A Life of J. C. Beaglehole: New Zealand Scholar

Part OneThe Making of an Historian

1Forebears

Beaglehole was a not uncommon name in eighteenth-century Cornwall. It was derived from bugel hal, meaning herdsman on the moors. As time passed, however, Beagleholes were largely found clustered in the mining villages of the county. The spelling varied; Bagelhole, Begelhole, Bugelhoal, Buglehole and more appear in parish registers, as well as Beaglehole. Christian names showed less variety: John, William, Henry, Elizabeth and Jane constantly recur. There were clearly a number of families in the west, in Helston and its nearby villages of Breage, Sithney and Germoe, and the first John Beaglehole in whom we are interested was born in Breage in 1805, the son of Margaret and William, a miner.1 John moved from Breage to the St Austell area and became, according to family tradition, a copper miner. Most of his children were baptised in St Austell. He died in Liskeard, however, where his youngest son was born. In the 1871 death notice of his widow Margaret she is referred to as 'relict of the late John Beaglehole of St Cleer Cornwall'.

The copper mines of the St Austell district, lying to the east of the town, became prominent only after 1812. St Austell had been a tin-mining village which grew steadily in size in the second half of the eighteenth century, once china clay was discovered in 1755 and began to be mined. By the end of the century the population was just under 4000, and while the china clay industry came to dominate the town – and, in time, the huge heaps of white spoil equally dominate its surrounding landscape – copper and tin mining were significant in the first half of the nineteenth century. Copper and tin miners, indeed, regarded clay-working as an inferior occupation that called for none of their skills as miners. Copper miners from St Austell were among those who in the late 1830s and 1840s developed mines in the Caradon district near the village of St Cleer, a few miles from Liskeard. More and more miners and capital were attracted. A railway built from Liskeard to the new mines enabled the ore to be taken by barge down the Liskeard and Looe canal and shipped out of Looe. By 1850 the Caradon district was recognised as one of the richest mineral areas in Cornwall and the Caradon Hill Mine, employing some 4000 men, perhaps the greatest of the Cornish copper mines.

John Beaglehole's initial move from Breage to St Austell and the subsequent move to Liskeard or St Cleer, which seems to have taken place between the birth of his son Joseph in St Austell in 1843 and that of Sampson in Liskeard in 1848, were as much a part of a common pattern as was his family's subsequent move to South Australia after his death. Whether there were more specific reasons for the move from St Austell we can only conjecture. The winter of 1846–47 was particularly hard. Hungry workers believed they were being starved in order to benefit profiteering corn merchants, and in May 1847 there were riots in Wadebridge, in which St Austell miners played a part, seeking to prevent the export of corn to other parts of the country and to have it available locally at a fair price.2The men did little more than threaten, but a month later a mob of casual mine-labourers and clay-workers invaded St Austell itself and started looting some shops. Troops eventually restored order and ten men were given sentences of imprisonment ranging from six months to two years.3 It was a time when a family man might well decide to try his luck at the flourishing new mines at Caradon, not least because his eldest son, John, was already old enough to be working and the second, William, soon would be.

John had married Jane Rickard on 26 July 1826 in St Austell.4Both registered their names with a mark. Jane bore eight children in fifteen years of marriage before dying of 'inflammation of the lungs'. Only four of those children survived to adulthood: John, born in 1829, William Henry, 1833, Mary, 1838, and Absalom, born in 1840 and losing his mother before his first birthday. On 20 April 1842 John remarried. Margaret Williams was a widow whose husband, Thomas Williams, had died nine years earlier. Margaret was thirty-six and had two young sons of her own. She too was the child of a miner, Joseph Watters. And if Margaret signed the register with a cross, this time John wrote his name, spelling it Beagelhole. John and Margaret went on to have two sons, Joseph Watters (named after his grandfather) in 1843, and Sampson in 1848. Two years after Sampson's birth, John died at Liskeard, leaving Margaret with the care of eight children, ranging from her stepson John in his early twenties down to two-year-old Sampson. The 1851 census return for St Cleer village lists Margaret as a 'lodgings housekeeper' and her sons Thomas and John Williams as well as John and William Henry Beaglehole as miners. Later that year Margaret and her family, with the exception of her elder sons and her eldest stepson, John, sailed to a new life in South Australia.

They were but a tiny part of a great exodus of peoples from Europe to the new worlds in the mid-nineteenth century. What precipitated the move we do not know. Certainly, life in a Cornish mining community was far from comfortable. Before the Caradon discoveries, St Cleer was an agricultural parish with a population of 984 in 1830; then copper was discovered and in thirty years the population had reached almost 4000.5 Mining boomed and brought prosperity to some, but a heavy price was paid. The overcrowded, insanitary hovels of cob and thatch thrown up by the miners consisted of little more than walls and a roof; water supply was a secondary consideration and sanitation came last of all. Disease was rife. The St Cleer parish burial registers 'show an alarming increase in the proportion of infants dying under five years, and the virtual halving of the average expectancy of life from over 40 to less than 22 years'. Much the same tragedy is revealed in the burial registers of other mining parishes. The miners' poverty was reflected in their average weekly wage in the second quarter of the nineteenth century: less than 13 shillings, a bare living wage and nothing more. All too often meals 'consisted of sour barley bread washed down with boiled water slightly discoloured with tea, occasionally varied with a few turnips … fried in grease that had been purloined from the mine engines'.

Margaret and her family left Plymouth, about eighteen miles from Liskeard, on 7 May 1851 on the Sultana and arrived at Port Adelaide just over three months later, on 10 August. In the shipping list they are entered as BeagleholeMargaretaged 38housekeeperWilliam17minerMary14servantAbsalom13Job8Joseph7Sampson3

There is a discrepancy between the ages given for Margaret and Absalom and those recorded in the 1851 census for Liskeard (taken in March), where they given as forty-five and ten – the ten for Absalom being apparently correct. The differences may have arisen from ignorance or from error. From the way she signed the marriage register Margaret almost certainly could not write; quite probably she could not read either. Her death notice in 1871 gave her age as sixty-seven, which would give a birth date of 1804 and suggests that she was at least forty-five when they sailed. It may have been expedient to supply the younger age to meet the conditions for the passage to Australia. The Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners in London regulated the supply of assisted immigrants by altering the terms of eligibility. Margaret got away just in time, because that year assistance was withdrawn from widows, widowers with children, single women with illegitimate children and habitual paupers.6 The other enigma is the listing of Job. No record has been found of him being born as Job Beaglehole nor as Job Williams, so he does not appear to be a son of Margaret. After the family arrived in Australia, there is also no record of Job as a Beaglehole. Perhaps some other family asked Margaret to bring him out to relatives and he travelled under her name to make it legal.

Why South Australia? First, assisted passages were available, and without these a widow in Margaret's circumstances could never have considered making such a move. Second, it seems possible that she was following relatives who had already made the voyage. Another widow, Elizabeth Beaglehole (1801–74), whose husband William Henry Beaglehole (1800–33) may have been related to Margaret's husband John, left Helston and made the passage out with her two sons, John and William Henry, on the Prince Regent in 1849. Another William Beaglehole had arrived in Adelaide about 1845 with his wife and family. Maybe the two widows went out to join him; such a pattern of chain migration was not unusual at that time. The provision of assisted passages was explained by the colony's place as the first example of the Wakefield system in practice. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonisation sought to 'synchronise flows of labour and capital with the release of land for settlement'7and to ensure an adequate supply of labour by funding migration from the proceeds of land sales. During the first phase of South Australia's development, 1836–57, population growth depended heavily on assisted immigration and about 160,000 immigrants arrived in the colony. A disproportionate number of these migrants came from the south of England, and for several years in the mid-century more than 10 per cent of arrivals were from Cornwall. Miners, especially those recruited from the Cornish copper-mining towns, had little difficulty finding employment at most times, and a concentration of 'Cornish' villages and towns grew about the copper fields at Kooringa (later known as Burra), Kapunda, Moonta and Walleroo. It was widely said that, wherever in the world a deep hole was dug for minerals, you would find a Cornish miner at the bottom of it, 'highly skilled, self-reliant, with the tradition of centuries of mining enriching all his work, and most probably with the teaching and tunes of Methodism giving direction and rhythm to his life'.8South Australia may not at first have seemed a great improvement on Cornwall. In Kooringa, where the family first settled, 1600 out of the 4400 residents in 1851 were living in caves dug into the bank of the river, and that year there were 153 deaths from cholera and typhoid, most of them children.

Joseph and Sampson followed the family tradition and became miners, moving from the copper mines of South Australia to the silver mines of Broken Hill when the copper ran out. Sampson eventually moved to Kalgoorlie and the gold mines of Western Australia, while Joseph remained with silver. They both married and had large families, though eight of Sampson's and his wife Elizabeth's thirteen children died in infancy. Their sister Mary married William Henry Snell in 1856 at Kooringa and had a family. Absalom decided on farming and, apparently the victim of false pretences, travelled to Western Australia to take up land that proved to have no water and very little feed for stock. He returned and eventually settled on a mallee block near Tailem Bend east of Adelaide. It was an arid area of low rainfall where he and his family would have barely made enough to live on. Of what William Henry did in his first years in South Australia we know very little. Years later, in a letter to one of William's sons, Absalom wrote 'I have the Deeds of your fathers land but I think they are no good sold for rates or gone otherwise …'9 The deed, 10 in which William was described as 'of Kooringa Miner', showed the land, bought from Charles Tompkins on 5 August 1852 for £18, to have been in the village of Kensington near Adelaide. Whatever his interest it was not enough to hold him and, probably in 1857,

William's death certificate, dated 27 July 1910, recorded that he had been in New Zealand fifty-three years.

William Henry crossed the Tasman to New Zealand.

We know almost nothing of what he did in the following eight years. Family tradition has it that he tried his luck on the Otago goldfields before moving to Wellington, where he is said to have worked on the wharves before he found a job, later a partnership, in the brickworks in Taranaki Street. The brickworks, part of the original Wellington acre 86, were on the eastern side of Taranaki Street; the site, later occupied by Odlin's timber yard, is now part of the playing field of Wellington High School. The first definite date and event we have is that of his wedding on 4 January 1866 to Mary Jane, daughter of David Robertson.

David Robertson was born on 8 December 1813 and spent his early years in Fifeshire near Newburgh, a town on the Firth of Tay.11 His father, James Robertson, was a Chelsea Pensioner who farmed at Lindores. The few surviving letters of his parents are dictated, presumably because they could not write, but David, unusually for the time, had some schooling. His father wished him to study for the ministry, but after a period of study in Edinburgh he turned to horticulture and in his early twenties went to England, where he was a gardener on a series of estates in Hertfordshire. For about seven years from 1840, David, now with a wife named Ann, was at Bedwell Park, near Essendon, apparently as head gardener. Bedwell Park was the home of Sir Culling Eardley Eardley, a religious philanthropist, friend of Dr David Livingstone and founder of the Evangelical Alliance, established to promote religious freedom throughout the world. It would have been a congenial position for Robertson, whose surviving letters and gardening diary show a thoughtful man, Godfearing, respectful of the ways of Providence, and committed to total abstinence. It was at Bedwell Park that Mary Jane (known as Jane) was born in 1842, followed two years later by a second daughter, Annie. On 24 August 1846, a few months after the birth of a son, Ann died; ten days later the baby died. The following year David married Mary Walker. There were seven children from this second marriage, the two youngest being born in Wellington.

What led to the decision to migrate to New Zealand we do not know. There are some signs of restlessness in David's letters in the years after his second marriage. He contemplated moving to Ireland, though it seems unlikely that he actually did so. Early in 1854 he was on the estate of Waresley Park in Huntingdonshire, which belonged at that time to the Feversham family. It was probably from there that the family left for New Zealand, arriving in Wellington on the barque Alma in May 1857. Jane, the eldest child, was fifteen, and her youngest stepsister, Helen, was born nine days after the ship berthed.

