Personal
p. 65 · Read in the full issue
Word has been received in Suva that Mr. George Bucknell, who was serving with the AIF in Singapore when the city fell, has been found safe in a prisoner of war camp. He is the son of Mrs. Buck nell, of Suva, whose other son, Herbert, who was also in Singapore, is still missing.
Mr. and Mrs. A. G. Smyth, well-known residents of Western Samoa, arrived in Sydney in September, on a holiday that had been delayed for years by the war, and they will spend a couple of months in Australia. They speak of feverish days
in their Mandated Territory, when there were 22,000 American Servicemen there, trying to spend unlimited dollars on a limited female population; of copra at over £2O per ton; and of an apparently growing wave of petty crime among the native Samoans.
Mr. W. H, Watson, Rarotonga busi ness man and Island Council member, has returned, after a roundtrip by air to Aitutaki, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and New Zealand. He was the first private indivi dual to make the round flight. The tour, which was for business purposes, included a two weeks’ stay in New Zealand. Mr.
Watson was able to conclude arrange ments for the installation of a small clothing factory in Rarotonga, and for improvements in the already-established footwear factory.
We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for any thing except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges. Winston Churchill.
The French novelist, Mauride de Kobra, has prepared a will, leaving his library of 17,000 volumes, and various valuable works of art, to the town of Papeete, in Tahiti, because he regards Tahiti as “one of the remote places of the earth,” and one least likely to be destroyed by the atomic bomb.
Jubilee celebrations of the LMS are prepared for many places along the southern New Guinea coast. There will be feasts and services on an impressive scale at the Training College, Fife Bay, on Hood Point, and Vatorata Hill, Port Moresby, and the stations westward, up to Daru. An advance in all departments of service is planned for the new days of peace.