OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 August 1942, Page 4

OTHER PEOPLE’S IDEAS

ST. MATTHEW’S CHURCH (To the Editor.) Sir, —1 fear that in putting my vision of a restored church acre before the public I have hurt the feelings of those older residents of the town who were instrumental in commercialising it with, I am sure, the best of motives. I am sorry Mr T.T.D., as you are one of the last men I would wish to hurt, but you have confused the issue again. The Ven. Archdeacon tells me the leases are in perpetuity. You say that they are virtually in perpetuity, which means that in effect they are in perpetuity, but not in actual fact. In fact the people who should know seem very vague, as'in answer to my first inquiries I was informed that the leases were for 21 years. However there is nothing surer than that this town must in the future have open spaces both for health and aesthetic reasons, so may I suggest that the 1 Borough Council raise, after the war is , over, a loan, claim the Church acre for the town and build a row of shops I running east from Mr Nicols’s. The . rent of these shops, with offices above, . to pay interest and sinking fund on ( the loan. The Queen Street frontage to ’ be open gardens, the back half of the , acre to be the site of a white concrete ; church, where anyone can go for prayer, meditation or rest. If the church . authorities refuse, this, the whole site ’ should then be gardens —naturally the , leaseholders and church to be compensated. This, Sir, is my vision, both for i God and the people. I congratulate Mr Gawith on his fine letter and generous offer. —I am, etc., ANNE FLETCHER. Masterton. August 12. LANSDOWNE SCHOOL (To the Editor) Sir, —I have learned on good authority that the temporary hospital at Lansdowne School is being closed down today for the simple reason that there are no patients, or at least not sufficient to justify administering this particular unit. Need, one say any more? A few weeks ago the position at the hospital was desperate and nothing for it but to take over the school. The responsibility was thrown on the Health Department and the “heads” were brought on the scene and the Hospital Board’s case was apparently made sufficiently grave—at least on paper—to warrant the commandeering of the school. At a public protest meeting last year these same capable authorities who control the health of our community gave assurances that the school would not be taken unless in an emergency brought about by enemy action. This type of muddlement is becoming monotonous. Today we find some hundreds of children deprived of their school, their education being interfered with, and expenditure piled upon expenditure and we sit and take it, and we must not protest—the layman could not possibly understand the intricacies of our Hospital Board and its “grave” responsibilities towards matters of health. I venture to say the layman could not make a bigger mess of our health problems today. From my own observations I suggest that the Hospital Board Room would have comfortably met the present emergency and that now the trial has been macle and the “desperate” needs of the board proved a farce, the school should be immediately handed back. If there is an explanation it should be an interesting one. —I am, etc., COMMON SENSE. Masterton, August 12. LOCAL CIVIC HISTORY (To the Editor.) Sir, —August 13 will be the sixtyfifth anniversary of the first meeting of the Masterton Borough Council in the old R.M. Courthouse building, at noon of Monday, August 13, 1877, and the taking of the oath by the newlyelected councillors. The Mayor (Mr Robert George Williams) first made the statutory declaration and then administered the same to the following nine councillors: —Duncan McGregor, Wm. Wilson McCardle, Edwin Feist, Henry Bannister, Farquhar Gray, Wm. Perry, Job Vile, Edward Wyllie and Donald Donald. The brief agenda paper -was then soon disposed of, consisting as it did of the reading of the minutes of the Local Board for the last time by its ex-clerk, Mr Thos. Wilsone, who then, as acting Town Clerk and Returning Officer, was instructed to write the municipalities of Wellington, Milton, Kaiapoi, Blenheim and Timaru for copies of their by-laws. The meeting then adjourned to a near date, but was further adjourned to the end of August, after which the proceedings became not only more lengthy but highly important to the progress of the town, dealing with street-widening, swampdraining, forming and metalling new roads from the old Mill Creek to Railway Hotel, and a further contract extending the same in the Waingawa Bridge direction further north. The 338-page first minute book is perhaps the most interesting reading of the many as voluminous preserved since

then. It containing minutes of transactions over the first four-year period, ending on December, 1881, when they were also being reported in the columns of the local ress, including the “Masterton News Letter” and the “Wairarapa News,” evidently rivals of those days before the “Wairarapa Times” and “Wairarapa Star” drove these earlier journals practically out of the running as far as local news was concerned. From council records is gathered the fact that on the morning of March 4, 1879, the whole block of Queen Street office and business premises extending from Perry Street to the Post Office corner of today, then called Hall Street, was swept from sight by fire. This led to loan proposals, including the sum of £5OO for water-supply for an otherwise defenceless volunteer fire brigade. Another item among many recorded refers to a horse named Old Crowbar, whose carcase, by kind permission of an Albert Street lady property-owner, was buried near the scene of his death. Unless Mr Chas. Bannister can solve the mystery for us, none will know whether this equine veteran was an ex-servant of the corporation or a popular figure on the roadsides incarcerated for the last time in the local Pound. —I am, etc., N.J.B. Masterton, August 12, 1942.