CURRENT NOTES

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25609, 25 September 1948, Page 2

CURRENT NOTES

Mrs T. L. Fancourt, president of the Young Contingent of the Victoria League in Christchurch, will leave soon to make her home in Auckland. On Wednesday she will preside for the last time at the Young Contingent’s luncheon meetings. Food for sale was either wrapped in cellulose paper or lifted with tongs; there was no handling of food in the shoos she had visited in the United States, said Mrs S. Mair (Holmwood road), who has returned from a holiday visit to Boston. In the super markets packages of prepared food could be purchased, and one had only to add water or other liquid to bring it to the' right consistency for cooking. She had seen packages of prepared bread rolls and baking powder biscuits and had tasted them when they had been baked in the home oven. They were delicious. Frozen food could also be purchased, and many homes now had deep freezers to keep food fresh. There were television sets in many of the homes she had visited, said Mrs Mair.

News has been received in Wellington that the one-time famous New Zealand soprano Rosina Buckman (Mrs Maurice d’Oisly) is in indifferent health. Miss Buckman spent her early life in Marlborough, where her mother was well known as a concert singer. She “toured with the Williamson Grand Opera Company in 1910, sharing the honours with Amy Castles. She received much encouragement and help from Dame Nellie Melba and from John McCormack, the celebrated tenor, and reached a higher peak in grand opera than any other woman singer from New Zealand. Marrying Maurice d’Oisly. the French tenor, she visited New Zealand with him in 1922, when she was most enthusiastically received. During recent years she has devoted herself to teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, while Mr d’Oisly is on the staff of examiners. Miss Buckman’s mother, Mrs John Buckman, died in Palmerston North recently.

Members of the Old Vic Company* were entertained at supper last evening by the Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society. The guests were received by the president, Sir James Hight, the chairman, Mr G. S. Salter, and members of the committee.

People did not realise that tins Of meat or cheese were preferable to tins of vegetables for sending in parcels overseas, it was stated at a meeting, of the “Save the Children””Committee yesterday. Mrs Ashley Dean, who with Mrs Gerald Anderson packs the committee’s parcels for dispatch overseas, said that she had received many tins of vegetables, and she wondered if it would be possible to exchange some Of them;-for tinned goods that were not easily procurable in the countries where the parcels are being sent. Mrs O. T. J. Alpers, who returned some time ago from overseas, said fat and tins of honey would be very welcome. “It is, for us here, certainly a great comfort, and it is easier to bear our troubles in life when one hears from such dear people as you must be,” wrote the mother of a German child sponsored in Rangiora under the “Save the Children” scheme. The sponsors of the child had asked a woman born in Germany 83 years ago if she could write a letter in German to the child. She thought she could remember enough German to write it, and recently the reply came from Hamburg, a city which the Rangiora writer’s parents left 75 years ago for New Zealand. The writer said she and her family were in the Russian zone at the end of the war and suffered many privations, but in January, 1946, they were able to go back to Hamburg. It was no use thinking about a dwelling. she said. At first they had lived in a room, but they now had a place of their own built of roofing iron. It was primitive, but at least they had it to themselves.