The Admiralty have issued figures relating to the progress of recruiting, On the success of which the naval expansion now proceeding so largely depends. They are chiefly of interest as showing that the Royal Navy, besides taking precedence among the defence services by right of seniority, also seems fully to maintain its place in the affections of the youth of the nation; for in spite of the rapid increase in numbers recruited of recent years—from 2,600 in 1929 and 1930 to 11,500 last year, and over 16,000 this year—there has been no difficulty in filling requirements. The only exceptions to this success have been in respect of two branches; there has been a scarcity of trained cooks, and some difficulty in obtaining young men qualified in the engineering trades for direct entry as artificers, states the Naval Correspondent of "The Tim:
The scarcity of cooks is not peculiar to the Navy; it is almost a national failing, if one may judge fróm the correspondence which appears periodieally on the subject in the Press: And the scarcity of qualified artificers, which causes a temporary difficulty only in the Navy, is almost inevitable at the present time. Normally the Navy trains its own artificers, entering them as boy apprentices and sending them to sea five years later fully qualified. But it does not take that length of time to build ships of war, and the new cruisers and destroyers of the rearmament programme initiated two years ago are now coming into service" To bridge the gap, the Navy needs at the moment to enter artificers already qualified by experience in the engineering trades ashore, and in that respect it is competing not only with civil industry, which is itself, during a revival in In his summing-up Lord Hewart said it would be difficult to imagine words more likely to bring a man into hatred than words which accused him of murder.
What could possibly be more in-juncus to the plaintiff than the suggestion, notwithstanding the verdict of the jury, that it was no accident, but that the plaintiff really did intend to use the revolver and dia use it trade after a period of depression, suffering from a similar scarcity, but also, since the expansion of the Air Force and the mechanization of the Army, with the other defence Services. Nevertheless, the past few months have seen a marked improvement ín this respect, and it is being maintained.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.