A Nation’s Effort For Its Handicapped

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30794, 5 July 1965, Page 2

A Nation ’s Effort For Its Handicapped

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter)

STOCKHOLM.

Houses, flats and work-shops will be built for Sweden’s seriously handicapped citizens with money collected by the people of Sweden in a big one-day charity drive. The total collected amounted to about £BOO,OOO.

More than 125,000 organisers from the Swedish Lions’ Club, scouts, guides, the Red Cross Society and other associations succeeded in collecting an average of 2s a head.

Most of the funds came from the sale of three million and a half lottery tickets. A competition was organised among Sweden’s 26 counties, with points awarded for the amount of money collected a head.

One county, Jamtland, in central Sweden, proclaimed itself a republic, elected a president, and printed visas without which noone was allowed to cross its borders. Barriers were set up on all roads, and anyone even delivering food inside the boundaries had to buy the 4s visa. Jamtland won the competition. . ® •

The progress of the collection was reported by the national television network in programmes lasting up to four hours and a half. More than 800 telephone lines were set

up to handle offers of money. Newspapers came out with extra editions to report the latest figures. During the television programme, viewers demanded that the master of ceremonies, Mr Lennert Hyland, sell his tie, chair and other items in the studio to the highest bidder.

His tie fetched £4O and a chair brought four times that figure. The television switchboard then closed down because hundreds of thousands of bids were blocking the lines.

Almost every Swedish stage and screen personality performed in aid of the drive. A Norwegian pop group gave £466 from money it had intended to use for new amplifiers.. ..

Workers at one large com-

pany’s works collected so much that they were given a flagrant boost on the television programme, which roused a storm of criticism. But the authorities declared that while the Government declined to allow commercial television, advertising was permissible “in certain charitable circumstances.”

In northern Sweden, the driver of a taxi bought three lottery tickets—one for himself, one for his woman passenger, and one for the baby which she had just given birth to in the taxi. Contributions came from Swedish minesweepers at sea, from a United States company, and from viewers in Denmark and Norway. Promises of free building materials, paints, architectural services, and furniture worth hundreds of pounds poured in.

A girl in central Sweden reported she had made a dress of red feathers—worth about £67. In another city, shoeshine boys charged about £7 a time. A special stamp costing Is 4d was printed.

A band offered its services to the highest bidder and played for one evening for about £1067.

“It was quite fantastic. There has never been anything like it in Swedish history,” says Mr Sven-Olof Brattgaard, a nerve specialist, who conceived the idea of the drive. Mr Brattgaard has been an invalid himself for 25 yeans. “Although the collection was planned for only one day,

contributions continued to pour in afterwards,” he added. “The final figure is expected to reach about a million pounds." In addition to providing houses, some of the money will be used to take handicapped people from home to woric, to pay their rent when they are unable to earn sufficient to pay it themselves, and to establish small industrial concerns dose to their homes.