Читать книгу The Times Great War Letters: Correspondence during the First World War - James Owen - Страница 12

MOURNING CLOTHES

17 August 1914

SIR,—IF THE COUNTRY should decide to dispense with such mourning the economic effect will be to save a disturbance of cash expenditure. Mourning will still be bought for those who die natural deaths. But we should have a huge additional and artificial expenditure, temporarily inflated by the heavy death-toll of the next few weeks; and the money so saved will be available for the support of ordinary trade.

MRS. EDWARD LYTTELTON

The war’s heavy death toll ended the expensive Victorian ritual of mourning expressed through gradual changes of clothing.

EMPLOYMENT OR RELIEF

18 August 1914

SIR,—WILL YOU ALLOW me to raise my voice on behalf of the many women workers who are being rapidly thrown out of employment by this tremendous inrush of well-meant but short-sighted voluntary work?

The matter is one which has already received her Majesty’s serious attention, and also that of the council of Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild. It has also been the subject of a few broad hints on the part of our leading newspapers. But still the inrush continues, the tide of voluntary work still rises, and is already beginning to swamp the vast hosts of needy women who depend on their skill or their handiwork for bread for themselves and their little ones.

There are three points which I would like to place before all those who at the present moment are throwing themselves so whole-heartedly and so injudiciously into this veritable vortex of voluntary assistance.

1 Have they thought out the fact that by all that voluntary work—typing, secretarial, nursing, as well as needlework, they are creating the very evil which they are preparing to relieve later on—namely, unemployment?

2 Have they thought out the fact that every garment sewn or knitted by an amateur is so much bread taken out of the mouth of a poor seamstress?

3 Have they thought that it would be a far finer and more patriotic thing to deny themselves the pleasure of working and sewing parties and to use their local funds for purchasing made garments from their local outfitters or giving out the work to their needy sisters?

The purchase of certain descriptions of ready-made garments has almost entirely ceased in some small country towns. The small drapery dealers will very soon have to shut up their establishments or in any case greatly reduce them, and thus one of the many channels through which the poor seamstress, the shop assistant, the clerk earns her precarious livelihood will be closed to her, and presently she will have to be relieved out of the local fund or left to starve if she is too proud to ask for relief.

She would be far happier in earning her bread to-day than in accepting relief from any fund later on.

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

EMMUSKA ORCZY

A PROTEST AGAINST SECRECY

5 September 1914

SIR,—YOUR CORRESPONDENT MR. Charles Whibley is obviously not interested in the lives of sons and husbands at the front. As one who comes from a fighting family of many generations and who has three sons in France to-day, I cannot too strongly express the dislike of the present secret methods felt by all whose dear ones are opposing the German hordes. We want no revelation of military secrets, but we would like to know the kind of life being led by our kith and kin, and we strongly object to the abandonment of the British tradition of the publication of generals’ dispatches. At the time of writing we have received practically nothing from Sir John French, except through Lord Kitchener’s statement of last Sunday.

Your obedient servant,

A FATHER