EX-IMPERIAL SOLDIERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 238, 7 October 1936, Page 12

EX-IMPERIAL SOLDIERS.

Your correspondent "Faugh-a-Ballagh" has very ably stated the case of the defence of New Zealand, and also the Ex-Imperial man. He says there are about 25,000 ex-Imperial men out here; but what of the children they brought with tliem and have had since arriving here? If each man had one or two (I have live) that would make, roughly, 60,000 to 70,000 citizens, and a nice little company for the defence of New Zealand. But what have we, the fathers and mothers got. A lot of abuse of being Homies and, coming out here, to sink or swim as fortune willed, and the last five years on the bread line for a lot of us, taking our families out to camps that were unfit for human beings to live in, and being charged 10/ per week rent for the accommodation. We believed the propaganda that flooded England after the war that New Zealand was God's own country, flowing with milk and honey. The milk flows all riffht, but a lot of it, that many of us mothers would be glad of, flows to waste. I have a lad born in New Zealand 15 years ago, crippled in mind and body, whose birth was premature by one month, brought about by a train accident to me the day he was born. No compensation; eight 'different doctors have attended him; they kept him alive and me poor. But we Britishers are proud, ask for nothing and get nothing. But it is time something was done for the ex-Imperial men, who are fast breaking up and coming to the end of their tether.— WIFE OF AN OLD CONTEMPTIBLE