A HEAVY TOLL

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19503, 9 December 1937, Page 11

A HEAVY TOLL

MINING QN THE RAND COMPENSATION SCHEME "There is a sad side to the life there, and that relates to the miners' disease known as silicosis," said Mr. J. R. Kirk, Wellington, on his return from a visit to South Africa. "One has only to read the tombstones in the big Bramfontein cemetery at Johannesburg to get some jdea of its incidence. Here some thousands of European miners, mostly up to 30 years of age, a great many from Cornwall, "lie victims to the methods used for obtaining fortunes for those who have become millionaires.

" "These men were doubtless relatively well paid, but what of the many thousands of great, strong natives who Wave succumbed while giving their best for less than 2s per day—the rate Which still prevails in the Rand, plus <iuartefs ; and keep? "For the 20 years preceding 1935, £12,000j000 was paid in compensation for silicosis, mostly to Europeans and their widows and children, and every year between £BOO,OOO and £1,000,000 is paid in compensation, while the industry is further faced with huge outstanding liabilities in respect of miners who may be expected to develop the disease later. These figures will indicate to some relatively small extent the prevalence of a disease which limits man's working life to little more than 12 years and leaves him like a war-gas case until his untimely and body-racking end arrives. " 'lll fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where Wealth accumulates and men 'decay,' wrote the poet long ago, and an inquiry of this nature, in conjunction with the fact that gold has been taken from holes in Africa at such cost in lives (still going on) to be placed in other holes in America and underground vaults in England, leads to the question as to whether it is all justified and worth it.

"I feel sick when I think of the big fine fellows I have seen with their great ohysical frames who, I know while ~ putting very little in their pocket or their stomachs, are filling their lungs with a gritty dust which is about to choke them. Employed on the Rand are some 15,000 white miners and about 150,000 natives."