Page 3 Advertisements Column 2

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2012, 22 February 1907, Page 3

PAUPERS WIN £40,000 LOTTERY. The great Christmas lottery for a prize of £40,000 has been Avon I y the Evora workhouse inmates, said a recent Lisbon telegram. All the paupers, numbering 1000 clubbed together, each paying 6d, and bought, a whole ticket. Each has won £4O. • The workhouse is now deserted, all the former inmates having left. Their departure was made the occasion of great rejoicing, a farewell banquet being given, at which everyone drank champagne.

Among industrial diseases what is erroneously known in Sydney as “sewer disease” is one of the most deadly, and carries off scores of the finest men qs regards physical development in the C|f labor-. The work is vock-trenciiing and rock-tun-nelling, for which the payment is respectively 8s and 9s a day. Owing to the underlying formation of the city and suburbs being of sandstone (says the Sydney Worker) the practice is to drive tunnels through the solid rock, or cut through the stone by excavating trenches, and the dust produced by continual use of the pick being of a hard, gritty nature, once inhaled in the lungs remains there. According to sworn testimony by the late Dr. J. J. Power, and embodied in a report of the committee of enquiry presented to Parliament in June, 1902, out of over 200 workmen treated for wliat is called by the misleading term of “sewer disease,” not one 'recovered. The doctor’s advice to patients was to get away from the stonework as soon as possible, otherwise the disease became chronic and incurable. His opinion was that no man should be allowed to work in the construction of sower's for.' more than six ' months' without a six months! holiday. A well-known contractor who furnished particulars t*o tlie_committee stated that 60 per cent to 70 per cent, of his best hands died. After four years working among rockcliopping the disease is set up, and a slow, torturing, suffocating illness precedes death. The United Labor Protective Society lias made what seems to b,e a r E asbiiable request—that the rock-chopping work should he paid for at the rate of 9s- per day and that for tunnel-work the day should be six hours; blit the Water and Seworage Board so far has not seen its way to accede.