NEWS OF THE DAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 2, 3 July 1939, Page 8

NEWS OF THE DAY

Royal Mail Carrier.

The honour of being the only Wellington yachtsman ever to have his boat used as a Royal Mail packet belonged to Councillor W. Duncan, said Mr. W. P. Rollings at the annual dinner of the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club on Saturday night, in proposing the toast of "Veteran Members." In the 1913 strike, said Mr. Rollings, when the regular shipping services were stopped, Mr. Duncan was at Picton with his launch Taniwha. The mail had to be taken across Cook Strait somehow and the postal authorities suggested to him that he take it on the Taniwha. This was accordingly done. Boys and Girls in Factories. "There is a distressing number of boys and girls of the minimum legal age going to work in factories," said Mr. T. Conly, Vocational Guidance Oflv cer in Dunedin, when he was asked to comment on a suggestion that juveniles were going to work in factories at a much lower age than was formerly the case^ Admittedly there was an acute shortage of labour in the factories, he said, and, although employers would probably prefer girls older than between 13 and 14 years, they were so desperately short-handed that they had no choice but to take whatever they could get. One aspect of the problem which was distressing, Mr. Conly added, was that boys going from one factory to another carried their time with them unless they were going to; commence apprenticeship in another trade. The cumulative effect of this after a lad had been in one or two stop-gap jobs was that he was difficult to place and became a ready-made pro- J blem on the labour market.