GENERAL ITEMS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 19 June 1941, Page 4

GENERAL ITEMS

Home-Grown Grenades Some Home Guardsmen have already > tired of throwing practice grenades by , hand and the members of one unit in . the Nelson province developed a bomb- . throwing machine which they claimed to be a great success. It would throw 1 bombs into a candle box, they said. Un- * foreseen complications arose, however, when, after the experiments had been ’ going on for some time, members’ wives discovered that the largest and best of i their winter store of potatoes had disi appeared—they were somewhat the size ; and weight of a grenade. ; Air Raid Heroes ; “Coming up the street. I saw two . squads of men in tin hats and rescue squad uniforms.” says a resident of : Birmingham in a letter discussing a walk in the evening after a big raid. “ ‘Black-out time/ I thought, ‘and . they are just going on duty. But how queerly they walk. They cannot be 1 drunk; but why is that man swaying?’ 5 As they came nearer, I saw their faces, ; and never shall I forget them. Yellow i feces with big eyes ringed with black. They were trying to keep their ranks and to march across to the fire station ! opposite, but they were too utterly i blind with smoke and fatigue to walk ( in step. Then I realised that these men , had been on duty ever since the raid 1 began the night before —22 hours of ! digging trapped people and mangled ; bodies out of the debris, toiling and , digging to save people trapped in fires.” i > Wages and Hours ; An emphatic protest against increasing workers’ wage rates or shortening ’ their hours in the present time of » emergency was entered by the Southj land County Council at a recent meeti ing. The council decided to forward a motion of protest to the ActingPrime Minister (Mr W. Nash) and the . Minister of Labour (Mr P. C. Webb). . The subject was raised by Cr W. M. , Norman after a report from the New Zealand Comity Council's Industrial 1 Union of Employers dealing with Con- . ciliation Council proceedings in the , award of the New Zealand Local . Bodies (Rural Section) Labourers * Union. In these proceedings the 1 present award was agreed to in the : main, but certain points about wages > and conditions remained in dispute and have been referred to the Court of Arbitration. “This matter has been ■ coming up every 12 months,” declared - Cr Norman. “The terms they are l asking for now are absolutely ridiculous when there is a war on.” The * chairman (Cr J. Dennis) said that the ■ men themselves were quite satisfied .It was the union secretaries who wanted the increased wages and conditions more favourable to the work- ' ers. Education and Life “To this day the idea persists in ; many quarters that a man can be con- « sidered educated or cultured although he may be completely ignorant of the place of mankind in the physical uni- ’ verse,” said Mr A. G. Henderson in the [ commemoration day address at Canter- » bury University College, (states "The p Press”). “In my own time we used to be j told that one of the greatest purposes of - a university was to teach the individual ■ how to live, and yet 95 per cent, of the , students went through the university [ course without ever receiving a scrap of biological instruction, and what biological instruction, was given in the i schools and colleges was purely utilii tarian. lam not sure that the position i is very much better to-day. Classicalism still has a strong hold on education 1 though not quite the stranglehold that t it had last century, for while the dead [ languages have lost their place in the schools, the influence of the tradition persists. You see it in the importance l attached to philology in the teaching of ; English, and even in the approach to history and in the teaching of it. The substitution of life for etymology as the basis of education is painfully slow.” I