JUBILEE OF HAMILTON.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15987, 15 May 1924, Page 6

JUBILEE OF HAMILTON.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —I have this day received a circular from the Borough of Hamilton on the above subject, and I claim the right to reply to same, with your permission, through the Times. The time chosen is not at all appropriate. As I said in my previous •. " letter, to hold a jubilee in May when the anniversary day is not until August 24, does not fall in with the views of the people most interested. The Jubilee is a sufficiently interesting subject for a public holiday or the right to proper date, and I am quite sure that if Captain Steel, the officer in charge of the first arrivals of the old Fourth, had still been alive he would have objected to the date fixed by the Borough Council. I am asked to advise by return whether I will be present on that occasion, to which my answer of course will be “no,” but I fully intended to be present, if the proper date was chosen. I quite agree to the proposed programme as far as it went had the proper date . been chosen. I have, with my wife’s assistance, compiled and put in writing some of the incidents and doings of the old times, and which might have been interesting to some of those who have not experienced the hardships of a nioneer life and which I fully intended' to have read at the long-contem-plated Jubilee. I have before me a photograph of the 30 veterans taken bv Captain Reid on our 25th anniver- I sary, August 25 (the 24th being a \ Sunday), and a fine lot of men they were; but I am sorry to say that there are only one or two of them still living. Of course most of them have left their families to take their places, and I am proud to say that many of the Hamilton-born children have made their mark in different parts of the world as well as at home. —I am, etc., . ISAAC COATES. Canterbury, Melbourne, May 2.