Three months later David Robertson was appointed sexton at the Wellington public cemetery in Sydney Street, a position he was to hold for thirty years. A small four-roomed cottage was built for the family, into which they somehow all fitted. David's botanical knowledge brought him into contact with Sir George Grey and in the 1860s, during Grey's second term as Governor, the two used to make collecting expeditions into the bush around Wellington. At the government's request, David classified and named many native plants, ferns, trees and shrubs. He was also friendly with a later Governor, Sir William Jervois.

Clearly an educated and thoughtful man, David was said to have helped the young with their lessons. In the case of his eldest daughters, however, what little evidence there is suggests that they had little schooling. Annie, when she married, just before her twenty-first birthday (two years before her sister Jane), signed her marriage certificate with a cross. She later learned to write her name, and she could read. She had also inherited her father's religious interests and social concerns and was one of the first converts to the Salvation Army in Wellington. As Annie Rudman, she became a prominent figure in the Wellington City Corps for over forty years and was joined there by all seven of her children. Two surviving letters by Jane suggest that she too had very limited skill at writing.

Of the circumstances which brought Jane Robertson and William Henry Beaglehole together we know nothing; in all probability it was the Methodist chapel. They were married on 4 January 1866 in David Robertson's cottage in the cemetery, and then Jane joined William in the cottage in the brickyard. There, nine months later, on 8 October, the first of their four children was born: David Ernest, always known as Ernest, or Ern to the family. There followed Edward William (Ted) on 12 March 1870, Joseph Samuel (Joe) on 24 August 1875, and Annie Jane Miriam (known as Annie, and in later life in the family simply as Auntie) on 10 August 1879. Between Ted's birth and Joe's the family moved into a new house in Hopper Street at number 49 (later renumbered 51). William and his partner in the brickworks, George Maslen,

William and George Maslen later fell out, and William seems to have left the brickworks. In Stone's Directory for 1891–92, and again in 1895–96, William's occupation is given as 'lumper', or waterside worker, though the electoral roll for 1893 and 1896 continued to list him as 'brickmaker'.

had bought the whole section of ground from Taranaki Street, opposite the brickyard, through to Hopper Street and they built two similar small two-storeyed houses facing the two frontages. Jane, inheriting her father's gift, created a garden remembered by Ern as 'gay with flowers … and sweet with perfume'. William grew vegetables. The Beagleholes reached the brickyard by nipping through a gap in their back fence and then through the Maslens' section, and in his early years Ernest spent a good deal of time about the yard, often in the company of the Maslens' elder son, who was about his own age. They played hide and seek, he remembered,

about the long drying sheds, wheeled the barrows, found endless pleasure in the horses and carts, and were particularly interested in the firing of the kilns … Father supervised most of the kiln work and brick baking, this led to his staying up often through the night; and one of my great joys as a boy was to be allowed to go to the yard in the early evening, sit in front of the openings in the kiln through which the fires were kept up roasting potatoes with great, very long-handled shovels with much gusto and listening to the gossip … [of] men working in the yard with their friends [who] made a practice of assembling round the kiln in the evenings till bedtime smoking and yarning.12

William and Jane's was a Wesleyan Methodist household. William became a lay preacher at the Primitive Methodist chapel in Webb Street, opposite the bottom of Hopper Street, 'and would sometimes make the long journey through Karori to Makara to take his turn at preaching there'.13 Jane, in spite of her limited education, became Ernest's first teacher of writing and reading, taking him through Line upon Line and Precept upon Precept, children's books that were based largely on incidents in the Old and New Testaments, and were popular in those days in chapel-going households. These, together with the Bible, were the first books he read. Fairy tales and nursery rhymes, he later wrote, did not come his way – only when he had children of his own did he discover such things – and he wondered if his parents had even known of their existence.

Ernest went to the Wesleyan Day School, where he received a book prize for progress in 1876, and to the Wesleyan Methodist Sunday School in Manners Street. A number of books, rewards 'for Good Conduct and Attendance', have survived, works of rather oppressive piety. 'It is a delightful employment to discover and trace the operations of divine grace, as they are manifested in the dispositions and lives of God's real children', one of these, Annals of the Poor by the Rev. Legh Richmond, opens. Whatever Ernest made of these particular volumes, books came to assume a place of extraordinary importance in his life. Methodism represented not simply a set of religious beliefs but also a way to self-improvement, with the printed word providing the key to progress towards that end.

Whether Ernest went on from the Wesleyan Day School to Mount Cook School, as his brother Edward later did, we do not know, but from 1879 to the end of 1881 he attended Morton's Private Academy on The Terrace. Conducted by Mr Robert Morton 'of Aberdeen University' (simply 'of', no degree is given), this was one of a number of private schools, short-lived in most cases, that were started in Wellington in the first few decades of settlement. The academy claimed to offer 'all the essentials of a Liberal English Education' and Ernest's half-yearly reports list a formidable array of subjects: reading, recitation, spelling, grammar, composition, geography, history, arithmetic, mental arithmetic, writing, ornamental writing, drawing, mapping, Euclid, algebra, Latin and elementary science. Pupils were tested in most subjects every Monday and allocated marks for their performance every other day, as well as for attendance and conduct. By his second year Ernest was first in a class of eight in almost every subject, though a 99.6 per cent in mental arithmetic pulled him down to second. Tuition cost £4 4s per quarter, and even with a discount of 20 per cent for prompt payment this could not have been easy for the Beagleholes to pay. Secondary schooling was the exception rather than the rule for a working-class family then, and Ernest was probably lucky to have had what the academy could offer. Joe and Annie had no secondary schooling. Ted was more successful. After three years at the Wesleyan Day School he went on to Mount Cook School, and from there was awarded a scholarship which took him to Wellington College. Dux in 1888, he won the senior half-mile twice, and on leaving became a pupil-teacher back at Mount Cook School.

Leaving the academy marked the end of Ernest's formal schooling, but he left with a thirst for further education. The Evening Post of 14 July 1884 has a letter to the editor:

Are you aware of any classes for the study of practical chemistry, natural philosophy, or botany? Being desirous of prosecuting those studies, I should be grateful for any information.

I am, etc.,

Ernest Beaglehole

The editor replied that it was 'scarcely creditable that in a city such as Wellington we should have to answer the above question in the negative'.

By this time Ernest was deeply involved in the activities of the Young Men's Wesleyan Mutual Improvement Society, which he had joined the year after he left the academy. The society had been formed in 1869 for 'Mutual Improvement and Instruction in Theology Etc.'14 Candidates for membership had to believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, but the early preoccupation with theological questions steadily broadened and became more varied and secular. The young men met weekly, with perhaps fifteen to twenty members attending, a minister generally presided, and there were 'readings, recitations and impromptu speeches' followed by 'criticisms'. During the 1880s debating increased in popularity, both within the society and against similar societies: in 1885 there were debates on the abolition of the House of Lords, the abolition of capital punishment, and Home Rule for Ireland. As well as playing a full part in these activities, Ernest also served at different times as a member of the committee, as librarian, as treasurer, and as secretary.

Ernest read essays to the society on Gladstone and Ireland, on Charles Kingsley, Charles Darwin, Samuel Johnson and Thomas Chatterton, and gave a lecture on Lord Tennyson at a meeting open to the public at which the Wesleyan church choir sang 'Come into the garden Maud', and other appropriate songs. As editor of the society's journal (a manuscript volume in which pieces could be written to be read aloud at forthcoming meetings) he read out editorials he had written on 'Agnosticism, Positivism and Christianity' (subsequently published in the Leader, a newspaper dedicated to the 'interests of Christian and Temperance Work')15 and on 'Scientific Education'. He gave a recitation of Walt Whitman's 'Hymn to Death'. He debated in favour of evolution, affirmed that 'Carlyle has had greater influence than Dickens' (losing by four votes to ten), opposed the granting of Home Rule to Ireland, and affirmed that the press 'is wielding its power for the good of the community'. In many ways the society (together with the Mechanics Institute, also active in Wellington at that time) was a precursor of the later Workers' Educational Association, or WEA, and if Ernest learned little of 'practical chemistry, natural philosophy, or botany' he was clearly reading widely and taking a keen interest in intellectual and political questions.

As secretary and editor of the journal, he was developing a fluent if solemn prose style with a distinct gift for the purple passage. Reviewing the second half-year of 1889 he concluded: 'The dark mists of gloomy anticipation, the lowering skies of chilly prognostications have given way to the brightness of summer sunshine, of realized aspirations and the fulfilment of cherished desires.' (This does not appear to have been a direct reference to the fact that following a change of rule eight young women had joined the society during that session.) Two years later, on the eve of perhaps its most successful period, he called on the flagging members of a society that 'has helped in so large a measure to keep burning the lamp of truth and learning' to protest against the prevailing climate of 'boorishness, conviction based upon ignorance or indifference, and the insubstantial pageant of passing show, the despising of all the more graceful sides of life, an utter want of appreciation of the beautiful in art and letters' – all, he asserted, 'the characteristics of present day life and thought'.

Whether or not in response to this exhortation, the society in 1892 had a number of successful public meetings and lectures, sometimes illustrated by magic-lantern slides and enlivened by 'musical selections'. These attracted large audiences and the admission charge raised money for the library. Membership rose to a high point of ninety-one. At the end of 1893 Ernest retired from the committee and as editor. He was still listed as a member the following year but there is no record of him taking part in any activities. By then he had become totally absorbed in the Forward Movement.

The Forward Movement had its origins in London, in the mixture of social work and evangelism among the working classes in east London initiated by Wesleyans in the 1880s and later centred on Toynbee Hall and Mansfield House. These were Anglican and Congregational foundations, where young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge lived and worked to promote education and temperance and the general welfare of the community. The movement in Wellington was begun by two Congregational ministers, the Rev. W.A. Evans and the Rev. G.H. Bradbury, who resigned their ministries in Nelson and in Canterbury in order to take up this work. Evans was married to Kate Edger, the first woman to graduate from the University of New Zealand. Before her marriage she had been principal of the Nelson College for Girls and on moving to Wellington she largely supported her husband (and the movement, which never had the resources to pay Evans and Bradbury adequately) by coaching pupils and opening a private school in their home.

The first meeting was held on 27 August 1893, and appointed a committee of management which included Ernest Beaglehole as well as several of the redoubtable Richmond–Atkinson clan. Among them were Arthur Richmond Atkinson, lawyer, journalist and later member of the House of Representatives for Wellington; his wife Lily, a great temperance campaigner, suffragist and feminist; and Maurice Richmond, later professor of law at Victoria University College. Within six months Ernest had become the committee's secretary.

Evans described the Forward Movement as 'a faithful attempt to bring the cardinal principles of Christianity, as conceived and interpreted by its best exponents, to bear on the complex conditions of modern society'.16 Its purpose was at once religious, educational and philanthropic. In religion, Evans believed the movement to represent 'the expression in modern times of true Evangelical faith',17and in severing formal links with any institutional church he hoped it would appeal directly to those whose interest was primarily in the 'social spirit of Christianity'. In education, a number of classes were started; there were public meetings on current social issues and regular lectures on history, literature, philosophy, civics and economics. They were given by Evans and his wife, by her Theosophist sister, Lilian Edger, by Bradbury, and by other Wellingtonians of note: Atkinson and Richmond from the committee; Sir Robert Stout, former prime minister and soon to be appointed chief justice; and later, when he had moved to Wellington to become Secretary of the Department of Education, George Hogben. The philanthropic or social work of the movement was carried out largely by Evans, who became a familiar figure in Wellington's slum areas and something of an authority on charitable aid.

The Forward Movement classes and lectures in their way marked a step towards the founding of a university college in Wellington. Evans was one of its most energetic promoters and, following the passing of the Victoria College Act 1897, he became a member of the new College Council together with the college's greatest advocate, Sir Robert Stout. When the college opened, the Forward Movement largely discontinued its lectures. By this time it had passed its peak. The heady excitement of its first years was over, and in 1904 Evans followed Bradbury back into a church appointment, becoming minister at the Newtown Congregational Church.

