OIL FROM COAL

Evening Star, Issue 19892, 14 June 1928, Page 5

OIL FROM COAL

A BRITISH PROJECT Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, June 13. (Received June 14, at 1 a.m.) A serious attempt to take advantage of the Budget preference by the distillation of oil from coal is to bo made. A new company has ordered 4,000,000 tons of the best Welsh coal, to be delivered at the rate of 750 tons daily, over fifteen years.—Australian Press Association-United Service.

STARVATION IN MINING VALLEY

APPALLING STATE OF AFFAIRS Any project that will help the Welsh mining industry is of importance. The state of affairs in South Wales is serious, and the suffering and want of thousands of men, women, and children through, months of unemployment is arousing* the conscience of the nation. The newspapers are printing many touching accounts .of the existing conditions, and while some blame the miners for their attitude, it is_ being realised that economic conditions are at fault, and that even if there had not been a big strike the bulk of the present-day conditions would still be found. Mrs Lucy Cadbury, in the ‘ Woman’s Leader,’ writing about a South Wales mining valley, says:— “ I travelled from London through sunshine, but when I alighted at the bleak station in the valley the rain was falling in torrents, and it was easy to believe, what is a fact, that the rainfall here is three times the average for Great Britain. SOME OF THE CASKS.

“ t visited several homes, uul briefly must describe a lew. Of one woman a a good neighbour brought word, ‘ She is very ill —too weak to got out of bed —but I know what’s the matter with her—it’s just want of food.’ “Mrs A. was downstairs. ‘I got so soro and there is not much ou _my bones, so Mrs J. said come down just for a bit of a change.’ Mrs A., her transparent white face framed in white hair, told me then of the husband doing part-time work. ‘ But my son there, he’s been out two years.’ Two girls of twelve and thirteen at school, ‘Pm ashamed to send them—they’re really in rags.’ “I shall not easily forget one home I visited. The man hero is nursing the baby—about nine months old not so many months hence there will be a fourth in that family. They would bo in great distress was it not for the wife’s mother. But her father’s work may cease at any time, and then what comfort will there be for the younger family?

“ The young mother stands by the (ire and silently weeps, and I. have no words with which to comfort her. Well, she shall have some clothes for the baby, anyway. One pathetic side of all the trouble is that the thrifty have through force of circumstances been brought to the level of the thriftless ones.

“I saw little Nancy D., too weak to go to school. She lies on a sofa with n cup partly filled with milk on the sill beside her, and father and mother anxiously watching her listless white face. She is no whit bigger than my girl of seven, and the thin little arms tell their own tale. What else can he expected with father out of work month in and month out? “ Mr D. is gifted with an optimistic spirit, hut Mrs D., like many other women I met, seems crushed by the ceaseless burden of ‘ nothing better to look forward to.’ A tew men are leaving (he valley, too few out of tho thousands who will never find work in the mines. It is not easy to find work elsewhere.

“ Already. however, Government training centres, industrial and agricultural, are dealing with a certain number of the younger men. “So men’s clothing is especially needed for men leaving the valley. “The children’s clothing,_ boot repairing (work done voluntarily by out-of-woiTi miners), distribution of any now bools received, etc., is now’ well organised and distributed through all the schools. There arc 36,000 children in elementary schools and 2,000 in secondary schools in the Rhondda —and 12 per cent, of these need now boots. “It is Imped that organisation of relief for miners’ families throughout the country will shortly ho put on a sound basis.” NO HOPE EOR THOUSANDS. “The situation, briefly, is this,” says the ‘Now Statesman’: There are in the mining villages of South Wales and of other colliery areas many thousands of workers for whom there neither is now, nor ’is likely to fie ever again, any prospect of permanent employment in the pits. “In must of these places there is absolutely no alternative employment; for such other employment as used to exist wore dependent on the coal industry, and have been destroyed by its decline. Consequently there are, at present in these areas whole populations with nothing whatever to do except to subsist miserably and in idleness on such resources as they can in one way or another command, MOM' HAVE THEY LIVED? “ How have the wretched people m these derelict townships lived through the past few years? Partly on insurance benefits and partly on parish relief —a little of late on private charity aj well—but mainly by using up their lifetimes’ savings, selling their furniture, and getting into debt. The miners mostly had something put by from the good times of the Great War, and tlio year or two succeeding it—savings certicates, money in the Co-operative Society, insurance policies of one sort or another.

“ They have been living on their savings, and now most of them have exhausted what they iiad put by for old age or lor giving their children a start in the world. The second resource has been debt. Rents and rates and tradesmen’s bills have remained unpaid—insurance policies have been surrendered —those who have nothing have borrowed from those whoso case is a degree less miserable.

“ Landlords and mortgagees have had to go without rents and interest, and consequently rented houses are not being repaired, and houses bought by the miners have become the property—the white elephant property—of the mortgagees.' Tradesmen, creditors of their customers, have fallen into debt to wholesalers, and are threatened with bankruptcy.”