4 NOVEMBER 1938, Page 22

HELP FOR THE UNEMPLOYED.

[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]

Snt,—Last year you were good enough to publish in The Spectator two letters from me, appealing to your readers

to " adopt " the families of unemployed men, and the result was that 65 families and 2C0' old, lonely, single people were befriended and I was able to provide warm clothing and a Christmas parcel for a dozen other very needy families.

This splendid response has made the past year a happier one for hundreds of people, not always because they have had much material help but much mare because they now feel they have friends and life is less empty and hopeless.

I have just come back from a visit to a number of " adopted " families in Monmouthshire and the Rhondda. To listen to them you would think their troubles had ended when their " adaptors " first wrote to them.

Winter is coming and few of these families have even enough blankets to keep them warm. There will be much illness— and who can wonder. I have details of hundreds of families, from Cumberland to South Wales, all of them sent to me by people who have taken much trouble to discover the cases most urgently in need of help. Not many of the men can hope for work again. Some have been unemployed too long, some are too old, others are invalids or cripples. And there are widows too, who usually have the hardest time of all.

If people, in thankfulness for a deliverance from the horrors of war, would care to make life a bit easier for those who are finding life in peace-time hard enough, will they write to me and I will do my best to find just the sort of family they would