CURIOUS PENSION RECORDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15124, 15 October 1912, Page 10

CURIOUS PENSION RECORDS.

-' ■ LONG-LIVED RECIPIENTS. J Ix lie pages cf a " Superannuation" Bine' Book, issued by the British Govewment * last month, sexagenarians abound. Not I an office in Whitehall but has its happy J crop of them. There are at this present ; moment 3079 of the main army drawing j among them £703,885 per annum. Add | various other grants and allowances under scattered sub-heads, and the number becomes 4140, and the total £708,362, On the whole the most interesting of all is the storekeeper of Sierra Leone. By his story, as the return tells —it gives him (with each of the others) but a single linecuriosity is at once piqued and baffled. Fate has different ways of insuring those whom she seeks to preserve against the last of human ills. But her most successful device to secure longevity seems to be the Stats Service and the pension. When the storekeeper of Sierra Leone joined the Government service Queen Victoria, had been but five years on .her throne; and he left it three years after the Great Exhibition of '51. At the time he sojourned in the land it enjoyed the pleasant sobriquet of the " White Man's Grave." so that a desire to withdraw from its neighbourhood, after 12 vears' service, may possibly have been quickened by suffering health." But there is no hint of this in the record. The single word of the single line devoted to the storekeeper - which deals with this aspect of his career is " reorganisation."58 Years Old " Allowance."

Storekeepers have come and gone since that day doubtless, but the return of 1911 has nothing to say of thern—you are left to guess at their fate. Only this one survives in its pages. On March 31, 1854, at the age of 28, he drew the last of his salary of £182 10s per annum. From April 1. 1854, a " compensation allowance" of £45 a year, began to run. "Whither the successive payments which have been despatched since "then in what land the storekeeper resides, beyond that of the living, the report makes* no men-. . tion. But the boy who took up storekeeping at 16 in the far " fever port" is now 86 years old. IT he came to England when ho retired, he came when railways were in their infancy. Many portents and marvels have arisen, one after the other, since those first payments of the fifties. As new decades and new cheques have arrived, there have come in turn also the telephone, the motor car, the big liner, '• wireless," nay. the aeroplane. " The storekeeper had been drawing his allowance for 16 years before England got free education, and may have studied Home politics for over 50 years before Mr. Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill. Two new Kings ascended the throne. The Crimea and the Mutiny, the wars of the Soudaa and South Africa tested the land: End through all the shocks and changes the post carried, steadily, the old storekeeper's pension. Sexagenarian " Pension." And yet his is not the oldest. Sixty-one years ago there was ,a moueyer's apprentice in the Mint. He was then 19 years of age, and the line which is given to his career ends with the hard word " Abolition." But, it was abolition with a difference. Attached to the extinction there was a " compensation" allowance of £150 .a year. The moneyer's apprentice is now an octogenarian. What he has done to fill the leisure which foil upon him in the fifties the Blue Book loaves to idle specu lation. But at, any rate he has not been cut off in his prime. Diligent burrowing would doubtless reveal ether curiosities of the pension-books. There are the " chaplains" of Foochow and Madeira, for instance, who were " abolished" in the seventies, and still live to remind the Treasury of the penalties of their " reorganisation. '