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Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21198, 23 June 1934, Page 11

Few modern Prime Ministers could afford to make a gift of £SOOO to a deserving cause. Mr R. B. Bennett, the Canadian Premier, has just given roughly this amount to Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, and some years ago, when he was Prime Minister of Britain, Mr Stanley Baldwin made a similar gift to Kidderminster Hospital. But there are probably no other cases of this kind among recent Prime Ministers. Very few of them have been rich enough. Even Mr Baldwin, who was a wealthy man when he entered the House of Commons, is not nearly so rich to-day. But his gift to the nation of £120,000 in 1919 was the greatest gesture in modern politics. There was nothing theatrical about it. The money was given anonymously as from "F.5.T.," and it was only years afterwards that the identity of the donor was discovered. At a recent meeting of the Hull Public Assistance Committee, objection was taken to the continuance of the practice of taking inmates of workhouses for drives into the country in a large motor-car, which at other times was used as a funeral hearse. One member of the committee said he had been begged by an old man of one of the institutions not to be sent out in a hearse. Cases had been known where certain of the old people had brooded over the matter until it had become an obsession. It was eventually agreed that the objections raised to the motor-car being used alternately for pleasure and for funerals would be considered by a committee.