For Ernest, the early years of the movement had been important in several ways. Fired as he was with that passion for self-improvement that was characteristic of many working-class families of the time, he can only have been gratified by his place in the movement alongside some of Wellington's most eminent citizens. For the rest of his life, while he remained a modest man, he was not one who showed undue deference towards those with greater worldly success. In material terms he had not achieved a great deal. His first job was in Brittains, a chemist's shop in Manners Street. Later, for two years, he worked for Blundell Brothers, publishers of the Evening Post. He was sacked from that job when one of the Blundell sons wanted to join the office and a vacancy had to be made,18 an event which left a certain bitterness. After that he found a position as an accounts clerk with Sharlands, wholesale chemists in Dixon Street, and he remained with them for the rest of his working life. But it was not self-improvement in the material sense which stirred him.

It was through books and his reading of English literature that Ernest sought to better himself. The intellectual life, he affirmed in an article he wrote on Matthew Arnold, 'so far from being mere elegant trifling, helps us more than all other studies to the companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings'.19 That was the companionship he sought. Arnold, he believed, represented more than anyone else 'the intellectual spirit of the closing years of the nineteenth century', and in his poetry his 'rare and delicate genius' found 'purest and noblest expression'. Purity, nobility, beauty, truth – the words recur. Another article by Ernest, published in the Forward Movement's journal,20 was on Robert Browning's long poem 'The Ring and the Book'. Ernest gave a straightforward account of the poem's narrative content and affirmed that the 'work contains the most beautiful and lofty thoughts nobly uttered, passages of supreme beauty and great power'. What he hoped to do in writing the article, he said, was 'simply to induce others, lovers of good books, and admirers of the great and beautiful and true … to turn to' this poem. Ernest does not show any remarkable insight or imagination; what he wrote at this time tells us much more about himself than the poets he writes about. As a young man, in his mid-twenties, he was discovering in literature what he had not found in the Wesleyan church of his boyhood. It was not an abrupt break, but rather a shifting balance. Sharing some of the doubts of that age of doubt, Ernest found solace in a verse by Matthew Arnold:

Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

It is perhaps not surprising that a young man such as this should have fallen in love, and on 23 July 1895 Ernest was married to Jane (generally known as Jenny), the daughter of Joseph Cawte Butler and his wife Jane Tiller.

Joseph, born in 1844, was one of the six children of John William Butler and Jane Cawte. Jane Tiller was the daughter of Edmund Tiller and Sarah South. The Butler and Tiller families both lived in Southampton, where Joseph is said to have worked in the timber yard owned by the Tillers. Joseph and Jane were married in 1866 and Jenny, their eldest child, was born two years later on 22 February 1868. She was followed by Ada and then by George, the only son. After George came Annie, Winifred, Amy and finally, after the family arrived in Wellington, Jessie Marian.

They emigrated in 1883, sailing from Plymouth to Wellington on the steamship Ionic, together with Jane's brother William (Bill) Tiller, his wife Harriet (Polly) and their young family. Polly was pregnant and had a miserable trip. During the cold crossing of the Indian Ocean, 'Polly as usual [was] groaning and bewailing her fate, expecting every minute to be swallowed up', wrote Joseph with a certain lack of sympathy in the diary he kept on the voyage.21 The rest of the party seemed to enjoy the voyage, and Joseph was pleased to meet 'a good many Colonials who have been home for a trip and are now returning and the general verdict seems to be that if a man is energetic and sober, there is not much fear but he will do very well in New Zealand'. Arriving in Wellington, they rejoined Jane's eldest sister, Mary Tiller, and her husband James Brown, who had made the voyage out with another Tiller son, George, nineteen years before and were well settled in Wellington with three children. Joseph Butler established himself as a builder and the family settled in a house in Cuba Street. Jenny was fifteen when they arrived. She had finished her schooling in Southampton and had worked there in a bookshop. After the family arrived in Wellington she got a position in Te Aro House (the name by which the retailer James Smith's was then commonly known), but we know little else about her early years in Wellington.

It was hardly surprising that Ernest Beaglehole came into contact with the Butler family. Cuba Street was not far from Hopper Street. Bill Tiller became a prominent member of the Wesleyan church in Taranaki Street, and a Miss A. Butler is recorded as singing at an early social evening of the Forward Movement (probably Ada, who had performed on the Ionic on the voyage out, though all the Butler girls sang). There was clearly an overlapping of family activity. Family tradition has it that Ernest courted Jenny doggedly for years, but the first time he proposed she turned him down. She was deeply devoted to her cousin Jim Brown, a lively young man and a great sportsman, son of James and Mary, and he to her, but they believed they should not marry because of the closeness of their relationship. Ernest eventually proposed again and this time, to the surprise of her family, Jenny accepted him.22 They were married at the Butlers' house by the Rev. W.A. Evans and moved into a house at 49 Hopper Street built for them by Joseph Butler with assistance from his son George and Joe Beaglehole. The house stood in what had been the garden of William and Jane Beaglehole's house, where Ernest had lived almost all his life.

2Childhood and Youth

John was the Second of the four sons of Jenny and Ernest Beaglehole and was born at home on 13 June 1901. It was apparently a difficult birth; Jenny haemorrhaged badly and was said to have nearly died.1 The family was not impressed with the baby's appearance, 'the most hideous baby they'd ever seen',2 but the midwife, Mrs Kilfoy, disagreed and declared him to be a 'really good boy'. His elder brother, Geoffrey, had been born three years earlier, in 1898. Keith followed John in 1903 and Ernest in 1906. John, for reasons we do not know, was the only one to be given a second Christian name, Cawte, from his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cawte Butler, who in turn had been given it for his mother, Jane Cawte. Until his years as a student at Victoria University College John was always called Jack, and within the family this went on rather longer.

We know little of his early years. At seven he wrote to his Uncle Joe to thank him for a Christmas present, and continued: 'I should like to no how much money you are getting a month. I hope you are not to busy'. He ended with the news that they had been to the zoo, where he 'went on the camel three times and keith to times and ernest went on and before the ride was ended he cried'.3 About the same time his father reported him to be very keen on marbles. 'And he lives to win too. And makes plenty of commotion whether winning or losing.'4 It was a lively family, 'rowdy as ever', Annie wrote to Joe,5 and Ern worried whether his salary would be enough to feed and clothe them decently. He considered trying to get a bookshop of his own,6 but in spite of such dreams he was to remain in the accounts department at Sharlands.

Wellington, in those first years of the twentieth century, had certainly progressed since William Henry arrived over forty years earlier. Its population of over 50,000 was crammed on the little flat land there was between the harbour edge and the bare hills, stripped of the bush which once covered them, but still largely empty save for the first beginnings of the suburbs of Wadestown and Brooklyn. Te Aro flat, of which Hopper Street was a part, was a mass of working-class housing, backyard tradesmen, and local shops. The more substantial citizens lived on the western and northern sides of the city, in the more spacious houses on The Terrace or in Thorndon. Shrewd investors had built the cable car, opening up the farms of Kelburn for development. The business part of the city was still largely built of timber, the occasional building soaring three storeys skyward, with the Government Building, completed in 1876, one of the very few that had any sense of grace or fine proportion. One of Victoria's first professors, arriving in 1902, was amazed at Wellington's physical aspect. 'That agglomeration of derelict tinshanties and pretentious pseudo-Corinthian stucco pilasters that was Lambton Quay', he described it, though he continued, 'with the harbour and sky and hills and cloudscapes more than making up for man's handiwork'.7

Many years later John tried to recapture something of the Wellington of his early boyhood. He was writing a foreword to a life of the forthright, Edinburgh-trained, Australian doctor Agnes Bennett,8 who arrived in Wellington in 1905 and became a well-known figure as well as the Beaglehole family doctor and a close friend of John's mother.

Looking back on Wellington in her first years here [John wrote] I seem to see not merely a ridiculously colonial, provincial, gauche, conventional, narrow piece of society, but a sort of heroic age. There weren't the goings on, certainly that there were in London or Paris. For the dedicated painter, or the dedicated writer, there wasn't much to do with New Zealand but to leave it. For certain other people … there was just as much to do as in London or Paris, and they might quite well find it worth their while to come here and make of that time, quite unpretentiously, an heroic age. I, who was a small boy and neither a hero nor a dedicated anything, and never considered the merits of the place at all (though I may possibly have heard that Mr Seddon considered it God's Own Country) had no theories, no historical or geographical generalisations whatever.9

These were, perhaps, thoughts that John would not have until much later; for the moment the most important thing was that the Beaglehole boys were part of an extended family of formidable size, most of them living in close proximity, which provided a warm and lively base for their early years. Next door were their Beaglehole grandparents. John recalled his grandmother as 'a sweet person, with a softly wrinkled face and most often dressed in black'. She gave birthday parties for her grandchildren. Their grandfather gave them a penny and an orange on Sundays when they arrived home from the Primitive Methodist Sunday School.10 Auntie (their aunt Annie) at times found employment minding children or in domestic service but often was living at home fulfilling the single daughter's role of caring for elderly parents. Increasingly, her life came to focus on her nephews next door and she became renowned for her fruit salads made for birthdays and other special occasions. In contrast to her brother Ern, she remained faithful to Primitive Methodism, and she and her mother were known to sweep off to revival meetings in the Town Hall in the taxi owned by Jason Cotterill, who lived nearby in Wallace Street.11 For much of John's early years his Uncle Joe was away from Wellington. For five summers beginning in 1907–08 he worked as an assistant guide and labourer on the newly opened Milford Track. Years later his uncle George Butler told John that while Joe was a guide 'a myth grew up about him that he was an Oxford undergraduate & perhaps a remittance man, & all the young ladies were most sympathetic & reverent … It was because he always carried about some hefty book with him on logic or something which he read at odd times'. Even if it was never clear how much he did read, Joe, like his brother, collected books. But he was always something of a roamer and his bad stutter cannot have helped him in looking for work. After a number of odd jobs, he settled in Wellington as librarian in the Department of Agriculture.

Ted Beaglehole, having had the opportunity of secondary schooling, was to show more ambition. He was the first Beaglehole to gain a university degree, to travel back to Europe, and to have a successful career as a teacher and school inspector, including several years in Western Samoa. John always liked and admired his uncle. Ted began his career, as a pupil-teacher, in 1889; in his second year he passed examinations in Latin, French and mathematics to complete the first section of a BA degree from the University of New Zealand. It could not have been easy. As Victoria University College was not yet established, it was a case of solitary study with a textbook as an 'exempted student' – that is, one who was not attending lectures. The following year he failed the next section of the degree. Ted taught at a number of Wellington schools and in the Wairarapa until 1905, when he enrolled at Victoria – by now with a wife, Laura Pinney, and two small daughters, Joan and Margaret – to complete his BA. This was followed by an MA with first-class honours in mental and moral science (which was to become the two separate subjects of psychology and philosophy). He then went off to Germany with his family for further study at the University of Jena. At the end of 1909 Auntie reported to Joe that there were fears whether Ted's German would be good enough to satisfy the examiners,12 and in the event he returned without a further degree. The family were once more in Wellington towards the end of 1913, living in Ngaio, with Ted back in school teaching. In 1915 he was an unsuccessful applicant for the registrar's position at Victoria College, but the same year, because of his knowledge of German, he was sent to Western Samoa as Director of Education following New Zealand's occupation of the former German protectorate. Laura and the girls, now at secondary school, remained in Wellington, though John was never as close to Joan and Margaret as he was to the cousins on his mother's side, especially the Patersons and the Osbornes.

