MARVELLOUS WORK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 June 1941, Page 6

MARVELLOUS WORK

OF REAL SHERLOCK HOLMES. His mission in life was to hound down the best in human nature as surely as the fictitious Sherlock Holmes tracked down crime. Thomas Holmes belongs to our own day, dying in 1918. He was born poor near Walsall in Staffordshire, and as a boy he worked 14 hours a day for three shillings a week. He brought up five childrep on a mere pittance, and found time tc) improve himself. Being incapacitated from continuing his work as the result of an accident, he became a policecourt missionary at 39, finding in that work his true vocation. A marvellous work he did, as we ' may read in his stirring and vivid book, "Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts.” Few men of his day understood the lower classes, their mentality and their outlook, their sufferings and trials as this honest, kindly upright man. He had much to do with prison reform, helping to throw aside the old harsh treatment, and introduce the idea of helping the prisoner to do better and be better. But his greatest work was in bringing to the notice of the public the scandalous circumstances in which thousands of poor people earned a living not worth calling a living. The idea had gone abroad that the Song of the Shirt had done its work, and that all was well in England's green and pleasant land —and in lands far beyond. But. Thomas Holmes shattered the dream, tolling the world that he knew a woman and her daughter in Islington, costume machinists, who, buying their own thread and using their own sewing machine, earned Is lOd each in a day of 14 hours; and that a maker of artificial flowers in . Bethnal Green made l.}d an hour if she worked 16 hours a day, Thomas Holmes was able to establish a house of rest for 40 poor women, and before he passed on he had helped to make the world a better place.