Our Campaign Comforts Fund.
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Inspection by the W.D. The Growing Purchase Department. Gifts Wanted.
Our usual table, which we reproduce above, continues to reveal the steady and consistent progress which we are maintaining in connection with the purchase and distribution of comforts in connection with this Fund. It is correct to say that at no time since its inception has this scheme been allowed to become standardized. The numbers of troops for whom we have to care have steadily become larger, and will for some while to come, we imagine, continue to do so. Fortunately our subscribers have to date correspondingly afforded us the larger means to the end.
It will be readily imagined by those whom we have not had the good fortune to receive at these offices in order to inspect, our organization, that the latter has had to be continually extended and modified as the rapidly-changing circumstances have dictated. At no period, we are proud to be able to write, has this Jack of standardization hindered our progress. We have been enabled to extend all the while we have been carrying on the good work. At the present time our energies are bent on improving matters to such an extent that during the coining harder season we shall be able to look after at least twice as many men in connection with every consignment, as we have hitherto accomplished.
The purchasing department of thisFund alone would now do credit to many a large provincial stores, and sheer necessity has trained the various members of THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR staff who have made themselves responsible for this branch of the Fund's activities, to become expert purchasers of all kinds of stores of which, not many months ago, their experience was limited to individual pairs or quarter-. dozens. Purchasing, so far as possible, is now made with a very keen eye upen altering markets. On account of the altogether. unusual demands for most of the stores which we regularly send out, the securing of sufficient supplies of them of high quality and at rock-bottom prices: is no small task. We haVe, for example, to place definite orders for, and have many of them already in the .stores, say, another 20,000 pairs of the special driving gloves, of which to date we have already despatched more than 10,000 pairs. Cloves are, of course, a winter comfort, but we record the fact that our purchases for the coming season in respect of this particular gift are already on a larga scale, as interesting evidence of the necessity which we have recognized for purchasing well in advance of requirements.
The outstanding event of last week's activities has been the fact that the Fund's whole organization has B30 been officially inspected by a Staff Captain for the War Office, and we perhaps are entitled to record the fact that that gentleman was very generous in his appreciation of the coraple.teness of our organization and of the manner in which the small staff of hard workers is maintaining a remarkable service of comforts for so large a body of men with a minimum of establishment expenditure.
It has to be recorded that THE COMMERCIAL MOTOR Campaign Comforts Fund is officially the only fund which is.recognized by the War Department. as having the proper authority to coneet money and to spend it in, order to provide comforts for the whole of the M.T.
Columns of the A.S.C.
We will add a note with regard to certain gifts which perhaps some of our readers may feel inclined to present to the Fund. They are specific requests from A.S.C., MT., men at the Front, arid, if the articles in question are forwarded to us, we will take the responsibility of Packing and directing them andseeing that they get to their proper destinations. From a number of requests for more or less unusual articles which have cdthe into crur hands during the past weeks we select these four: an accordion, a, set of billiard balls,. one or 'two Scottish students' song book's. We are making no secret of the fact of having "turned down" a similar request for a harmonium aa from the fortunately limited experience of the Fund's staff, such an instrument cannot in any way be classified as a comfort.