Ada, the second Butler daughter, who had an unforgettable chuckle, had married Alexander Paterson, a draper who later became an art dealer. Joseph Butler had bought the Wellington picture framer and gallery, McGregor Wright's, when its founder moved to Christchurch in 1906. Alex ran the firm for some years and it was later taken over by his nephew, Dick Osborne, in 1932. Of the Patersons' four children the second, Alan, born a few months after his cousin, was the one John saw most of. The third Butler daughter, Annie (Aunt Nancy to her nephews and nieces), married Hezekiah Osborne (Uncle Ky). They lived in Daniell Street not far from Hopper Street. Hezekiah, it was said by his sisters-in-law, gave his wife 'a time'.13 He was a tailor and the Osbornes never had much money. Dick and Stephen, the eldest of their five sons, were close in age to John and Keith and in their early years the four spent a lot of time together. Keith later remembered Dick as 'probably the most inventive of the bunch. At one stage he had a passion for making guns out of bits of tube much to the horror of our Mothers who doubtless expected to see us borne in as corpses one day suffering from a stray charge of shot. Then there was bicycle riding on a bone shaker around McFarlane Street.' Keith 'learned to ride on one of the tireless wonders Dick put together out of scrap iron. And the roads thereabouts were hilly enough for a turn of speed.' Later, in the years before he took over McGregor Wright's, Dick, always ingenious, 'served his time – or partly served it – as an engineer, a carpenter & a jeweller and went on to gramophone building as a hobby'.14 Stephen, John's favourite cousin, became ill in his early teens with some kind of progressive paralysis. He was increasingly bedridden and able to communicate only by typing messages or letters on his typewriter. He was to die in his twenties, shortly after his mother.

Winifred, the next Butler daughter, did not marry. She worked for a period in McGregor Wright's and years later had memories of Kathleen Beauchamp (Katherine Mansfield) visiting the shop. Something of a stickler for the proprieties, she remained a stalwart of the established church. Amy Butler married Will Jackson. Their eldest child, Ralph, was one of the youngest of the gang of cousins. Jessie, the last of the Butler girls, was only ten when her mother died in 1899. Her father remarried (to his housekeeper, Elizabeth Holland) in 1904 and Jessie spent a lot of time at 49 Hopper Street, a youthful and very popular aunt to her four nephews. On 2 October 1913 she married a young Church of England clergyman, Harold Monaghan.

The network spread even further, mainly through Tiller relations. Many lived within walking distance of Hopper Street and before the time of the telephone they kept in touch with messages and visits. John was often the bearer of notes from his mother, and was remembered by the family of his cousin Amy Denton for such an occasion when he was ten. John was hanging around, eating apples but not saying much, while Amy's mother cooked. Finally she ventured, 'What time does your mother want you home, dear?' She was kneeling at the oven putting in a tray of rock cakes. 'What time do the rocks come out?' John asked.15 It became a family saying. The Beaglehole boys were all said to have great appetites; none of them shared their mother's vegetarian principles, which seem to have left them feeling hungry. Large appetites may have run in the male members of the family. A story tells of someone looking out of the window at Hopper Street during afternoon tea and suddenly crying out, 'Hide the cake under the sofa, here comes Joe!'

The extended family moved around to one another's houses for parties with music or charades, occasions of great jollity and youthful high spirits. Ern showed a lighter side, teasing the girls. He clearly adored them and would have liked a daughter. A young relative met him one morning, very dapper, on his way to work. 'Whither away fair maid, whither away', he greeted her. He 'had some very flowery language'.16 In the charades Uncle Will Jackson was a star, and Alan Paterson made his mark early, portraying a reformed sinner who had taken the pledge – a live issue, as most of the older generation were strong temperance supporters. Alan also showed an early talent for drawing, a foretaste of his career as a cartoonist on the Dominion. His gifts for drawing, acting and writing were all to flourish during his later membership of the Wellington Savage Club.17 John went to dancing classes conducted by Miss Moore, 'incredibly frizzed and rouged'.18 A cousin later recalled dancing with him 'when Miss Moore called out: "Jack and Amy, relax your muscles", and you muttered into my ear, "Good God, how are we supposed to do that?" and I said, "You ass, you know how to relax your muscles, don't you?" And your memorable reply was: "Gosh, I thought the woman said bustles."'19 In the summer there were picnics at Scorching Bay, reached after a good walk from the end of the newly opened Seatoun tramline.

The boys went to Mount Cook School. John began in 1906, when he turned five; Geoffrey had already been there for three years and Keith started two years later. The school, opened in 1875 as a development of the Buckle Street Girls' School, was run by a Mrs Wilkinson and her daughter. The Mount Cook district was something of a social mix. The homes of the better-off were on Willis Street, where Dr Bennett lived and had her rooms, and climbed the hills to the south, where the Kirkcaldie mansion at the top of Thompson Street looked down on many fine houses. On the Te Aro flat, which included Hopper Street, the houses were the much more modest dwellings of manual workers and the unemployed. The Mount Cook School grew rapidly at first, reaching a roll of 598 in 1897, before declining to 384 in 1907 and 330 in 1913. This decline followed the suburban development that was closely linked to the construction of the new electric tramway system. In 1904 the trams began running down Hopper Street, crashing and swaying within a few metres of the Beaglehole house. Surely one day, the boys hoped and feared, one would fail to take the corner into Webb Street and would hurtle into Burbidge's greengrocery, spraying fruit and vegetables everywhere.

Mount Cook School when the Beaglehole boys were there was in three separate parts: the infants' school (under Miss Watson) and the girls' school in Buckle Street, the boys' school in Taranaki Street. By this time the neighbouring Mount Cook prison had become the home of the permanent artillery (the prison having moved to The Terrace, from whence prisoners were marched through the city each morning to work in the brickworks still on the site of the old prison). This, along with the barracks and defence stores on Buckle Street, gave a military air to the area, and created interest, particularly to those at the boys' school. This was housed in a rather forbidding Gothic building erected in 1878, which by the turn of the century was somewhat the worse for wear. School logbooks and the minute books of the school committee20 give glimpses of the school and its activities at this time. The drains were a long-standing problem as the original ones were open and a constant health hazard; with the site subject to flooding in the winter they also occasionally overflowed. Finally in 1907, John's second year, the Education Board built a new toilet block. In 1913, his final year, the inspectors reported the rooms to be 'rather dark and badly lighted … the asphalt requires renewing in places, as in wet weather pools of water settle in front of the building. The floors were fairly clean but the windows more especially those at the back of the building were very dirty and some were broken.' The schoolwork done by the standard six pupils, however, was said to be very good.

There were the usual excitements that year: the annual picnic at Days Bay with the ferry trip across the harbour; school cadets for the boys who had turned eleven. There were also special events. Percy Burbidge, son of the greengrocer in Webb Street, who had graduated in physics from Victoria University College and been awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship for research in science, visited his old school to talk to the boys before going off to Cambridge. He was to reappear in John's life in 1932, when they were both on the staff of Auckland University College. Ted Beaglehole, just back from Germany, taught John briefly as a relieving teacher for standard six. 'Your uncle, I believe', Mr Bary, the headmaster, said to John. 'Yessir!', replied John, covered 'in a blaze of glory'.21

During the waterfront strike in 1913 the school was taken over to house the special constables and was closed from 3 to 18 November, after which the rooms used by the 'specials' were scrubbed out and disinfected. The standard six classes, with exams imminent, spent some of that time working at Te Aro school in Willis Street. Even after the school reopened the back playground was kept until early December for police horses. On 27 and 28 November John sat the examinations for those finishing primary school. He was placed thirtieth on the Wellington district list, with 497 marks out of a possible 800 (top of the list was Doreen Mary Britland

Doreen Britland graduated from Victoria University College with an MA in 1924 and became a secondary school teacher of classics. In the 1930s she was teaching in Hawera.

with 611 marks).22 This placing qualified him for a 'Junior free place', tenable for two years at a state secondary school. He was the only successful Mount Cook pupil that year, but his achievement was matched by his three brothers.

When John was eleven he produced the first number of Smudge, a handwritten paper with family news, stories, illustrations, quotes from other works, and jokes ('thanks to Richard Francis Osborne for jokes contributed').23 Before long there was opposition, with the Paterson cousins each producing a paper, as well as Stephen Osborne. Such productions, while not unusual among the young, tend to be ephemeral, but there were eight issues of Smudge in 1913; none survive from 1914, but a further five came out in 1915. The quotes and extracts that John included suggest that for a twelve-year-old he was reading widely: Shakespeare, Burns, the Children's Magazine, Chums (for jokes), Browning, Shelley, the London Magazine, Wordsworth, the Ladies Magazine (1809) were all drawn on in early numbers. Later he twice used stories from Sir George Grey's Polynesian Mythology. In the seventh number he reports that he had been reading Sir Walter Scott's romances Guy Mannering and The Bride of Lammermoor. This was followed up in 1915, just before his fourteenth birthday, when he helpfully included a 'Wanted!!!' list, beginning with a watch, a fountain pen and a bicycle and continuing with a printing press and four more books by Scott. During these teenage years he collected the complete A. & C. Black edition of Scott's works. Recollecting his early passion for books many years later, John said, 'I don't mean that I had no other interest at all. I was not interested in football, but I was interested in food, and marbles, and making toy theatres. It just happened that I had a natural affinity with the printed page.'24

When he was thirteen John wrote descriptions, or 'Brief Biographies', of the members of his family:25

David Ernest Beaglehole.

Head of the family. Born in New Zealand. Exact age not known. Suspected to be about 45, though. Bookish man. Head accountant at Sharland & Co. Ltd. Dixon Street. Has a mania for pinching the Editor on the inside of his leg. Otherwise, quite an agreeable gent.

Jane Beaglehole.

Wife of D.E., and second in command. Very beautiful. Makes the best apple pies in New Zealand – best everything, in fact, in the way of scrunch … Been married twenty years odd. Very agreeable personality. Reads about 17 books a week. At present, fond of reading novels by Russian johnnies.

Geoffrey Beaglehole.

Motor-maniac and sparking-plug fiend. Scoffs at everything else. Is assistant assistant assistant greaser of axles and carburettor-cleaner at Norwoods Motor Agency, Thorndon and Kent Terrace. Owns a bicycle which has always got the gripes somewhere in its inside … Started work and Technical School 1915.

John Cawte Beaglehole.

… Celebrated man of letters. Poems and articles, stories, etc. have appeared in past numbers of "The Smudge". Also famous stamp-collector. Has magnificent collection of the postage stamps of the world, which can be inspected on payment of a small nominal fee to the Smudge Company, Ltd. Aspires to be a wholesale and retail bookseller. He is the editorial staff, the printing staff, the publishing staff, and a few more staffs, of "The Smudge".

Keith Beaglehole.

… Fond of reading Henty's books. Has no particular ambition, but is said to have a leaning towards speculating in dentists' outfits. Very humorous lad sometimes … Also likes smashing up bikes, and trying to put them together again.

Ernest Beaglehole

… Is a foolish young spark.

There followed a more extended article on Ernest's character, which suggested that he could be a rather trying younger brother.

