He deplored the number of girls who were taking up commercial instead of domestic work, and he said evidence of this could be seen each morning as car-loads of girls and young women proceeded to town.
''Commercially-trained girls are not receiving what should fit them for being the mothers of the future,'' he continued.
''We shall never have the proper domestic affairs till young mothers can get help in their homes, and this state of affairs will go on as long as young girls are allowed to go into commercial life. These conditions obtained long before the war, so that cannot be blamed.''
Mr Bassett thought that girls were drifting out of their natural sphere in life, and he expressed the opinion that the State should see to it that girls, in going in for commercial life, should also receive instruction in domestic duties.
In fact, he hoped that in the interests of future generations, girls would be compelled to produce certificates that they were qualified for home-keeping and domestic duties.
Flying instructor
Mr Cecil Hill, the well-known Hendon aviation instructor, who has come out to take charge of the Aviation School at Christchurch, with his wife and child, went south on Wednesday night.
Mr Hill has trained some of the most brilliant of fliers at the front, and he describes the progress of aviation since the war began as extraordinary. When the war broke out the ordinary machine was able to fly from 40 to 65 miles per hour, with a relatively low capacity for keeping in the air, and could not ''hover'' or fly slowly.
The latest British machines are so stable that they will fly without any hand on the control. Air pockets are no longer a terror to them, and wind is of little consideration. They can keep in the air for eight hours, in which they can do their 800 miles.
A new British machine has a 250 h.p. Rolls-Royce engine, and can fly as slowly as 25 miles an hour and as fast as 120 miles. Machines have flown up to 140 miles. How rapid the improvement has been is shown in regard to this very machine.
When the Germans worked havoc with the Fokker machines, the British replied with a superior type of machine, but when it took the field the Germans sprang another surprise which beat it. Now all those models are obsolete.
The machines to-day are enormously more capable of manoeuvring and rapid evolutions and rapid climbing, and aviators operate at great heights. There has been the same brilliant advance by French inventors, constructors, and pilots.
Now Britain has thousands of pilots and machines, so much so that it is ever so much more difficult to get into the Flying Corps than it was, and there is a long waiting list.
School budgets stretched
At the meeting of the Macandrew Road School Committee it was decided, on the motion of Mr W. Wright, that the following remit be sent to the School Committees' Association:
''That the Macandrew Road School Committee believes that the Government allowance for school committees is entirely inadequate to meet the requirements of the schools, and that the time has arrived when a substantial increase should be made. The members of the committee regard it as an absolute disgrace that committees should have to devise ways and means of raising money to assist in the so-called free education of the children attending the public schools of the dominion.''
- ODT, 10.5.1917
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