Mr. WILFRID ROBERTS
(Newcastle Programme)
1 IN HIS TALK this morning
Wilfrid Roberts will leave for a moment the beauty of Cumberland. He will go in imagination to the other end of the county, to the industrial West, where once men and women were happy and prosperous, but where for twelve long years unemployment has hung over the people like a menace.
He is to talk of an isolated industrial district running up to the West of the Lake District, where 10,000, or over thirty per cent. of the population of the county, are out of work. Neither coal nor iron, the two principal industries, has really flourished since 1922. He will deal with some of the reasons, and some of the palliatives, since no remedy seems to exist. Already the hearts of almost hopeless people in villages like Frizington and Cleator Moor, and down to Maryport, have begun to hope again through the work of the Society of Friends. But the clubs they have started here and elsewhere, and the help they are giving, and even a scheme to train miners as poultry farmers, cannot remedy the evil.
Is the land a solution ? If Cumberland had as many men on the land as they have in Denmark, the whole of the 10,000 might be absorbed into agriculture.