With pen in hand, the 'celebrated man of letters' and stamp collector was something of an extrovert and wit. Unarmed, the reality was a little different. Rather plain in appearance with a prominent nose, beady brown eyes and spectacles, John was remembered by one cousin, Amy Brown, as a funny little boy, very gauche, very shy and with a bad stammer.26 His closest friend was his brother Keith, two years younger, who shared and was to share many of John's interests, but as a boy was more outgoing and assertive. 'Keith kicked up the Sunday before yesterday', Auntie reported to Joe, '& wouldn't go with the others to Sunday School, so Jennie bundled him off to bed, & kept him there all day much to his disgust … you know what Keith is when he makes up his mind.'27 John ribbed Keith, admired him, loved him dearly, and the bond between them lasted all their lives. Of the four boys' relationships with their mother, John's was probably the most intense. She was constantly very supportive, always listened to him and encouraged his writing. John admired his father, but until her death in 1929 his mother was the central focus of his emotional life. She, without doubt, was the greatest influence on the growing boy. John 'was the creation of his mother if any man ever was'.28

John moved on from Mount Cook School to Wellington College in 1914. The college was not, it would seem, an important formative influence in his life. Of the masters there, only one, H.B. Tomlinson (later headmaster of Wairarapa College), who taught him English, was remembered with any warmth or enthusiasm as 'one of the few school teachers we ever came across who showed any interest in what he taught'.29 Eric McCormick, who was at the college a little later than John, wrote in the foreword to his book The Friend of Keats: 'In 1923, my last year at Wellington College, I was lucky enough to have a gifted English master, H.B. Tomlinson, who was a great admirer of Keats'. Many years after his school days John recalled, 'I was soaked in Keats when I was young, from about 17. Earlier? I remember reading him when I was camping with Keith in the sandhills a bit north of Paekakariki … (& how my mother came up to see us, & we gave her a stew, a bit tasteless). I wallowed in the Odes. He was a sort of standard.'30

The headmaster, J.P. Firth, was a man of great reputation in Wellington and something of a conservative in his ideas. At the time of Firth's death, John wrote, 'I suppose he was a good headmaster in his way … but I never heard anybody accuse him of having taught any boy to think. Too new-fangled an idea, perhaps.'31 By the time John was at the school Firth was past his best, and his decline was hastened by the First World War. From the back garden of 49 Hopper Street John had heard the cheering at the barracks in Buckle Street on the announcement of the declaration of war in 1914, but the initial excitement soon faded. Many old boys of Wellington College served overseas and from 1915 the school magazine, the Wellingtonian, is dominated by lists and photographs of the dead, the wounded and those on active service. The 'old boys' notes' consist almost entirely of letters from servicemen. Firth tried to write personally to all of the former pupils serving overseas, and he was deeply affected by the casualties among them. By the end of the war 1658 former pupils had been on active service; of this number 226 were killed and a further 350 wounded.32 During the war years, the school, in a sense, took second place among Firth's concerns.

The Wellingtonian gives an occasional mention of John's activities. In the athletic sports he was second in the heat of the 100 yards under-14 but unplaced in the final. When Keith arrived in 1916, with an altogether more successful record in athletics and cross-country running, the two of them, somewhat improbably, entered the boxing competition. John was beaten in the first round of what must have been his one and only boxing match; Keith survived to the second round. The following year John was awarded his bronze medallion for life saving but, much more significant, he is listed for the first time among those winning academic honours. As well as completing the Matriculation examination, he was awarded the Barnicoat Essay Prize, the Liverton History Prize and the Navy League Essay Prize, and shared the Eichelbaum Prize for English literature for Form VIA.

Mount Cook School and Wellington College in many ways were less important in shaping John than his family and the comparative richness of the intellectual and cultural life they shared. The three main elements were music, books and the Unitarian Church. From his earliest years there was music in the house. His mother 'must have sung continually when she was a girl and a young woman, and so must her sisters – their family indeed must have been a nest of singing birds', John later concluded.33 This judgement was based on the heaps of sheet music and bound-up songs which he had found in cupboards when he learned to play the piano and was working through all the music he could lay his hands on. 'I might try out the accompaniment of some Mendelssohn duets, just discovered: "Oh that we two were maying; on the banks of some something-or-other stream!" – my mother's voice would rise like a lark: and "Oh that we two were maying!" my Auntie Nancy, who happened to be in the house, would reply; and after a time they would break down, in happy laughter.' Jenny was one of those people who could play any song by ear if she did not have the music, a gift which John very much envied. At family parties all the cousins gathered around the piano, Jenny played, and they 'roared out those lushly sentimental songs of the 1914–18 war' such as 'It's a long, long trail a-winding'.

Music was not just a family activity. It was also 'a communal exercise, a choral exercise, a public exercise'. John got to know the Messiah and Elijah as early as he got to know anything else, earlier than he got to know the piano scores of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas or saw those works on the stage. The family went to the Messiah every year and to Elijah most years. John's mother and his aunts sang in the Musical Union, conducted by 'the great, the revered, Mr Robert Parker, the touchstone of the musical art in Wellington'. John's Butler grandfather was one of the two men who played the double bass in the Musical Union orchestra – who supplied the double bass, indeed, in everything that demanded a double bass in Wellington. John understood that his grandfather was 'personally known to Mr Robert Parker' and he 'derived great satisfaction from that circumstance'. The Musical Union also sang Hiawatha and Faust in my hearing more than once under Mr Parker, and I think they had a go at Israel in Egypt, and it was said that they had once done The Bartered Bride, and the Golden Legend by Sir Arthur Sullivan, and a long time back, long before I was born, even some Bach; but in my time they really concentrated on the Messiah and Elijah, the 'immortal masterpiece', as it was generally known, of Handel, and the 'immortal masterpiece' of Mendelssohn. After every performance everybody rushed to the Dominion to see what Harcus Plimmer said about it. Harcus Plimmer was the great critical eminence of those days. You had to know what he thought. You could hardly exist, if you belonged to the Musical Union, unless you knew what he thought. You should have heard another of my aunts, also a devotee of Mr Robert Parker, when as a skittish adolescent I began to cast some light-hearted aspersions on the immortal masterpiece of Handel. Well, so much was the Musical Union part of the texture of our lives that when it coalesced with the rival concern, the Choral Society – and still more, when Mr Temple White founded his Harmonic Society – I felt as if the order of the universe had somehow been tampered with.

That was John looking back many years later. In his younger days he was more critical. When in 1921 the Choral Union (the amalgam of the Musical Union and the Choral Society) published its proposals for a choral festival – the Messiah, Elijah, Cavalleria Rusticana, Merrie England, The Golden Legend – John, just turned twenty, offered his views to the Evening Post:

this list is about the worst you could possibly draw up, showing an utter and almost inconceivable lack of originality and a total absence of musical interest … the way to interest the musical public of Wellington is not to go on doing the same old things in the same old mediocre way, but to strike out boldly and do something new and really worth while.

And, wishing to be constructive, he went on to offer some suggestions:

First, why not one of the works of the greatest composer of all? Bach's St Matthew Passion was given here very successfully some years ago under Mr Robert Parker and would bear repetition; or why not the glorious B Minor Mass, which, so far as I know, has never been given at all? Why not Haydn's Creation? If we must have Handel, why not Israel in Egypt, Joshua, Samson, Saul, The Ode on St Cecilia's, Acis and Galatea? Anyhow, give the poor old Messiah a rest. If we must have operas, why not Purcell's … Dido and Aeneas, or his King Arthur?34

The Year 1904, in which the Rev. W.A. Evans returned to the Congregational ministry and the Forward Movement in Wellington effectively ended, also saw the Rev. Charles Hargrove, representing the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, visiting Australasia. He lectured in Wellington and met Sir Robert Stout, now Chief Justice, who had long had an interest in liberal religion. A Unitarian Society, later the Unitarian Free Church, was formed in Wellington with Stout as an active member. At one of the first services held by the society Stout gave an address on 'Theology and the Universe' that illustrates how someone of his ideas could be attracted to unitarianism:

The immensity of the stellar universe was brought within the comprehension of the audience, and a very natural deduction was drawn that inasmuch as the ancients were unacquainted with these grand facts, it was fair to conclude that they had not said the last word on theology. The lecturer exhorted his hearers to devote their time and abilities to the search after further truths, and the service of humanity.35

The Wellington Unitarian Church and the Forward Movement had much in common. Again, members of the Richmond–Atkinson clan were to the fore. Miss Mary Richmond, daughter of C.W. Richmond, was among the founders, along with J. Gammell, a school inspector, and Hugh Mackenzie, professor of English at the recently founded Victoria University College. A minister was sought; the Rev. W. Tudor Jones from Swansea arrived in 1906, and immediately started to raise money for a building fund. The new church was opened in Ingestre (later Vivian) Street on 18 April 1909, with special hymns composed for the occasion by Dr Jones, Miss Richmond, Mr Gammell and Professor Mackenzie. The membership had grown to over 200.

Unitarians rejected creeds, ecclesiastical organisation, and central authority of any kind; instead, they stressed right thinking and conduct. This did not always make it easy for the church to define precisely what it was. Unitarians tended to be clearer on what they did not believe in than on what they did. For them theology was 'a Science which must be in accord with the Thought of the Day, and … Religion is the realisation of the highest and best in the human mind and spirit'. 'Revelation' they saw as 'the gradual unfolding of the meaning of things through the activity of man', and, above all, they believed, 'the service of God is to be found in the service of man'.36 The confession of faith in many of their churches was 'In the Love of Truth and the Spirit of Christ, we unite for the Worship of God and the Service of Man'.

It was hardly surprising that Ernest and Jenny Beaglehole, after their time with the Forward Movement, should become involved. 'Ern … goes to Dr Jones every Monday and reads with him', Annie reported to Joe, 'and into the bargain has been elected secretary of the Unitarian Church, but he says he will have to resign this as he hasn't the time, and of course he hasn't, it's really madness of him attempting it.'37 Ern does appear to have resigned on that occasion, but he accepted the position again two years later, in 1911, and became increasingly involved in the activities of the church. He took charge of the Sunday School while the minister was on his summer holiday and was 'organ blower' on those Sundays when Jenny played the organ. John, Keith and Ernest left the Primitive Methodist Sunday School and attended a Sunday morning Unitarian service for children and then Sunday School in the afternoon. Old William Henry Beaglehole, the stalwart of Primitive Methodism, died in 1910, but Aunt Annie clearly had her doubts about the family's new allegiance, writing to Joe with the news that Tudor Jones was leaving, 'and so the Infidel Church are left to mourn the loss of their beloved pastor'.38 Jones was succeeded by the Rev. W. Jellie, who had been the founding minister of the church in Auckland. He stayed three years before returning to Auckland, and in 1914 there followed the Rev. Ernest Hale, a young Baptist clergyman from Melbourne who had 'outgrown his orthodox beliefs'. Hale stayed until 1920.

A number of printed Calendars of the church that have survived from these years record the family's involvement. Jenny became secretary of the correspondence committee, which sought to win friends for the church by sending 'interesting and thoughtful little books' to those known to be 'interested in Religious Freedom'. In 1915 Ern became a church warden, and for a number of years he was treasurer; Jenny was elected to the church committee and was still taking her turn at playing the organ. The following year an appeal was made for £200 to buy a new 'two manual pipe organ'. The Beagleholes gave £5. The annual report of the church committee of management for 1918–19 tells us that during the year a choir had been formed and that 'sincere thanks were due to the members of the choir and to Mr J.C. Beaglehole for his untiring zeal as choirmaster and church organist'. A year later the committee noted that Mr Beaglehole's 'fine work as organist again merits special praise' and he received an honorarium of £5. A comment in a later letter suggests that John was taught to play the organ by Bernard Page, the city organist, but we do not know when or how he began to learn. A sonnet he wrote in 1917, 'addressed to the shade of J.S. Bach' –

… thou art The man who set the seal upon my brow Of premature age, and broke my youthful heart. So do I hail thee, even 'neath the yoke Of overwork thou hast for me bespoke39

– suggests he was already learning at that time. After the evening service on Christmas Day 1919 he gave an organ recital with pieces by César Franck, Mendelssohn, Bach, Handel and Somervell. The choir had mixed fortunes, being disbanded the following year for lack of male voices, but John continued as organist for several years. For him, Bach remained supreme. In 1921 he bought the translation of Johann Nikolaus Forkel's Johann Sebastian Bach (just published in London) and the following year C. Hubert H. Parry's Johann Sebastian Bach.40

Ernest Hale left Wellington for Adelaide at the end of 1920. Ern, along with Sir Robert Stout and Professor Mackenzie, took services in the period before the Rev. Wyndham S. Heathcote arrived for what was intended to be a brief visit on his way from Adelaide to the United States. Heathcote stayed from March until August and made a great impression. Numbers increased, the church was full for the evening services, and a crowd was attracted to the Town Hall to hear Heathcote speak on 'Why I left the Anglican Church'. The Beagleholes were to the fore at his farewell (which rather overshadowed the joint welcome to the new minister, the Rev. James Shaw Brown). Ern spoke in support of the chairman's remarks, Keith sang a song and Jenny expressed the gratitude of the women's alliance (of which she was secretary) to Mr Heathcote for 'the wonderfully interesting Sundays he has given us since he has been in Wellington, and the new point of view he has helped many of us to see things from'. Brown lasted only eight months; he clearly suffered in comparison with his predecessor and was not helped by the precarious state of the church's finances. On his resignation, the committee (Sir Robert Stout, chairman; D.E. Beaglehole, vice chairman) cabled to Heathcote, who was by then in Ottawa, and he agreed to return. John marked this with a fulsome column of welcome and exhortation in the church Calendar:

