SALVATION ARMY BANDSMEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 March 1929, Page 11

SALVATION ARMY BANDSMEN

BARRED FROM FOOTBALL. LONDON, February 2. Seventeen of the twenty-three men of the Salvation Army band at Newton Abbot, Devon, have handed in their instruments because, it is stated, it was found that they had' indulged in “worldly pleasures,” such as attending football matches and cinemas.

Bandsmen of the Salvation Army, on acceptance of office, undertake to renounce worldly pleasures, even smoking, but the ordinary “soldier” is not so called upon, and so these seventeen men are now just “soldiers.”

Hitherto the regulations have not been vigorously enforced in Newton Abbot, but the local adjutant admits their enforcement now, and declares that the position created will “soon find its own level.” There was no animosity. A member of the band, in an interview, said he was eleven years old when he started in it, and agreed to observe the regulations. “Since then I have grown up and got broader-minded. I have never seen a football match, but if I wanted to I don’t see that there could be any harm in it.

“Our adjutant knew we had been going to the cinema, and he read over the regulations to us, so we decided to cease playing in the band at the end of the year. The film I saw was ‘The Ten Commandments.’ “You can be a soldier and smoke, but you cannot be a bandsman and smoke,” he added, and he thought the men would not rejoin the band, unless the regulations were altered.