FURTHER EVIDENCE

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXVII, Issue LXXVII, 17 May 1919, Page 8

FURTHER EVIDENCE

BY CABLE—PBBSS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT

(Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn.) (Received May'l7, 9.15 a.m.) LONDON, May 9. At the Coal Commission, Lord Tredegar, in his evidence, said he owned 82,000 acres in South Wales, of which some had been in possession of his family long before the Norman Conquest, some was purchased in 1739, and his predecessors had acquired the balance by innumerable small purchases. Many titles were written in "dog Latin."

Mr Hodges quoted a speech by Mr Lloyd George at Swansea in 1912, wherein he stated that landlordism of the ground so pressed upon the miners that when they came out of the mines, instead of finding renewed vigor and strength, they found crowded houses unfit for human habitation which bred disease and degradation, while the men whose wealth thej made at the risk of their lives grudged them every inch of air space and sunlight. Lord Tredegar denied this was a fair statement of the conditions in South Wales.

The Marquis of Bute, in his evidence, said he owned 12,952 acres, the royalties from which yielded on an average £109,277 sterling. His ancestors acquired the bulk of the land as a grant from Edward VI. for raising an army.