OVER £350,000.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 190, 14 August 1933, Page 7

OVER £350,000.

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS.

CHILDREN OF "DIGGERS."

GREAT McCATTGHEY BEQUEST.

Already nearly 10,000 children have been helped by the Sir Samuel Mc* Caughey bequest, which is now in its 13th year of'service to tho eons and daughters of Australia's fallen and disabled soldiers. • :

The .legacy, which will yield at least £050,000, represents the most munificent individual gift made by a private citizen as a practical memorial to those who fought and fell in the Great War.

Primarily, the bequest was made to assist the technical education of children of deceased or seriously incapacitated members of the Commonwealth naval and military forces who served abroad in the Great War.

The donor, Samuel McCaughcy, went to Australia at the age of 20. He died in 1919, at his station home on the Murium bidgee, aged S4. For 64 years he had been a pastoralist. At the date of his death he did not own an acre of land, but he left for public purposes approximately £1,750,000.

In 1920, at the invitation of the late. Sir Samuel McCaughey's executors, that portion of the estate set aside for helping the dependents of ex-servicemen was taken over for administration hy the trustees of the A.I.F. Canteen Fund. Since then the full possibilities of such a legacy have been realised under the administrative leadership of Sir Nicholas Lockyer, chairman of the Canteen Fund,, trustees. The form of assistance provided includes school fees and allowances for books, fares and sustenance at junior and senior technical schools, commercial and agricultural colleges, and at universities. Special assistance is given to deaf, dumb, crippled and- mentally deficient children of ex-service-men, and to its proteges who go on to trade apprenticeships cash for efficient work are available as incentives. Rhodes Scholars. Boys and girls share in the benefite. They have been assisted to a start in life in fields as diverse as architecture, chemistry, the law, medicine, piano tuning, wireless telegraphy and wool classing. Girls have been trained in accountancy, commercial art, cookery, nursing and pharmacy. The bequest has been used in co-opera-tion with the Repatriation Act Regulations, whose grants it has supplemented in special cases. Where university men have qualified under its aid; the bequest has arranged for them to go abroad for further studies, with the tacit understanding that such student's should return to give Australia the benefit of their knowledge.

In this way two Rhodes Scholars are now being helped. One of them is J. A. Lanauze (West Australia, 1931), and the other J. M. McShane, of New South Wales. Their allowances are being supplemented.

The expenditure to last year' was more than £350,000, and the administrative expenses amounted to £18,600 —or only about 5J per cent of the benefits. One hundred and forty boys and 43 girls had been, aided to- university courses in Australia. The boys helped numbered 4983, and the girls 4SS6. It is expected that the total number will have been increased to 15,000 before the work of the bequest ceases in about ten years.