DISTRICT NEWS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4716, 14 November 1938, Page 7

DISTRICT NEWS

PIO PIO RETURNED SOLDIERS’ ASSN. (Own Correspondent.) The monthly meeting of the Pio Pio sub-branch of the R.S.A. was held in the Rest Room on Tuesday evening. There was a very good attendance of members under the presidency of Mr. J. Keith Walker. Mr. W. E.. Cayley-Alexander’s vital statistics again came up for discussion. He explained that his analysis of the age of death of ex-servicemen as compared with civilians of similar ages was before the Parliamentary Commission when framing the Social Security Act. So far, however, the Government has not seen fit to give full effect to these, but it proposed that it be one of the main planks of R.S.A. policy at the next conference to push for pensions for ex-service-men at 55—this being equal to a civilian’s age at 60. Mr. Cayley-Alexander gave the branch access to recent correspondence with Dr. Abbott, of Auckland, who has been sufficiently interested in Mr. Alexander’s analysis to forward it to the Ministry of Pensions in England. There occurs the interesting fact that, working from a totally different angle, Dr. Abbott arrived at precisely the same conclusion as to ex-soldier disadvantage at derfth-age as does Mr. Cayley-Alex-ander. •

The principal guest of the evening was Dr. Otto Einstein, an ex-service-man of the German Army from 19151918. He gave a brief but highly 1 interesting resume of some of the events in his career as artillery observer and medical officer. His service with the German Field Battery took him to Verdun, to the Somme in 1916, to Russia, where conditions were of the very harshest: little good water, less food, and day by day advancement in the face of a retiring enemy. His army medical work was done mostly in Alsace-Lorraine. He gave interesting details of some of the devices used in his battery for more effective fire, a special low trajectory fire and a richochet fuse.. The talk was all too brief. In passing a vote of thanks to the doctor the president extended a welcome to the doctor to any meeting of the branch.