News in Brief

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20204, 15 January 1934, Page 6

News in Brief

Exacting Social Demands. “ I have seen the Rugby matches at Twickenham, the Derby four times and the Grand National three times,” said Sir Thomas Wilford, High Commissioner for New Zealand in London, in the course of his special broadcast to New Zealand. Sir Thomas was referring to the social side of a High Commissioner’s activities. He spoke also of the exacting demands involved in attending numerous official functions, which sometimes followed each other rapidly for weeks on end, and mentioned specifically official luncheons. “ Staying power is a very necessary qualification for a High Commissioner,” he added. % Relief and Spending. “ The Unemployment Board’s policy of endeavouring to improve the position by imposing worse conditions on the unemployed has not worked out satisfactorily in the past, and I think the board might reasonably try to give better conditions to see whether that would not improve things,” said the Mayor, Mr G. W. Hutchison, when replying to a deputation from the unemployed. “ This cutting down all • the time of unemployed men’s wages and hardening the conditions may be all right with the idea pf trying to force people to accept work that is offering, but it is not improving the general conditions. My idea is that it is only by giving more spending power that we are likely to get back to normal times.” S* K » Hastening Death. A remarkable custom which is said to have existed in Norfolk until recent times is mentioned by a correspondent of the British Medical Journal. “ A doctor who is still in practice there,” he writes, “ told me he had met with tv o instances of the hastening of the death o c old people who lay too long a-dying. The method employed was to draw away the pillow and allow the sick person’s head to fall back. In one case my friend remonstrated with an old woman who, he believed, had just helped a sufferer out of the world, and told her it was murder. Her reply was: ‘Oh, no, sir, it’s not murder; it’s what we call drawing the pillow.’ He was Told by a district nurse that she had come across a similar case in South Lancashire. The practice seems to be used only in the case oi. persons who take an unconscionable time to die, and have worn out the patience of all around them.”