RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30533, 31 August 1964, Page 17

RANDOM REMINDER

FORCED LABOUR

The youth of today is too often seen as an unkempt tight-trousered guitar-strumming pimply pestilence, and we therefore welcomed, the other day, the receipt of a letter from a man who was clearly impressed with what he had seen going on at the Harewood Young People’s Golf Club. This club, started some years ago by the late Mr A. R. Blank, has as its principle objective the fostering of golf among youngsters and the provision of playing facilities for them. It is a rewarding sight, on a Sunday, to see whole families picnicking and

playing golf at Harewood. And there are scores of boys who go there in pairs and threes and fours, to play their game and sit about talking of the birdies and the birds. At Harewood, golf is not an expensive game for a girl or boy, and now the place is hardly big enough to hold them ail. But what struck the correspondent, particularly, was the sight of about a dozen boys, out on the course on a Tuesday afternoon, picking up papers and rubbish—the cigarette packets of the adult members, the raisin containers of the younger ones —to have the course clean and tidy for an open tourna-

ment to be played on the course a few days later. This, the correspondent concluded, was excellent evidence of public spirit among the teenagers, and he thought some mention of it should be made. And so it has. But there is a footnote, which has to be wrtten. On making inquiries about the boys’ activities, we learned, somewhat to our dismay, that the boys responsible for the clearance were members of a sort of scholarly chain gang. They came, in fact, from one of the Christchurch secondary schools, and if they were not all avid golfers, they had one thing in common; they all .had detentions.