SIR,—As the father of a conscripted son I should like
to endorse the complaint of " Gunner." My son, a promising art student, was called up for the Navy last August after completing 18 months of a three-year scholarship. He did his basic training and served for four months or so at sea in a destroyer. Since then he has been posted to a shore station where he is doing nothing, useful and has no opportunity of pursuing any sort of study or practice in art so essential to him for his future.
As a scholarship-holder he represents a certain investment by the L.C.C., but, as he is likely to forget much that he has already been taught and will have to go over the same ground again when he is released and resumes his scholarship course, the cost of earlier art training may be considered wasted. Having long since finished his naval training he is as good a sailor as he is ever likely to be. Idling at a shore station merely impairs his efficiency. He should have been released at the end of his sea training with advantage not only to himself but to the nation. At present he merely represents a burden of expenditure. This seems to me to be a scandalous state of affairs at a time when the nation needs all the artistic and technical talent it can command. Moreover his whole future is at stake, and it is disheartening to young men of this type to know that their studies are interrupted and delayed and their chance of beginning a useful career exasperatingly hindered. It is a soul-destroying wastage and must have an ill effect on many similar conscripts.—Yours faithfully,
A. G. WILSON.
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