We know we will get any amount of inspiring talk and inspiring example from our Parson. It is up to us to do something ourselves worthy of him and the Cause, which is greater than any man. We have fetched him back over a continent and an ocean to be our leader; let us see that we become worthy followers … Garibaldi conquered half Italy with a thousand men; can't we conquer Wellington with our small army?41

'We devoutly hope and believe', John wrote, 'that Mr Heathcote is the right man in the right place', but for all Heathcote's sardonic eloquence this, sadly, proved not to be the case. Heathcote lost support when he spoke critically about prohibition, arguing from his experience in the United States that it was a complete delusion to think that prohibition would abolish alcohol. Rather, the traffic would be 'driven beneath the surface, secretly corrupting the springs of national life'.42 The church was deeply divided on the issue; it lost members and Heathcote returned to Australia (after a 'short but brilliant ministry', the Calendar recorded), lamenting 'I should not have left Ottawa [for Wellington] if I had known what was ahead. Unitarians must learn to set the example of broad-mindedness in New Zealand – an example which is sadly needed'.43 Thereafter it was downhill for the church in Wellington. Declining numbers and financial problems led to a decision to carry on without a minister from the beginning of 1925. John had continued to look after 'the musical portion of the services' although, the 1923–24 report noted, 'at times of unavoidable absence, this work has been done by other members of the family'.44 With Heathcote's departure the family commitment to Unitarianism began to wane. John was increasingly absorbed by his life as a student at Victoria College; the claims of the Tramping Club on a Sunday were coming to outweigh those of the church.

An early short story by Frank Sargeson entitled 'Chaucerian' begins: 'When I was a young man I used to go to the Unitarian Church. In those days it was the thing for quite a number of young men to go to the Unitarian Church. It was their way of letting people know they had grown up and had independent minds.'45 As a child John had no choice about going. For him the church was more than a symbol of adulthood and independence; for a decade or more it was a significant part of his life, an important influence for both his intellectual and musical development during his teenage years and early twenties. It played its part in his becoming 'grown up' and having an 'independent mind'. Although his church-going days ended when he was a young man, the Unitarian commitment to intellectual freedom, to reason and to the working of conscience remained a lasting legacy.

It was also through the church that John met the Hooper family.46Richard Henry Hooper, a farmer who later became a journalist, was at this time editing the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture. A born idealist with a passion for new ideas, though not very practical, he had spent from 1902 to 1909 in England with his wife Sophia and family on the staff of the New Zealand High Commission. While there he had taken an interest in movements for social reform. He found a home eventually in the Fabian Society, with which he kept in touch following his return to New Zealand. Sophia Hooper was a daughter of Richard Arthur Hould, an Aucklander and ardent socialist with a fixation on the single-tax notions of Henry George (a belief not shared by his son-in-law). The Hoopers joined the Unitarian Church in 1918. Their second daughter, Estelle, known as Star, taught in the Sunday School. Their elder daughter, Challis, was in Dunedin training to be a nurse and returned to Wellington in 1920.

John was drawn to the Hooper family and became a close friend of them all; with Challis, six years his senior, the friendship was to be lifelong. The families were not close socially, in spite of the church, but for John the Hoopers' ideas and their experience must have marked them as being 'a little different'.47 For a while, during his undergraduate days, he used to have the evening meal with them almost every Sunday.48 Challis was later to remember him as an almost daily visitor. 'He came and went. The door was on the latch for him … and when he didn't come he wrote, letters, verse, poems streamed from his hand … about the days doings, about books, and very humorously about people.' She recalled John propping up the kitchen door while her mother went quietly on with the cooking or the ironing and John talked. And he seemed so relaxed that his stammer all but disappeared. With her father, who was slightly deaf, the roles were reversed: John mostly listened while Hooper, who normally did not make contact with people easily, did the talking. The affection between them is shown in the ode John wrote to mark Richard Hooper's birthday in 1920:

O, gentle Muse, inspire my pen, To sing the worthiest of men, To sing his virtues and his praise – To glorify his winning ways – To lay my tribute at his feet, Infused with all a poet's heat. Give me to celebrate the worth That rarely, on this poor old earth, Is concentrated in one man, Rarely, since earth and time began.

The ode continued, reviewing Mr Hooper's career and home life for over a hundred lines more – an indication also of John's growing facility with his pen.49 Even more revealing, perhaps, is a letter John wrote to Mrs Hooper a year later, when she had been ill and he was recommending something to read:

How would you like Horace Walpole's Letters, in XVI vols with two supplementary vols, notes, addenda, & corrigenda etc? – my Mother has just finished them, having read with great enjoyment and advanced to the very familiar stage of referring to the Author in casual conversation, as 'Horace'. And he an Earl, too, at that! She a mere Beaglehole!! – Or how about Gibbon's Decline and Fall? If you read that you could carry it over her for a while; because She has never been able to get through more than half the first volume so far … Or England under the Stuarts, by G.M. Trevelyan, a standard and fascinating Book … Or I can recommend two books of fairy Stories – The Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde, and Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, by Eleanor Farjeon. Or how about Speeches on British Foreign Policy, edited by Edgar R. Jones, M.P.? Or Bealby, a humorous novel by H.G. Wells? Or a book of Short Stories? Or Terrorism & Communism, by Karl Kautsky? … Madam, I have several hundred books to choose from, and my Father several thousand – all are at your service. I think perhaps a good one to start on would be The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, by Anatole France, which is very charming and fanciful and altogether delightful – at least I found it so … Perhaps, however, a Punch might be the ideal as Challis suggested – the Liquid Nourishment of Convalescent Literature? – I think I had better trust in her greater judgment and familiarity with the curious twists and turns and divagations of your Character, and send you a very light Punch.50

With Star, his contemporary, John shared his interest in music, and they went assiduously to concerts, especially anything free. They attended Bernard Page's free organ recitals on Sunday afternoons. John was not uncritical. 'Mr Page may be said to have three chief faults', he noted, 'over-use of the full organ, over-use of the tremulant, over-use of the 3rd movement of R-K's Scheherazade. They were all in evidence last Saturday night … You go to an O[rgan] R[ecital] expecting and having a right to a certain amount of intellectual enjoyment, instead of which you get an overdose of neurotic Russians forced down your unwilling gorge.'51 Star tried to teach John to dance but had no more success than the earlier Miss Moore. He noted, at this time, 'The great sorrow of my life at present is that there is no dance music by Bach (7/6/20)'.52 One doubts whether this would have made any difference. Coming from a family of boys, with a gang of male cousins, John was clearly intrigued by Star and may for a time have fancied himself in love. But their common interests did not go much further than music, for she lacked his intellectual cast of mind and his passion for books. 'I regret to say her taste in books was & is dreadful; & this used to give me serious qualms'.53 As she became absorbed in her nursing training at Wellington Hospital, their paths diverged. As a confidante her place was increasingly taken by Challis, whom John came to judge 'the pick of the family'.54

By this time he was well embarked on his student career. University study had not been his first choice. One of his teachers at Wellington College, 'a kindly soul, whom I admired greatly', asked him, '"What are you going to do with your life, Beaglehole?" I said modestly I didn't know. "Well", he said, "you know a little about a lot of things and nothing much about anything; you might do quite well as a librarian." I thought he did a little injustice to the depth of my learning, but I was struck with his perception otherwise.' John's father consulted Charles Wilson, the Parliamentary Librarian, who was discouraging.55

John's second choice was to become a bookseller.56 His father really wanted him to go to university, but, John later recalled, 'he was a wise as well as generous man, and a bargain was struck. He would get me a job in a bookshop, and I should try that for a year – my honour satisfied; and then I should concede to him a year at the university, after which I should make a free choice'. Ern saw the book manager of Whitcombe and Tombs, a Mr Cameron, and a position was arranged.

John's choice was hardly surprising. He had been brought up in a house full of books by parents for whom books of all kinds were 'precious vehicles of the mind'. Ern had been buying books since his youth and had dreamed of leaving Sharlands and opening a bookshop of his own. Jenny, for her part, 'if not exactly omnivorous, was always reading: she read while she knitted, or dressed, or did her hair; she was one of those people, as she herself said, who couldn't see a scrap of printed paper lying on the pavement without bending over to read it. As a young girl in Southampton she'd worked in a bookshop herself.' As her sons grew she developed the habit of leaving books out where they would see them, with passages marked that she believed they would find interesting – or improving.

John began to frequent the Wellington bookshops. One of the first books he bought, he later recalled,

was at Smith's (I speak as a Wellingtonian, who knew the contents of that second-hand establishment fairly well, though sometimes a bit afraid that Mr Smith might throw him out) – it was an odd volume of the Tatler, vol.II, a little crown octavo thing, bound in panelled leather, blind-stamped, gilded spine and (once) edges, 1733, 9d. Romance. I see I wrote my full name on the fly-leaf, and the sacred date, 26/1/1917. Just think – 1733! It may have been to make this article look even more antique that I repeated my name on the inside front cover, in my best writing, with the words 'Hys Booke'.

A year later, when he was seventeen, John produced a volume of his verse for his father's birthday, a 24-page handbound pamphlet. He had come a long way since the days of Smudge, having absorbed the conventions of traditional book layout, including the use of a half-title page, flyleaves, and a two-colour title page with ruled border; he also made a considered and assured use of fleurons. 'Remaining coolly classical and neither ostentatious nor pretentious', Sydney Shep writes, this slim volume carried the germ of aesthetic beliefs in typography and book design that were to be exercised two decades later. Among the assured verses, the ironically titled 'Doggerel' expresses John's ambition to keep a bookshop 'complete with leaded windows – no common banal one', in which poetry, essays, chapbooks, first editions, rare books, prints and broadsides will be his stock in trade. Was there an echo of Ern's dreams in all this? He wrote, too, of having workmen to 'execute fine bindings' and a printing press 'For printing fine editions/Of books both old and new.'57

Whitcombe's might have seemed something of a let-down after this, but clearly it was not, and during his year there John managed to persuade the company's book buyer to include in his orders some private press works from the Shakespeare Head Press and the Cuala Press (run by W.B. Yeats's sisters) as well as works on lettering and wood engraving by Eric Gill.58 His official duties were upstairs in the educational department headed by H.G. Sturt, a rather small and lively man, already fighting an heroic but losing battle against tuberculosis that killed him a year or so later. He was dedicated to bookselling, and was a hard-boiled rationalist, at which John rejoiced. Sturt was devoted to the books of an American who wrote about the joys of being a small farmer in New England (a sort of watered-down Thoreau), also cultivated by John for a while under Sturt's influence. Mr Coventry, the second-in-command, in contrast, never gave any indication that he read and was a modest but solid pillar of the Methodist church. After the shop closed for the weekend, late on Friday evening, John would walk up Lambton Quay with Sturt and Coventry or Archie (one of the boys from the ground floor) and 'at the invitation of Mr Sturt, call at Gamble and Creed's for supper, tea and hot buttered toast, and listen to Mr Sturt expatiate on life and goad Mr Coventry into argument'. Then there was Maie Ross, the sister-in-law of the manager, 'an exceedingly pleasant warm-hearted young woman from Australia' whom John liked very much. She sang in Temple White's young Harmonic Society, and John was soon her accompanist in church socials and other such festivities. Most of the staff John remembered with equanimity, even affection.

