Reporter’s diary

Press, 17 March 1982, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

40 years on IF someone does something for long enough it becomes a tradition. So it has been with Mr Bill Henry, who for more than 40 years has raised the St Patrick’s Day flag at the shoe factory of M. O’Brien, Ltd, in Wairakei Road. Mr Henry will perform the little ceremony for the last time .today — he is due to retire soon as the firm’s purchasing officer. The strange thing is that Mr Henry is neither Irish nor Catholic. “It goes back many years to when I was the firm’s ‘boy’ down in Dundas Street,”, recalled Mr Henry yesterday. “I had to squeeze through a manhole and clamber over a rusty old roof to get to the flagpole. It was high enough for me not to be able to look down. I think I was given the job because I was the smallest and least valuable member of the staff,” said Mr Henry. The flag was reputedly brought out from Ireland by the founder of the company more than 100 years ago, so good care is taken of it. Noone has yet volunteered to take over’ Mr Henry's job of hoisting the flag. Tragic anniversary ONE HUNDRED years ago this month, two young Christchurch boys died a tragic, lonely death on the Port Hills. A reader,’ Mrs Lorna Stubbs, of St’ Martins, remembers hearing from her . grandmother how the boys, aged about 10 or 12, set off on March 28, 1882, to walk over the Rapaki Track to Lyttelton. On the way back a thick fog enshrouded the hills. It was believed that the boys became separated and lost, and perished during the bitterly cold night. Two small stone cairns still mark the spots where they were found — one not far from the Rapaki Track, and the other on a hillside some distance

away. One of the cairns can be seen from the Summit Road. Mrs Stubbs wonders if anyone knows the names of the boys, or knows any more about the tragedy. Hospital ‘first’ TWELVE residents of Templeton Hospital and Training School might be able to visit the United States for 15 days in August, if all goes according to plan. The 12 men, ranging in age from early 20s to late 40s, have worked together for years in their own concert party, entertaining residents, staff, and members of the public, and putting any money they raised into the Patients’ Recreation Fund. Though all suffer from Downes Syndrome, all are fully mobile, alert, and outgoing, and they are looking forward greatly to the American trip — which will be a'“first” for Templeton. “They will visit Disneyland, Marineland, and all the places other tourists go,” said one of the organisers, John Field. “They are all happy types and they make plenty of friends," he said: Mr Field said that about 535,000 would have to be raised to send the 12 residents and four nurses on the trip, with help from Air New Zealand already promised. Any donations should be addressed to Disneyland Venture, Templeton Hospital, Private Bag, Templeton. The concert party is giving up its big day of the year — the Hospital Fair — this Saturday, to go to the cricket at Lancaster ’Park to try to raise some money. Straight talk AN ENGLISH council official took the British Government’s present campaign against "gobbledegook” a little too far, it seems. Roger May, legal officer to the South Cambridgeshire Council, abandoned the usual

official jargon when he sent a rent demand to Steven Sparks, aged 36. “Let me make one thing clear: if for any reason we don’t get the money, you’ll be out of that house so fast it’ll make your head spin and we won’t be re-housing you,” Mr May wrote. The letter caused Mr Spark’s wife to break down in tears, and led to an official apology from the council. Said a council spokesman: “I disapprove of the phrase, but Mr May was trying to put it in plain language and not gobbledegook or jargon.” It didn’t work anyway. Mr Sparks failed to pay up and will now be evicted. Think again THE PLUNKET Society’s survey of local authority attitudes to the fencing of private swimming pools has drawn what it calls a “staggering” reply from the Pahiatua County Council. The council suggested that “electric fencing would probably be more effective than conventional fencing” to -keep pre-school children away from pools, and said it did not intend to make any by-law. “I couldn’t believe it at first. What an appalling attitude from a supposedly responsible body,” said the society’s medical director, ‘Dr David Geddes. Last year 17 pre-school children had died in inadequately enclosed pools, and the problem deserved proper consideration from community leaders. “If the electric fence was a light-hearted suggestion, there are 17 children who won’t see the joke,” said Dr Geddes. Rising prices NO, it didn’t happen in Ireland — it was in the Worcestershire village of. Chipping Camden. A notice on the door of a shoe shop read: “Our bargain basement is now open on the first floor.”