LOCAL AND GENERAL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4403, 17 March 1941, Page 4

LOCAL AND GENERAL

Farmers are reminded that argricultural statistics are now due and the local Police, both at Te Awamutu and Kihikihi, will be glad to receive immediate co-operation by those concerned in supplying such returns.

There was an attendance of over 30 at a meeting of the Te Awamutu and Cambridge Legion of Frontiersmen in Cambridge on Wednesday evening. Lieutenant F. H. Green gave a comprehensive review of the year’s activities and a satisfactory financial position was revealed.

The war scare had created a new problem, said the Minister of Public Works, Mr H. T. Armstrong, while receiving a deputation from the Greymouth Borough Council. Once the people wanted roads to get into the towns, but now they wanted roads leading from the towns.

The Metropolitan of New Zealand, Archbishop O’Shea, has received the following cable from the Apostolic Delegate to* Australia and New Zealand in Sydney: “Kindly arrange March 23 as a special day of prayer in accordance with the wishes of His Majesty the King.”

“ There are plenty of places to drink beer in this country,” said Sapper Ken Prowse, serving with the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces in England, when writing to his mother, Mrs E. Prowse, of Te Aroha. In a place similar in size to Te Kuiti there were as many as six first-class hotels.

“ How many does he subscribe to ? ” inquired Mr Justice Johnston in the Napier Supreme Court recently, when counsel for a petitioner drawing Social Security funds sought to obtain a decree absolute without undertaking to pav the costs, told his Honour that his client had 11 children of his marriage and another seven later.

The Te Kuiti Farmers’ Union has been pressing the Minister of Transport to give permission for farmers to buy benzine in drums for more than one month. It was reported at the Sub-Provincial Executive meeting yesterday that the Commissioner of Transport had just advised that farmers may now buy 12 months’ supply of benzines in drums, for agricultural purposes on ordinary license.

At the annual meeting of the Northern King Country eexcutive of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union, it was resolved to pass an Otorohanga remit as follows: That all companies handling bobby calves, pigs and all meats and farm produce generally should present standardised balance sheets, without any camouflage, to enable farmers to know the true position.

It was wonderful to see how young girls had come forward for war service, said Mi's M. J. Bentley, a member of the Dominion Council -and Dominion Executive of the Women’s War Service Auxiliary, speaking at a meeting of New Plymouth women. But it was even more wonderful to see the active work the wives, mothers, and even grandmothers of boys on active service were doing. In Wellington, she said, she had a number of women over sixty years of age doing military drill, and enjoying it. “ We want the men to see we can step side by side with them,” she said, “ and I think you’re going to do it.”

Complaints by the Northern King Country executive of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union to the Railways Department concerning the cleaning and disinfecting of railway waggons was the subject of a reply (received at the annual meeting) by the Minister of Railways, who said that his staff were given definite instructions to see that stock waggons were kept clean, and that though it was in the busy season not always possible to rail these back to cleaning depots, all possible care was taken. A suggestion that an outbreak of strangles in the Taumarunui district had resulted from failure to disinfect railway waggons met with the response that loading and unloading was the responsibility of consignor and consignee, and the Department’s staff could not be expected to diagnose stock troubles, but if such diseases were reported -to the Department immediate steps would be taken to have trucks disinfected.