WOMEN CENSORS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 39, 14 August 1940, Page 8

WOMEN CENSORS

DISMISSAL IN BODY

THE UNCHAINED TONGUE

(By Trans-Tasman Air Mail, from "The Post's" Representative.)

SYDNEY, August 10,

Because honorary women censorship workers in Sydney divulged the contents of letters passing between members of the Royal Australian Navy and relatives and friends ashore, the entire staff, of about twenty women in Sydney and those in other States were dismissed.

A Labour member raised the question in the House of Representatives, and the Minister for the Navy, Mr. Cameron, said that complaints of the practice had been proved. Earlier, the member had been informed that the Minister for the Army, Mr. Street, had said: "If I hear of any person on the censorship staff breaking the oath taken on joining the staff, he or she will be dismissed immediately."

Two days later, the principal military officer in Sydney, LieutenantGeneral Miles, announced that the entire staff of twenty voluntary women communications censors in Sydney had been dismissed. He said that, since the orders for the dismissals had come from Melbourne, he could give no reason for them. It meant the abandonment of the system of unpaid women censors.

A naval officer's wife said that she and many of her friends in Sydney, knowing that women of their acquaintance were doing censorship work here, have been sending letters to friends in Melbourne for posting there. They knew that the letters would be censored in Melbourne, possibly by women, but did not mind as long as the censors did not know them.