PEACE PRIZE

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22513, 17 December 1947, Page 8

PEACE PRIZE

TRIBUTE TO QUAKERS HEROIC WORKERS SYDNEY, Nov. 20. Behind the award of the 1947 Nobel Prize, worth some £9OOO sterling, to the relief committees of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, lies a story of many years of relief work in many countries, and heroic attempts to clear up some of the devastation left by war. During the Spanish civil war, British and American Friends fed half a million Spanish children daily for months. More than a million food packages have been distributed to old people, children, and hospitals in Vienna during the past two years. Since 1917 American Friends have provided relief to 6,000,000 people in 22 countries. Between 1917 and. 1919 the Quakers assisted in the rebuilding of more than 1600 towns of France. During the present year, tens of thousands of seed packages, flowers, and vegetables, have been distributed in Finland.to people with gardens. Russian Famine Relief After the great Russian famine of 25 years ago, the Friends bought horses in Siberia and drove them into European Russia for distribution among some hundreds of villages. In France after the first World War, the Friends bought bees in the south for restocking northern apiaries; they bought Dutch and Danish cattle for farms in In China today they are mainly concerned with re-equipping and re-open-ing hospitals devastated and closed during the war years. The latest relief undertaken is in the Punjab, where at the invitation of Pandit Nehru, Prime Minister of India, they had a first refugee camp opened within a few days of getting a team to Delhi.

However, the Society of Friends has always tried to see beyond immediately necessary relief to long-term assistance. For example, in Frankfurt, Germany, a work was established recently and equipped with sewing machines, carpentry tools, and cobbling tools. Quakers Help in Bengal After the Bengal flood of several years ago, a Quaker relief team (including several Indian members), spent a considerable time in the villages introducing ideas of co-operative buying and selling which may be of permanent value to the peasants. Another permanent piece of work is a maternity hospital _in northern France, established during the first world war, and a similar hospital was built at Salonika two years ago. Quaker relief committees are still working in 11 countries, from France to China.