HOLIDAY FOR BRISTOL’S BLITZED

Evening Star, Issue 24008, 6 October 1941, Page 8

HOLIDAY FOR BRISTOL’S BLITZED

BUND MAN AS ORGANISER Twelve hundred Bristol mothers, fathers, and children, bombed out of their homes, are to have a two weeks’ holiday in 10 of the most famous colleges in Oxford (says the ‘ Sunday Express ’ of July 13). These soldiers of the Home Front, shattered by the blitz, are being led into peace by a blind man, Mr Charles Maelnnes, born on a ranch in Canada, and reader in Imperial History at Bristol University. It was his idea, it is his crusade. • (i xoii’vo stood on tlie battlefield, he says to them all. “ You’re entitled to a fortnight’s'leave.” ,That was three months ago. To-day, on the lawns and in the cloisters of Oxford, one of the most remarkable help-your-neighbours schemes is coming to birth. Balliol, Christ Church, Merton, New College, Corpus, Oriel, Magdalen, Lady Margaret Hall, Wadiiam, and St. Hugh’s are leasing and lending themselves to the scheme, which will cost about £20,000. Mr Maelnnes is a jolly, red-faced man of nearly 50, with blue eyes, shaggy hair, and tons of determination. Nobody would suppose he was blind; he doesn’t seem to know it himself, and taps away cheerfully at a Braille typewriter. Everyone is helping him—the Lord Mayor of Bristol, Mr Alderman Underdown, the trade unionists, the churches, the doctors, the caps and gowns of the university, and, above all, the dominions —Canada, South Africa, Australia—and America, too. Mr Maelnnes showed me a great slab of bacon he had just received from Canada. “It’s going to Oxford,” he said, and patted it affectionately. “ I began this job,” he went on, “last April. All of us thought something should be done to give the blitzed workers, factory girls, mothers, fathers, and kids a bomb-proof holiday this summer. “They’d caught it badly. It was pitiful to see the magnificent way they took it. “ We’d already sent thousands of people to holiday camps.' We gave Christmas parties to 17,000 children. In this, Mr H. V. Hindle, my friend and right-hand man, was a, wonderful help.” (Mr Hindle is hon. secretary of the Lord Mayor of Bristol’s War Services Fund.) ■ “ But we wanted something more, and, as an old Balliol man myself, I thought; ‘Why not Oxford?’ That started it. I wrote to the authorities, and they responded nobly.' Ten colleges said: ‘ Bring them to_us. We’ll give them the picnic of their lives.’ “ Rich and poor are in the scheme—munition workers, clerks, shopgirls, factory hands, and the well-to-do. And it’s all done by kindness.” Yesterday I went to Oxford to meet the first contingent arriving from the West Country to laze under the gleaming spires and slow chimes of the university. Everything had been arranged—boating trips, excursions, film shows, recreations of all kinds.