Rays of Hope: The Story of Agnes May Robinson and the Sunshine League, I would certainly make a bee-line to the nearest book store and get one! Surely it is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read! It is a book that can appeal to all and sundry in Bermuda. I think it is capable of tugging the heart-strings of any mother or mother-to-be and softening the most hard-boiled man who would take time to read it.

Rays of Hope is an easy-to-read history lesson about women attempting to cope with social conditions in Bermuda during the early years of the 20th century, conditions which we in this day and age may find hard to believe.

In any case, those situations moved Agnes May Robinson to set up 80 years ago the country's first locally organised social welfare society which birthed the Sunshine League and its special interest in underprivileged children.

It is an institution that continues to revolve around the Sunshine League Home, situated near the corner of King and Dundonald Streets in Hamilton.

There was plenty of talk about the declining social and moral conditions in Bermuda during the early years of the 20th century. But it was Agnes Robinson who took concrete action.

A major concern was the need for a nursery where mothers could leave their children while they went to work, and as often occurred, when they were hospitalised. There was also the problem of homeless children, particularly boys.

They were called street urchins, waifs, wharf rats, boys who sold newspapers during the day and slept wherever they could at night.

They were labelled hooligans, who were frequently brought before the magistrates and flogged for making nuisances of themselves and stealing. A regular pastime of the so-called "wharf rats'' was diving off the docks for pennies thrown overboard by tourists.

Flogging was seen by the authorities as the solution to problems of young offenders and efforts to outlaw it proved futile. The case was cited of two boys, aged ten, brought before a magistrate for stealing bananas. He gave them six strokes of the birch. Within ten days one of those boys was back for stealing a cheque.

The aftermath of the First World War had a devastating effect on some working class families; inability to get work for months on end led some men and women to drown their woes in alcohol and gambling which resulted in more destitution.

Significantly, it was in 1919 (January 28, to be exact) that Agnes Robinson, with the support of her sisters and other single young ladies, totaling eight, from her Bible class, saw her dream come true with the establishment of the Sunshine League.

A prominent member of the Oddfellows Lodge, Mrs. Etta Jones, was invited to become a member, and the group's first social worker.

It was most flattering to read in Rays of Hope how Carol Hill discovered among her aunt's papers an old Bermuda Recorder with first-hand accounts from Mrs.

Jones of some of her exploits in the 1920s and '30s. Three stories in the issue dated October 7, 1950, over the byline of none other than Ira Philip, are cited in the book.

The gist of one of those stories is how Mrs. Jones discovered a wretched looking boy of nine sleeping on a box behind a door. As the league's representative she took him in hand. He grew to manhood, and became a doctor.