The first thing John learned was how to make a neat parcel of any size, tearing off the proper amount of plain brown paper from the roll at the end of the counter, folding it precisely and tying it up with string. It was a skill he never lost, which was later greatly admired by his sons. He had to unpack as well as pack. Large wooden cases from London arrived off the ship and on the first floor. John unpacked the books and sorted and counted them and arranged them on a long counter. From America they came in large mail bags, cardboard boxes containing two or three volumes each, cheap reprints, mainly from Grosset and Dunlap, which were to vanish completely from the market with the end of the First World War. Cameron came and stuck bits of paper in the different lots with the New Zealand price (plain figures) and the net price (secret signs) and John marked the books accordingly; he then cut the English prices off the dust-jacket flaps, and carried the general literature downstairs. That was the theory. In practice every book had to be examined carefully and dipped into or read in large chunks (another skill he never lost), John's theory being that a bookseller ought to know about the inside as well as the outside of his books – and then, of course, he had an injunction from his father to look out for his special orders. His only apprehension was the inopportune arrival of the manager. If the excitement of unpacking the books was the high point of John's life as a bookseller, it was a year which he altogether enjoyed greatly. Just before Christmas he received a rise of half a crown a week, from twenty-five shillings to 27s 6d:

I concluded that my worth as an asset to the trade was now recognised, that I was successful, and a great future lay before me. Not very long after this I was faced by the other half of the bargain with my father; and bitterly repining, but with my duty clearly pointed out by my mother, informed my colleagues that they would have to get on without me for a year.59

At the beginning of 1919 he enrolled at Victoria University College.

3Victoria University College, 1919–26

In his History of Victoria University College John describes the bright hopes and dreams which he found there in the first postwar years, when more and more soldiers returned and numbers rose again from the low of 320 in 1917 to 671 in 1920 and 750 three years later; when the first building was finally completed with its northern and southern wings in place, the northern one containing the great library two storeys high with the memorial window to those members of the college who had lost their lives in the war; when new staff were appointed and the government grant was increased. At first, indeed, there seemed no bounds to what was possible:

… when three empires had gone like wrecks in a dissolving dream, and the intoxicating vision of Education, as the maker of all things new, stood before the eyes of youth and age alike. So optimistic was mankind, in that brief day. Mr H.G. Wells wrote his history, and there at the end of it was Life, standing upon the earth as upon a footstool, stretching out its realm amid the stars. If some of the other prophets were less ecstatic, they could all somehow be assimilated; for faith and scepticism, Wells and Gilbert Murray and Bertrand Russell and J.B. Bury, the League of Nations and the Russian Revolution and the New Psychology, somehow everything seemed capable of being sorted into a general plan, if only human beings would consent to be tolerant, and progressive, and liberal, and rational, if only they would think about social reform and abandon secret diplomacy, and read Areopagitica and Mr Russell on Free Thought and Official Propaganda.

But the vision blurred, optimism faded as the years passed. The continuation of John's paragraph describes a changing mood in the college during his years as a student:

… it could not last; people, in New Zealand as elsewhere, would not do these obvious things. The student was afflicted by persons, even among his fellow students, who betrayed a strange reluctance to be interested in everything, and to wish to reform everything, to try everything in the light of reason and convict most of it. When these unfortunate and exasperating persons were sceptical, they were sceptical the wrong way round. They had, most of them, never heard of Bertrand Russell; and when they were told about him, they generally concluded that he should be in gaol. In spite of the wreck of empires, in spite of Education, and of the New Psychology, and of the New History, and of the obvious manifestations of the reasonable mind, it became apparent that a new world was not going to be born.1

John enrolled for a BA and in his first year, 1919, chose to study English, French and Latin. He did not distinguish himself. In the college examinations he was one of twenty-seven given a Class II in English; eight were in Class I, thirty in Class III. Latin and French saw the same result, with a drop to Class III for the French oral.2 Passing the college examinations was the prerequisite for sitting the university examinations (the University of New Zealand, based on the model of London University, examined but did no teaching; that was done within the four constituent institutions) and in the university examinations John's results were similar, with French rather worse.3 His classes were unlikely to have been very stimulating. Twenty years later he wrote an affectionate portrait of Hugh Mackenzie, the professor of English;4 genial, expansive, boundlessly hospitable, the rationalist foe of the Bible-in-Schools League, as comfortable in the pulpit of the Unitarian Church as in the lecture room, infinitely kind and tolerant but, alas, no scholar. Eric McCormick, in a letter to John, was harsher: 'what a disaster that monument of granite was to literature and literary scholarship for more than a generation!'5 Nor is it easy to imagine a lively course based on Seecombe's Age of Johnson, Skeat's Primer of English Etymology and Lounsbury's History of the English Language. French was taught by a temporary lecturer. Edwin Boyd-Wilson, appointed as professor the following year, arrived too late for John's French but in time to introduce him to tramping. John Rankine Brown, professor of classics, was a dedicated teacher and scholar, greatly admired by some of his students, but with his shyness and innate caution he failed to fire John's imagination.6

The courses in each subject were at two levels, pass and advanced, and an advanced subject required at least two year's study after it had been completed at the pass grade. In his second year John began the advanced course in English and added the pass courses in mental and moral philosophy and in history. Again he achieved Class II for English and for ethics, while in psychology (which together with ethics comprised the course in mental and moral philosophy) he was given Class III. Thomas Hunter, the professor of mental and moral philosophy, was to be an important figure in John's life, but his impact was outside the lecture room. For the history course, covering the development of the great powers in the nineteenth century (Hawksworth, The Last Century in Europe) and the outlines of English history from 1272 to 1509 (Oman, History of England), he was one of four in a class of fifty-one awarded Class I.7 More important, in that year he read H.G. Wells's Outline of History, 'that first electrifying edition', originally published (and read) in twenty-five instalments8 ('finished 18.1.21', John noted9). In tracing the rise and fall of nations, Wells 'summoned up the whole human past as an argument for his vision of the future'.10The destructive forces unleashed by the war threatened mankind with disaster; only the emergence of a world consciousness and a world state held out a hope of salvation. Wells, as the prophet of righteousness, had produced 'an epic that began with the Creation and ended with a vision of the New Jerusalem'.11 There were those who willingly pointed out all the errors that Wells had made, but after Hawksworth and Oman and F.P. Wilson's lectures it must have been heady stuff.

John had found his subject. Although it meant spending two more years (four years in all) to complete the BA degree, he decided against continuing in English and in 1921 started the two-year advanced course in history. Two papers covered 'the general course of the history of Europe from the beginning of the sixteenth century with special reference to great movements and international relations'; a third paper 'the outlines of the development of the British Colonial Empire and Colonial Policy', of which at least a fifth was to be devoted to the history of New Zealand.12 The college placed him in Class I each year, and in the final university examination, for which the examiner was Professor A.J. Grant of Leeds University in England, he was given marks of seventy, eighty-five, eighty-five. The five papers needed for his MA in history, which he completed in 1924, still concentrated heavily on British and European history. That year the first two papers were on England and on Europe in the period 1715–63. The third was on the history of the great powers, including the United States and Japan, since 1815, 'with special reference to the main lines of social and political development, colonisation and international relations'. This paper, the prescription noted, 'shall always contain one or two questions on the history of New Zealand'. The fourth paper was on the history of political ideas up to Mill, Comte and Collectivism (Marx was not included). Finally, there was an essay or 'a brief thesis embodying the results obtained … in some investigation into the history of New Zealand'. The textbooks listed were: Phillips, Modern Europe; Grant Robertson, England under the Hanoverians; Graham, English Political Philosophy; Dunning, Political Theories; and Hassall, The Balance of Power. The college Calendar promised lectures only on English and European history, 'at times to be arranged'. John was awarded first-class honours (the examiner was again Professor Grant) with marks of seventy-five, seventy-seven, seventy-five, fifty, and eighty for the thesis.

In his thesis on Captain Hobson and the New Zealand Company, John sought to cut through the uncritical and widely accepted view of the Company's role in the early days of colonisation and to make a careful study of its bitter relations with the Governor. The thesis was based on printed sources: British Parliamentary Papers, the New Zealand Gazette and other published papers and books of the time. John recognised the limitations of research that did not draw on the records of the Colonial Office in London, but as an introduction to historical research, in which he was making his way with little or no guidance, the thesis served him well, and it pleased his examiner. Equally important, it introduced him to the Alexander Turnbull Library. Nearly fifty years later he recalled the dazzled awe with which he first laid eyes on the library's collections, and had 'the magical, the transforming experience of laying hands on my first historical manuscript, the brief diary kept by Colonel Wakefield on his passage to New Zealand in the Tory. It did not cast a flood of light on anything; but it was a manuscript, it was enchantment'.13He wrote an article about the diary, with copious quotations, for W.J. McEldowney's short-lived journal of 'public affairs, art and literature', the New Nation.14

When he came to write the history of Victoria University College, a work of considerable tact as well as affection, John said remarkably little about F.P. Wilson, who had taught him history. Wilson had been a foundation student at Victoria, the mainstay of the tennis team, and was described on his graduation (in the New Zealand Free Lance) as 'the sort of chap who is absolutely indispensable at a dance, or anywhere where organisation or social sweetness are usable'.15 John would have met him in his first year at Victoria. F.P. was chairman and conductor of the college Glee Club, which he had founded; that year John was the club pianist.16 In 1909, after a period of primary school teaching, Wilson had been appointed to lecture, mainly to commerce students, on history, economics, physical and commercial geography, economic history, currency and banking. With the arrival of more staff, the range of his teaching was narrowed and directed more towards students in arts than those in commerce. In 1921 a chair in history was founded, to which he was appointed: 'the genial F.P. – now with his subject at last released from the danger of mere subordination in a school of economics and commerce'.17 How double-edged that word 'genial' can come to seem! History students could rely on 'regurgitating dictation–speed lectures';18 John was not the only one in those years to be awarded first-class honours by the external examiners, but intellectual excitement was not something one experienced in the lecture room.

He was reading widely. He kept a record of the books he read between 1920 and 1923 and they cover an astonishing range. In 1922, the year he completed his BA, the list ran:

Jefferies The Open Air The Story of my Heart Life on the Fields W. James Immortality Thoreau etc. In Praise of Walking R. Rolland Musicians of To-day J.N. Forkel Bach J.L. Roxburgh The Poetic Procession G.L. Dickinson Essay on India, China, & Japan Religion, a Forecast & a Criticism Religion & Immortality Graham Wallas Our Social Heritage Morley Notes on Politics & History Conrad Lord Jim A Personal Record R. Rolland Some Musicians of Former Days Strachey Eminent Victorians W.P. Eaton The Idyl of Twin Fires Trevelyan Recreations of an Historian Willa Cather Youth & the Bright Medusa Stevenson Master of Ballantrae H.G. Wells Washington & the Hope of Peace J.H. Freidel Training for Librarianship Sir F. Bridge Twelve Good Musicians W. McFee An Ocean Tramp Conrad Under Western Eyes J.D.M. Rorke A Musical Pilgrim's Progress P.A. Scholes Book of the Great Musicians Seeley Expansion of England J.R. Elder Age of Maritime Discovery P.G. Wodehouse Piccadilly Jim L. Housman Possession Ramsay Muir The Making of British India Nationalism & Internationalism The Expansion of Europe Acton Nationality P.G. Wodehouse A Gentleman of Leisure H.G. Egerton Origins & Growth of Br. Empire A.C. Brock The Ultimate Belief C.H. Herford etc Germany in the 19th century J.H. Robinson The Mind in the Making P.G. Wodehouse Something Fresh F.S. Marvin The Century of Hope L. Binyon The New World J.M. Murry The Things We Are F. Greenslet Walter Pater C. Beard Reformation of 16th Century Belloc The French Revolution E.B. Bax The French Revolution P.G. Wodehouse The Coming of Bill Conrad One Day More A.P. Newton The Old Empire & the New J.H. Robinson Readings in Eur. History vol II Z. Kendrick Pyne Palestrina Eileen Duggan Poems Sir A. Lyall Warren Hastings L.P. Smith More Trivia H.M. Walbrook G. & S. Opera E. Thomas Collected Poems Acton Lectures on Modern History Bolton King Life of Mazzini P.G. Wodehouse Indiscretions of Archie Girl on the Boat Jill the Reckless Barrie Courage Bridges France under Richelieu & Colbert Egerton British Foreign Policy in Europe Sydney Herbert Nationality its Problems Modern Europe B. Russell Free Thought & Official Propaganda C.F. Warwick Robespierre & the French Revolution C.H. Currey British Colonial Policy 1783–1915 Raleigh (W.) R.L. Stevenson Cocteau (Jean) Cock and Harlequin Nicholls (Marjorie) 'Gathered Leaves' Fisher (Herbert) Napoleon King James I Counter blaste to Tobacco Collier (James) Life of Sir George Grey W.P. Reeves New Zealand Barry (W.) The Papacy & Modern Times Postgate Revolution 1789–1906 Lipson Europe in the 19th Century Rashdall etc. The Theory of the State Strachey Books & Characters de la Mare The Veil P.G.W. Uneasy Money Guedalla The Second Empire Conrad Chance Drinkwater Abraham Lincoln Oliver Cromwell C.H. Brooks Practice of Auto-Suggestion Bennett Mr. Prohack de la Mare The Return James Stephens The Crock of Gold Mary Sturgeon Michael Field (about ½) Mulgan Three Plays of N.Z. Goldring James Elroy Flecker J. Stephens The Charwoman's Daughter Housman Last Poem M. Beerbohm A Christmas Garland J.W. Hinton César Franck

He was also deep in the Athenaeum and the Times Literary Supplement, both in the college library.19

If John's reading was the most important element in his intellectual development, student life gave him a broader education. He made new friends, published verse and prose in Spike, the college review, and was for three years its editor (1922–24). He was an enthusiastic member of the Free Discussions Club. He developed as a writer and his MA thesis gave him that first real taste of historical research. He became a tramper, and he fell in love with a fellow tramper.

