THE WOFUL WAIL OF HOBSONSTREET.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIII, Issue 46, 24 February 1902, Page 2

THE WOFUL WAIL OF HOBSONSTREET.

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —Your paper professes to be run "For the cause that needs assistance; for the wrong that needs resistance" —no; I must be. wrong there—let mo look at # the "Star." Yes; you profess to be for—not against—the wrong that needs resistance. Well, I give up any appeal after this to any ethical code by which you may be guided, if it be possible that any New Zealand paper has an ethical code, and ask you as the local evening paper to allow me to give utterance to the wail of Hobson-street.

I know that I am pleading for a poor and friendless street against the haughty plutocrats that form the City Council. Hobson-street is emphatically not a fashionable street. We are, if not all poor people, mostly poor, and, without exception, lower middle class. We have no cards with "First and third Thursdays, 3 to 5," in the corner; we have (the male portion of us, except those in boarding-houses) to brush our own boots, to clean our own shop windows, and to sweep, when required, the pavement in front of our dwellings. Our wives, for the most part, do their own work; our sons and daughters go out to earn their own living as soon as they can. .Nothing1 can be more commonplace and sordid than our lives, and small wonder that all our young men who can start for South Africa.

Now, I should not be so foolish as to complain'of the neglect of the City Council to provide for the due cleansing, etc., of Hobson-st. if we were represented in the City Council. 1 have not forgotten the saying of a clever Frenchman: The Democracy that complains af its representatives is like an ugly woman who complains of her mirror. But we are not represented. The majority of the inhabitants of this street are tenants, and not property-owners, and although we pay the rates indirectly in rent we do not do so directly, and consequently do not vote for the Council. I daresay that if the Mayor condescends to read this letter he will ring up to the Town Clerk and ask "Where is Hobson-street?" The Town Clerk will look at the map and tell him that it is a low street inhabited by poor people, lying nearly parallel to Queen-street, and connecting the heart of the city with an obscure suburb called Newton or Grey Lynn.

We have for weeks past had the roadway picked up and laid down again by the Electric Tramway Company. They laid their rails in the gutters in a way to cause many stumbles and some falls, and fearful language was used by those crossing the street after nightfall. They piled huge heaps of road metal in all sorts of places; they occupied at least two-thirds of the roadway, and the remaining third was ploughed up by the omnibuses and carts, until it became muclswamps during the rain and dustheaps during the draught. You should see the clouds of dust when a vehicle passes; in fact, if the dust does not get into your eyes and blind you you can see nothing else. Every house is made dirty and uncomfortable by the dust. The roadway, as far as one can judge, has not been swept for weeks.

We are a peaceful and "law-abid-ing'" population. I don't know what law-abiding means, as I never heard the phrase until I came to New Zealand, but as the New Zealand press is very fond of applying the term to the inhabitants of the colony I will borrow it for the inhabitants of this street. But for all this we should like to see a policeman in the street, say, once a month. I can assure you that I have only seen one (in the street) once in the last ten months. It is not as if they were of the least use, but they are so ornamental! You meet swarms of them in Queenstreet, and what lovely beings they are! Not intellectually gifted, certainly.not; you can imagine them saying, like Grosvenor in "Patience," "Ilcnow I am beautiful!" Sometimes you see them standing still, a look of anxiety on their classic features. They are puzzling over the insoluble problem whether the Almighty made them or they made the Almighty. If you are in the habit of carrying a little bag, as I am, they fix an eagle glance on you, as much as to say, "I know what you have in that bag, my man; it is burglar's tools; I shall keep my eye on you.T It is good fun to cast a hurried anxious look on the bag, and then on Robert, deprecating, as it were, any further investigations. They look puzzled. It is a

pity that the authorities do not enlist shorter men; they might then get men of average intelligence. The present Bobby knows nothing, and is surly and uncivil when you ask him anything. I never ask them anything now, as apparently they have been brought from Stewart's Island, and know nothing at all of this part of the colony.

Nothing shows more our folom and neglected, condition than the fact that we don't get our "Star" until six o'clock. We can go down Wel-lesley-street and at the corner we can purchase "Stars"' at half-past f our —but we poor Hobsonians, hungry for our intellectual food, sighing for the brilliant leaders, and the | exciting local "pars," are kept waiting until sixIn addition to the tramway excavations, which are both dangerous and dirt producing, the contractors for the building of St. Matthew's church have enclosed the causeway and parts of the' rbaaway along the whole frontage of the proposed church, right down to Vincent-street. This, of course, must have been done by permission of the City Council, v It shows how these bloated capitalists liang 'together. The consequence is that all foot-passengers have to walk in the roadway up to their ankles in mud or dust. At the same time the roadway is absorbed by the Electric Tram Company, who allow heaps of road metal to be deposited just at this point, Yesterday I had to run the gauntlet of two buses and a cart, a man on a bicycle, and the navvies chucking about shovelsfull of road metal. Now when you have to brush your own boots, as I have had to do this many a year, it is a serious matter to have to wade in mud, just liquified by a shower, or by the man with the hose. Then we are awkwardly situated as to posting letters and parcels., and obtaining postal notes and orders. We ha"ye to descend to the depths of the Queen-street gulley and risk our lives by inhaling the stenches from the sewers, or we have to mount the hill to Newton. If we want to post a paper to aTrieno1 in England or in some other part of the colony on n Saturday afternoon we must go to Queen-street or Newton, for the Arcade is shut up at one o'clock p.m. There are many other neglected streets in Auckland, sacrificed to the Moloch of Queen-street, but I have wrilten about a street I know and in which I have lived for seven or eigffT years altogether. Perhaps you will say that I ought to appeal to the member who represents our street. But who does represent the street? I am sure I don't know; but •whoever he is, I should like to put a dynamite cartridge under his chair at the Council, with a time fuse attached, just to wake him up. Hoping that you will insert this letter (we take a lot of "Stars" in our street). —I am, etc., R. H. BAKEWELL, M.D. 160, Hobson-street, February 22nd, 1902. P.S. —On reading this over to the ladies of my household they all protest against the paragraphs about the police. They think, (if the mental process can be called thinking V) that I have not done justice to ths good looks of the Bobbies. Gracious! what more do they want ? And they say they frequently see them in the street.