5

H.—9

3.—PEEMANENT FOKCES.

(1.) PERMANENT ARTILLERY.

* Eighteen are recruits, enlisted since 1st October, 1892. The number and ranks of the officers may seem slightly out of proportion to the number of non-commissioned officers and men, but this is not the case. The four senior officers have each the whole responsibility of the care and preservation of the works and armaments of their particular centres—Major Goring (also Lieutenant-Colonel) is in command of the whole of the Volunteer Forces in the Auckland district; Major Messenger, at Wellington, has the work of the recruiting and depot of the Permanent Artillery and Torpedo Corps ; and these officers, together with Major Sir A. Douglas and Captain Morrison, at Lyttelton and Dunedin respectively, are, or should be, in addition to being in charge of the armament of their own stations, made responsible for the instruction and efficiency of the various Artillery Volunteer corps belonging to their centres; while Lieutenant Hume has but recently joined the service. L-I cannot speak too highly of the intelligence displayed and the work done by these officers, admirably aided as they have been by the services of MasterGunner Neville, E.A., Sergeant-Major Bush, and Sergeant-Major Parker, both late E.A. StaffSergeant Eichardson, E.A., is also a most excellent, intelligent, and smart non-commissioned officer, doing very good work. The non-commissioned officers and gunners of the Permanent Artillery are very highly trained, and capable of doing higher work than their rank denotes. They are well educated, intelligent, and drawn from a very superior class; very well behaved. I have inspected this branch thoroughly, both as to their own knowledge and as to their powers of instruction in imparting knowledge to the Naval Artillery and to certain cadet corps, and am fully satisfied. This corps has very unjustly suffered from treatment which it in no way deserves, and which I believe to be quite unwarranted. Parliament has sanctioned the establishment to be as shown above. It has been the custom to curtail of non-commissioned officers and higher-paid gunners, keeping the larger proportion of men on less pay than it was evidently intended they should enjoy. This is assuredly unjustifiable. With a corps so highly trained and so generally efficient as this one is it is difficult to believe that there is no prescribed uniform. The men buy their own uniform, and have been allowed to go to different tailors for it. The result, of course, has been that there are numbers of different cloths of different hues amongst the tunics and frocks, and also there is considerable diversity in the pattern in which these articles are made up. There has been some endeavour made to follow the uniform of the Eoyal Artillery, New Zealand badges being worn. This endeavour should be made a certainty of, and care must be devoted to that end. It will be greatly to the advantage of the colony if Lieutenant Hume be allowed to proceed to England to go through a short course of gunnery and the Firemaster's course. He has offered to pay his own passage to England and back, asking for personal allowance while going through these or other courses. I consider that his offer is a very good one, and have strongly recommended that advantage be taken of it. It is with much regret that I have to mention the fact that Lieutenant-Colonel Goring is, on account of ill-health, obliged to proceed to England. He has served his country for nearly thirty years without leaving her shores, and fully deserves the leave he asks for on full pay. Belonging to the Permanent Artillery is a body of artificers. These men do the work and correspond generally to the ordnance artificers in the Imperial service. They suffer under a grievance, which I brought to the notice of the Hon. the Defence Minister in a letter dated the 21st May, 1892. These men have no executive rank, are obliged to attend parades as gunners, and possibly be under the supervision of a third-class gunner, while, if the work to be done is an artificers' fatigue, the non-commissioned officers and men of the working-party are under the supervision of the artificers. There are two classes of artificers—fitter artificers, who have charge of the working of the machinery connected with the ordnance, and the wheeler artificers, who are practically carpenters. There is no comparison between the responsibility of these two classes, or as regards the amount of technical knowledge required of them—for instance, the two fitter

u o to .3 o CD "3 CD a I CO EG 03 El o> f." 02 ■I o Lo a o 03 o Gunners, Total. First Class. Second Class Third Class. 'he Permanent Artillery has an establishment of Vith a present strength of... 3 3 1 1 1 1 4 3 4 5 4 2 4 2 12 12 27 25 30 13 52 66 142 133* 'he Force is distributed at— Auckland Wellington Lyttelton Dunedin 1 1 1 i 1 i i 1 2 1 J. 1 i i 3 3 3 3 8 9 3 5 3 4 3 3 11 35 8 12 29 56 21 27 "i i Total 3 i l 12 25 13 66 133