SEAMEN’S LEADERS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18556, 11 August 1922, Page 9

SEAMEN’S LEADERS.

LONDON, August 9. Mr Havelock Wilson has received Mr Walsh’s letter of 25th of June, enclosing a copy of the missing letter dated 16th of April, j*n which Mr Walsh declares that Mr Wilson during his visit to Australia in 1912 told him he did not wish British members to be transferred to the Australian union. He accused Mr. Wilson during the war of assisting shipowners to rob the country of millions, and alter the war seemed, more anxious to shelter the profiteers than to protect members of his union, and not anxious to make shipping profiteers disgorge some of their plunder, which the seamen of England p-iled up for them during the war. Mr Wilson* in a lengthy, sarcastic reply suggests that Mr Walsh is suffering from a mental breakdown and advises the services of a nerve specialist. He adds: You stat© that I have been driven from pillar to post by British shipowners, but it is alleged by some shipowners that 1 compelled them to do things they ' otherwise would have left undone. My union during the last three years transferred over twelve hundred members of the Australian Seamen’s Union to the British Union without entrance fee. You talk of conditions won for Australian seamen, and appear to have an idea that if you were at the head of affairs in England you would have accomplishjed a great deal. Why have you remained so long down under? I am sure in the Old Country there would have been ample room for a man of your outstanding ability, but you evidently prefer to let off your spare gas at long distance. You ask me to rid seamen of the British shipowner. From what purpose? The latter serves a useful function, and creates employment for thousands. Does not he fill a function '.ji life equally as useful as your’s?