to tide them over until better times arrived, had all contributed to as black an outlook as any pioneer could well wish escape,” was Mr Wilton’s chief reason for telling Mr Daniell that he had come to Masterton at an unfavourable period of time; and i sorry indeed he felt for him and his | brave lady and children in arms as, i with a smile on their lips. they thanked him for his friendly interest in their welfare, as future citizens of Masterton, and trudged along their first Sabbath day journey together within its otherwise seeming "a good place to stay.” The story of Mr Daniell's later struggles to gain a foothold in business affairs in our town’s today comparatively peak level of progressiveness, has already been well told in the columns of your journal, in association with its very fine and full obituary notice of the death of the grand old gentleman named.

A few further remarks, of a personal kind, however, may not come amiss although they may not count for much, being merely mine. It was the late and memory-revered Mr T. W. Shute who, as one of Mr C. E. Daniell’s greatest supporters in Sunday School affairs, first introduced me to the friendly notice of his friend, who follows him to the grave, almost a generation later, full of courage and ripe of years.

Having promised Mr Shute I would recite Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” at one of Mr Daniell’s Sunday School social evenings, I thought it better, at the last minute, to recite another poem, of far lesser kind, little dreaming the day would come when the glorious passage "... and our hearts, though stout and brave, still (like muffled drums) are beating, funeral marches to the grave," ... would come appropriately near the life of one who (as a youth half a century ago) loved them both; and has seen each borne to the grave, amid universal esteem, for their never-failing faith in Christian aims.—l am, etc..

N. J. BENNINGTON. Masterton, July 17,