SALVATION ARMY

Grey River Argus, 6 December 1940, Page 10

SALVATION ARMY

The latest message received at the Wellington Headquarters of the Salvation Army from International Headquarters in London, reads as follows:—“Salvation Army mobile canteens we>pe the first to arrive at Coventry following the bombing of that town. The acute need made very heavy demands on the staff of the five canteens, who continued, despite great fatigue, to supply rescue workers and homeless people with refreshments. A number of Salvationists have been killed or injured in the latest raids in the Midlands. Resourceful Salvationists, deprived of their Sunday night congregations, conduct meetings in shelters with numbers of shelterers. A London Corps whose Hall was seriously damaged at six thirty on Sunday morning had a holiness meeting in full swing by eleven at a nearby Palais-de-Danse. The dusk and dawn shelter food service is now well organised in refuges sheltering many thousands in London and the Provinces. Salvation Army properties which have been damaged now number one hundred and fifty.” The Comforts Department, organied in the early days of the war by Mrs. General Carpenter, has dispatched many thousands of parcels to servicemen, large quantities of clothing, bedding,’ and other necessaries to refugees and evacuees in Finland and Great Britain, and .a considerable number of parcels of shoes and essential food to necessitous of servicemen.

Salvationists and friends of all parts of the British Isles and in Canada Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the’ United States, have maintained the flow of garments and gifts, and they are continuing this splendid work. As the winter approaches more and more garments will be needed for the millions of troops now on active service and for the refugees. Thousands of Londoners who spend each night in public shelters and the tubes are being served by the Army mobile canteens in response to an appeal from Lord Woolton on behalf of the Government. Admiral Sir Edward Evans, “O.C. Shelters, London,” and Lord Horder, physician to his Majesty the King, and chairman of the Government Committee of Inquiry into the health and conditions of people in shelters, have seen the Army at work and expressed appreciation of what it is doing. At one huge shelter where four thousand people find refuge, the Transport Board have agreed for the Army workers to go down into the tunnel, aild have provided trolleys for the carrying of tea urns down the quarter-mile underground passage.