BOYS' INSTITUTE

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 150, 21 December 1940, Page 9

BOYS' INSTITUTE

ANNUAL BANQUET

Nobody could possibly have mistaken the season of the year, at the Boys' Institute on Thursday evening, when the annual banquet was held lor the residents of the boarding estab-. lishment. The large gathering included the Rev. Gladstone Hughes, honorarypresident of the institute, and Mrs. Hughes, members of the management committee and their wives, friends of the institute, and members of the staff. After full justice had been done to the excellent dinner, and the health of the King had been drunk, a toast to Sir George Troup, president of the, institute, and that of the committee, proposed by one of the senior boys, H. Hairisworth, were honoured. The chairman of the management committee, Mr. J. D. Howitt, in a brief speech, advised the boys to make the best of their present opportunities in order to be ready for the stern tasks which lay ahead. For all its problems and perplexities youth was a golden time and t was to boyhood days that men, no matter how successful and learned they might become, loved to look back upon and re-live in their minds. Mr. Howitt entreated the boys to so conduct themselves that as mature men they might look back with pleasure unmarred by regret One of the aims of members of the management committee, he said, was to stand in. the place of real friends to every institute boy and he hoped that the boys themselves would look upon the members of the committee in that light. In a brief speech Mr. Leah paid a tribute to the excellent work of the matron, Mrs. Shepherd, and expressed the pleasure felt by members of the committee' and their wives at being invited to participate in the boys' festiVlAt S"the close of the dinner Bibles were presented to H. Hainsworth, O. Head, and G. Nees, who are leaving the institute at the end of the year. As a mark of the boys' appreciation of their care for them the director, Mr. B. A. Mabin, and the matron and caretaker, Mrs. and Mr. Shepherd, were each presented. with a gift by B. Shearer, on behalf of the boys. At the close of the dinner the proceedings were enlivened by community Singing and a ukulele solo given by Oscar Head. ■