EMPIRE DAY

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27664, 21 May 1955, Page 10

EMPIRE DAY

COMMEMORATION NEXT WEEK The Empire commemoration service, inaugurated in Christchurch in 1948 on the Sunday nearest Empire Day (May 24), will be held next Sunday in the Christchurch Cathedral. The address will be given by the Dean of Christchurch (the Very RevMartin Sullivan); and Mr Justice Adams, the Rev. S. C. Francis, and the Rev. Roland Hart will also take part. The offering will be devoted to the “meals on wheels” service of the Red Cross Society. All patriotic societies will attend the service. The Christchurch branch of the Royal Empire Societywwill celebrate Empire Day with a dinner at Elizabeth House next Tuesday. In a message issued for Empire Day, the chairman (Colonel C. E. Ponsonby) and the council of the I Royal Empire Society in London, say ..hat a year ago everyone travelled in spirit with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh as they circled the globe, visiting countries of common British tradition. This year, they remember the Queen Mother s visit to Canada and the United States, and the tour of the West Indies by Princess Margaret“Prominent in our minds must be the distress and anxieties that beset our fearful world, as advancing science offers to man the power of selfannihilation, if he should choose that path; so much so that the terrifying alternative may prove the revelation that will rescue mankind from insane destruction,” the message says. “We should be thankful and proud that it is to the British Commonwealth of Nations, more maybe than to others, that, under God, is given the chance to save the world by its example, and point the way to the long-sought goal of true and lasting peace. That, however, can only be if we all remain imbued with a spirit of mutual understanding one with another, and if our hearts are filled with determination and courage to follow together inflexibly along the course we know to be right.”