CHILD ACTORS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23221, 19 June 1937, Page 15

CHILD ACTORS

ENGLISH TEACHERS’ PROTEST (From Our Own Correspondent) (By Air Mail) U LONDON. May Tfl. L~' The training of children with theatrical aspirations was compared with (hat given to performing animals at the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers at Cardiff. Child actresses, who lose their girlhood freshness and grow up too quickly, and who take half a day from school to have their hair “permed,” were also mentioned by Miss I. Payn (Cardiff), - who moved a resolution, which was carried, calling upon the Government to take immediate steps to amend the Children and Young Persons Act. Miss Payn said that any child, on attaining the aged of 12, might obtain a licence for stage performance. if passed as medically fit and providing that certain rules were observed. Those conditions might sound quite satisfactory, but they were not always what they seemed. “ Most of us are acquainted with these little nomads,” said Miss Payn, “who. we find on investigation, have attended three or four schools in almost as many months. In my school only one of these children was able to retain her place in the school, and there was one who could not spell the simplest words, while her aritlfmetic , was on the same level. CIGARETTES AND CHATTER “ Some girls who were engaged in a revue for a month arrived at their lodgings to find that nine of them had to sleep in one bedroom, five juniors sleeping across one bed and four seniors in the other. The seniors, who were girls of 14 to 18, were in charge of the juniors, but so lightly did their responsibility rest upon them that they prevented their young charges from sleeping by their smoking and flippant chatter. The seniors were regaled between performances with sandwiches and port wine. The juniors arrived home on Boxing Day hysterical and hungry, and entirely cured of further stage aspirations. When these stage children return to school they have grown up too quickly, and, therefore, Sadly. They become physically and mentally older, having suddenly lost the freshness of • their girlhood and budding womanhood “With their permed hair—some ot them need to take half a day from school to have it permed—with their use of rouge, lipstick, and powder, they are to be pitied. They are not yet women and they are no longer schoolcnildren. The glamour of the footlights and the desire to draw attention to themselves is all important. Their scale of values is all wrong. They want life, but they don’t know how to live. Are we to see the work of early years thus cast so lightly aside for the transient glamour of the footlights? ” Miss C. A. Kinghorn (Cardiff) said there was a growing practice of picking up very small children for stage work. “ I have seen a tiny child,” she said, “sitting in a dressing room, with her lips painted and her fingernails like a Chinaman’s. A child like that will never drop such practices. Child dancers have to work so hard that they suffer from abdominal trouble and heart strain. The coloured children who took part in the film ‘Sanders of the River’ were drawn fromCardiff. They were well treated gene- | rally, but one can imagine their sufferi ing when they had to act in nothing j but little raffia skirts on the banks ol that Thames in December/* *