They Wanted Buttons —And Got Them!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 303, 13 April 1945, Page 9

They Wanted Buttons —And Got Them!

ago on the radio and repeated in the newspapers that the New Zealand Government, as part of its UNRRA commitment, had allocated to CORSO (New Zealand Council of Organisations for Relief Service Overseas) a million and a-half used uniforms which would be dyed and distributed among people in need of clothing in Europe. However, many of these uniforms have buttons missing, and a public appeal was made for a million and a-half buttons to replace those that had been lost. 3 Now the buttons are pouring in. Girl ii was announced a few weeks

Guides, Scouts, and members of the

Junior Red Cross have collected them from homes throughout the Dominion, Already the number coming in to Red Cross Headquarters is very large and there are still many returns to come. But it did not happen so quickly as we wrote those sentences. One of the collectors was a Boy Scout. "How long did you collect?" we asked him.

"About an hour

and a-half." "And did you mind .going into people’s places?" "It wasn’t too good at first, but all the people were nice to me. At one house they gave me a banana and another lady gave me an apple." "And how did the buttons come in?" "Well, only two places had the buttons already in parcels for me. A few houses didn’t give me any, and from four houses I only got four buttons, All the rest gave me plenty. At one house the lady brought out a big box of buttons. She tipped half into my bag and kept half for herself." A Strange Collection "If they had none ready, did yor wait?" "Yes. People went away and hunted then and there. At four or five houses I stayed ten minutes. And lots of people were doing the washing. I had to wait while they hung out the clothes. I could see where the people got the buttons. Lots of them kept them in tins or boxes on the mantelpiece, or in bottles on the window-sills or in drawers. One lady gave me buttons off an old dress she'd worn when she was young. Another lady said she’d cut hers off her son’s coat. Another gave me a lot of buckles; she said they might need buckles too in Europe. One place was full of kittens crawling about everywhere. They asked me if I wanted one, but I said, ‘No, thanks, fowls are enough for us.’ One man asked me where he could send old tyres. There was only one place with a

dog, a pretty savage Alsatian, so I didn’t go in there." The scout opened his boxes of buttons. "Look what I collected." There was every type of button there -big ones, small ones, cloth, metal, bone, and wooden ones, a tramway button, a New Zealand Shipping Company button. There was also a strange collection of other things that had crept in with the buttons-a cent, a screw, used matches, safety pins, a cartridge case, a stud, a toeplate, two prune stones, strands of cotton. A few days later The Listener visited the receiving depot at the Red Cross office.

"How are the buttons?" we asked them. "Don’t talk to us about buttons-look there. Soon we won’t be able to move for boxes of buttons." "So the drive is a success?" "We're sure of that. We have these after’ only a few days." Stacked in a corner were boxes, sacks, tins, newspaper parcels, cloth bundles, in fact everything that could possibly hold

buttons. "Just feel the weight of this small box — there’s 221b. of buttons in there; the right kind, too, they’re metal trouser buttons." One of the biggest jobs of the campaign will take place at the Red Cross rooms: the sorting of the buttons. Sewing Them On The next step in the campaign is the actual renovation of the clothing. This will be done by teams of women through the Relief Supplies Committee of CORSO, from such organisations as the New Zealand Red Cross, the Order of St. John, the Lady Galway Patriotic Guild, Church guilds, Women’s Institutes, Women’s Divisions of the Farmers’ Union, and other organisations. Manufacturers in Auckland and Wellington have promised to provide the machines and perhaps the operators for sewing on the buttons. There will also be required many hundreds of yards of thread, hundreds of needles, thimbles, and so on. The garments themselves are all service clothes which are perhaps frayed at the wrist, worn at the elbow or knee or slightly damaged, but which are in too good a condition to be cut down for children. The objective of CORSO is to produce garments which will really be worth wearing, which New Zealand will be proud to send. When all this has been done the Army will take over. They will clean and perhaps dye the clothing, and then they will deliver the goods. In a few weeks or months New Zealand clothing will be covering the tattered peoples of war-devastated countries.