Homeless Settlers Return

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 15118, 29 October 1949, Page 4

Homeless Settlers Return

Young Married Immigrants

From Britain

Conditions Too Difficult

To Remain

An Englishwoman, Mrs L. G. Waghorn, who has been spending a few days in Wellington en route to England from Australia, has formed the opinion that young married immigrants should be dissuaded from coming to New Zealand and Australia unless sponsored by people here, or until housing can be arranged for them. “During a two-years’ visit to Australia I have met many young couples who would like to stay out here, but who are returning home in fear that their savings will peter out before they find homes,” Mrs Waghorn said. “They are good types of settlers, and it is a pity they find conditions too difficult to remain, she said. The high rentals of rooms and apartments- in Australia has made heavy inroads into capital. Mrs Waghorn has been visiting her son, who went to' Australia in the interests of his firm, the do Havilland Aircraft Co., and apart from a boisterous Tasman crossing says she has benefited in health from her holiday. “When first I saw so much of everything in the shops in Australia I felt resentment that England has so little after suffering so greatly,” she said. “I sent home everything I could send. My daughter tells me that conditions seem no better at home —in some ways worse but we’ll get through. We laugh and have a lot of fun over our rationing.” Mrs Waghorn worked at the American Red Cross Club at Bishop Stortford during the war. Before she was married she worked for a firm of Court dressmakers in London and had some interesting comparisons to make between dress fashions then and today. “Now it often happens that two women arrive at the same party in identical frocks,” she said, “but in those days if there were two alike seen in the street there would have been a great to-do.” There was little trade in ready-made frocks, and women made their selections from coloured French fashion magazines for their dressmakers to copy. Mrs Waghorn said she knew that the full-skirted “now look”* silhouette would not last for street wear, and predicts an equally brief life for exaggeratedly tube-like skirts. She thinks, though, that full, long skirts are more graceful and feminine for indoor wear.

Mrs Waghorn, however, unreservedly approves the new look in flying-boats as demonstrated over Wellington this week by the Ararangi. She knows something of the construction of such aircraft, and recalled that the De Havilland Co. in Australia were particularly pleased" with the recent completion of the first jet aeroplane to be constructed in Australia.