“SILENT CITIES OF WAR DEAD”

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 163, 6 April 1938, Page 16

“SILENT CITIES OF WAR DEAD”

Inferior Homes Of Living

Inferior buildings erected in the past 20 years were criticised by the Duke of Gloucester when be spoke recently at the Gloucester Society dinner in the Mayfair Hotel, London. He had just referred to the care of the last resting-places of “Our Million Dead” in the Great War, a task with which he and Sir Fabian Ware, president of the Gloucester Society and vicechairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission,' are asosciated. “Thanks to British architects, many hundreds of ‘Silent Cities of the Dead’ have been built in different parts of the world. All are dignified, beautiful and restful and are admired by the foreign peoples in whose lands they are. ;“It therefore puzzles me sometimes why so much inferior work has been done in these 20 years for the dwellings of the living in this country which our dead loved and for which they gave their lives.

“We watch with pleasure every attempt that is being made to put things right, and are proud of the efforts being made in our own eoun“Anyone who visits Gloucestershire will see that much has been saved. But, &n the other hand, there is much that has been lost. Woods ruthlessly razed and not replanted, stone roofs replaced by corrugated iron, beautiful old cottages being pulled down, when they might have been reconditioned and made habitable at low rents. > “I fear that the balance may be growing on tlie wrong side. Our own carelessnesse and apathy have been very largely to blame in the past, and now in certain places there is another, difficulty—the necessity of meeting the imperative claims of national defence. “In present circumstances any urgent needs of the Government are bound to receive priority, but 4 <' im sure means will be found of reconciling divergent interests."