EMPIRE RED CROSS FUND

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23946, 23 October 1939, Page 12

EMPIRE RED CROSS FUND

COUNCIL FORMED IN LONDON LORD NUFFIELD’S OFFER (From Our Own Correspondent) LONDON, Sept. 22. The King and Queen consented this week to become patrons of the council which will direct the Empire appeal for the British Red Cross and St. John war organisation. The chairman is the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Frank Bowatcr, and Lord Cromer is the deputy chairman. The High Commissioner for New Zealand, Mr W. J. Jordan, is a member of the council. Sir Frank Bowater said that the Red Cross and St. John work in the last war cost £17,000,000, and to-day nothing short of an Empire-wide appeal would be adequate to raise the money on which British troops would depend so largely for their comforts and supplementary medical service. The Archbishop of Canterbury felt sure that the heart of the whole community would make a ready response It was good to know that once again those two great ministries of help, the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, had agreed to work together. \Vhatcvcr provision the State might make for the needs of the forces, there would always be scope for voluntary effort. No words could describe the distress in people's hearts that, for the second time in the lives of most of those present, they should be called upon to face the horrors of war, intensified since the Great War. It was a debt of honour that they should make provision for the needs of those in the field. It was a debt which the whole Empire would be ready to meet. This war. he supposed, would be largely waged from the air, and at many times and in many places people at home would be literally in the fighting line, Britain must be ready to do her utmost for her people who were wounded from the air. It was said of Napoleon that he was defeated because the eternal verities were against him. It was because of the eternal verities that the whole nation had undertaken the cause.