John met two students in his classes in his first year with whom he became good friends. Max Bickerton was a grandson of A.W. Bickerton,20 the eccentric foundation professor at Canterbury College. He had been at school in Christchurch with C.E. Beeby, who described their friendship as one of 'bickering intimacy'21 – a stimulating relationship for the young. Intellectual, quirky and, like John, from a home with books, Bickerton was also sceptical of all accepted dogmas and an unshakable atheist. He became a student of Hunter's, interested in psychology, and graduated with an MA in 1923. John clearly found him interesting and admired his outspokenness.

Harry Espiner was quite different. A returned soldier, badly handicapped by injuries from the war, he was very serious about his studies (in French and Latin) but also greatly enjoyed his fellow students. John had one memory of him, 'standing at the top of the Dixon Street steps, gazing at the lights of the town, casting some salutary pessimism into the mind of extreme idealist youth'.22 But it was a gentle admonition, half humorous, where he might be seen to have earned the right to bitter indignation. His sympathetic open-mindedness attracted John, who had found another listener; he won John's admiration as well as his affection. After he graduated with an MA in 1922, Espiner went to France, where, eking out a small war pension, he worked for his doctorate. John was to stay with him in Paris in 1927.

At the end of 1920 John went with a group of friends to stay in a house they had been lent in the Akatarawa valley, thirty-five miles north of Wellington. His brief notes, 'Certain Memoranda made by me, J.C. Beaglehole …', reveal much of John at nineteen as well as recording his first meeting with C.E. Beeby (Beeb), to whom Bickerton introduced him.

Thursday 30th [December]. Great Adventure – went up bush – Glorious – cathedral dome – tapestry of moss – ferns and mosses in limitless variety – moss-curtains – enormous tree – scene for As You Like It – smoke shafts and columns – sunlight filtered through trees – early pioneers – fences – mill-busted – whitewood – Beeby's coaxing of the fire – description of climb & getting wind up – broad prospect – valley – river etc.

This reads like the jottings of an aspiring poet, but we learn more. On New Year's Day: 'Loafed. Discovered bathing-pool. Glorious day … Bathed and read Prometheus Unbound. Climbed hill on other side of road. Sunset exquisite.' The next day the party walked to the Waikanae Saddle: 'Argued on war, ethics, art & morality, novelists, modern novels, C.O.s, education, professors, Bickerton, words. Had tea & talked about R. Bridges, W. Watson, modern poetry, Edith Howes, songs, education. Glorious sunset.'

The rest of the party left the following day but John got ten days' work navvying in a road gang, clearing slips and digging drains. He shared a tent with a man, 'about 56–60', 'deaf as a post' and very taciturn at first, though he mellowed after three days. Others in the gang proved more congenial. At the end of the first day John counted twenty-seven blisters, but by the fourth he was enjoying the work: 'Jan 7th. 4th day of toil. Enjoyed myself immensely today. Boiling hot, Building up road, making drain, & breaking down bank. Got some butter at last, thank God! – getting a bit sick of bread & con.[densed] milk. Finished Prometheus last night. Letter from Mummy, wh. I started to answer.'

The weather seemed to get hotter. 'This is the sort of weather that takes it out of a bloke', John wrote after spending a day 'mainly quarrying metal & wheeling it to road … Dog tired & went to bed early.' But he was warming to the hills and the bush. After a scrub burn-off in the valley there was a 'most peculiar & magnificent' sunset, 'the sun a blood-red circle in the midst of a slowly-moving mass of exquisitely coloured clouds' above the ranks of bush-covered hills. 'A birch tree with the sun behind it had the most exquisitely delicate silhouette effect; but the whole thing was indescribable, except for Corot or Conrad or a Japanese artist perhaps. The bush grows more & more beautiful every day – one could live for ever in it & not get tired of it.'

Letters from his mother, two aunts and three friends, however, left him looking forward very eagerly to getting home. On his last day, 14 January, he got his pay sheet for £6 10s and a testimonial, and noted, 'Sorry to be leaving, but glad to be going home'. 'Going home' meant walking over the hill to catch a train. He started at 6.20 in the morning; halfway up the hill it began to rain, 'phrases for pomes began to run in my head', the rain stopped but began again. He arrived at Waikanae, soaked to the skin, at a quarter past ten to discover the morning train had left five minutes earlier. So he walked on to Paekakariki (which he had originally planned before the rain started), getting soaked through once more, and reached there about 2 p.m., having covered twenty-five miles. His Jackson relations were staying out there so he joined them, borrowed some dry clothes from his uncle, and travelled back with them in the train the next day.

Spike, or, to Give it its full title of those years, The Spike or Victoria College Review, went back to Victoria's early days. It appeared twice a year and in the 1920s gave a lively picture of life in the college. Besides the predictable notes on student clubs and accounts of tournaments, graduation ceremonies, capping balls and extravaganzas, there was general college news, social and political criticism characteristic of the time and the work of aspiring writers in prose and verse – it was a great age for verse. John had three poems printed in his first year and two the following year, then in 1921 he became a subeditor and began to spread his wings. For 'A Lament', a rather overwrought mixture of verse and prose on the pine trees being cut to allow the building of the new wings on the original college building ('How they are fallen, fallen, those mighty ones, those pine trees …'), he was awarded the first prize of one guinea for the most original contribution to Spike that year. There were other poems, one a sonnet published with the title 'Written During a (?) Lecture', but recorded in his notebook as 'written during a history lecture'. It suggested his thoughts were miles away.

The verse of John's student days was typical of the time. Echoes of Bridges and Hopkins and rather too much 'poetic' language for later taste make the sentiments seem very conventional. As with the less successful examples of his later verse, he often failed to find a distinctive voice. He tried the big, formal piece with his 'Ode On the Unveiling of the Memorial Window, Good Friday, April 18th 1924: Mortalitate relicta vivunt immortalitate induti'. It has not worn well. In contrast, the much less ambitious poem 'To H.G.S.' (H.G. Sturt, his Whitcombe and Tombs friend who had died not long before) is still moving in its simple directness:

I remember the time I had dinner with you – How you talked and you laughed, though dying even then; And I remember the night (it rained like this) when I was told you were really dying, and it was true … How I rang up the hospital and found you were dead.23

Early in his Victoria days John got to know C.Q. (Quentin) Pope, another contributor to Spike. Pope was actively involved in the life of the college although he did not graduate – indeed, it is uncertain whether he was ever enrolled.24 He shared John's interests in literature, in buying books – especially well-printed ones – and in writing, and had published verse in Australian and New Zealand magazines, including Spike, since 1917. He became a journalist on the Dominion and, for John, a useful source of free reviewers' tickets to concerts and theatre, as well as something of a foil for his wit in a number of his Spike pieces. It tells us something about college life at the time that Pope could be so involved in it, that staff members could be actively involved in student clubs and that, through his association with Spike, John got to know two former editors, F.A. de la Mare and Marjory Hannah (born Nicholls). De la Mare, a Hamilton lawyer, faithfully read every number of Spike and wrote to John with questions and comments. John was to get to know him much better in 1931 when he and Elsie were living in Hamilton. Marjory Nicholls25 had entered Victoria in 1909 and, although she too never graduated, she was prominent in student affairs for a number of years and edited Spike in 1912. In 1920 she had married John Hannah, a Scottish businessman working in Ceylon, but he died of fever shortly after the wedding and Marjory returned to Wellington. For a time she taught at Wellington Girls' College (where her pupils included the young Robin Hyde), she continued to be actively involved in theatre (it was a family interest; her father, H.E. Nicholls, had been the leading member of the play-reading circle to which John's parents had belonged), and she published verse. The literary side of John found her very congenial and they became good friends.

John was in his element editing Spike. In his history of the college he wrote (clearly referring to himself as editor):

Spike, which was all for greater intellectual integrity and widespread denunciation ('The social condition of Wellington, if we only realized it, is ghastly'), and the editorials of which gave by copious quotation a pretty accurate index of the editor's current and dangerous reading – Spike lampooned the Minister [of Education] with vigour, joy and a proud sense of public duty.26

He went on to recall a squib of his, 'A Vision of Judgment',27 which for its treatment of the minister 'enjoyed some passing celebrity'.

The leader of the Labour Party, Harry Holland, wishing to have the 'Vision', wrote to the editor for 'a couple of copies of your bright little paper'. The horrified editor, who regarded Spike as an Organ of Opinion, could only reply with noble dignity that his 'bright little paper' was already sold out but would no doubt be obtainable in the General Assembly Library.28

John had a fluent pen, a sardonic wit and a taste for controversy. As a writer he also had an impressive range. The news of the death of Joseph Conrad led to a perceptive and deeply felt article29 reflecting his close reading of the novels. Very different, but possibly owing something to his reading of Charles Lamb, was a polished essay on 'Piracy as a Profession for Young Gentlemen'.30 (He did have a footnote to the title: 'There is no valid reason of course, why any refined young woman should not adopt it as her life work as well.') He began with a reference to Tom Sawyer contemplating life as a pirate, and ended, characteristically, with a view of the future:

There are two ways of earning a living in these modern days. One is by piracy and one is by capitalism; and no young man of brains and breeding would willingly become a capitalist. So peradventure in the not far-distant future it may be granted to us to rub shoulders with swarthy seamen on the Quay, with gold rings in their ears and blood on their cutlasses; it may be our portion to hear gaudy parrots swear in Spanish and catch the glint of pieces of eight and moidores as the sailors gamble on the street outside the Duke of Edinburgh …

we may, some fine morning as we stand on the hills that fringe our noble harbour, see the Black Flag unfurl itself in the sun below and hear faintly the distant song of the sailors as they warp their ship out into the bay. And as we turn proudly down the path to our quiet home we will know that we have solved our unemployment problem and are a nation. We shall have found our soul.

In his first editorial John commented on the nature of university education, and it was a subject to which he returned frequently. In 1925 there was a royal commission on university education in New Zealand (the Reichel-Tate commission). John wrote to its chairman on behalf of the Free Discussions Club (he was secretary that year), asking that it should emphasise the vital importance of academic freedom:

Of all the attributes of a University, freedom, it seems to us, is of the most vital importance. If in any sense the University is to lead the community in thought or ideals, it is imperative that within its confines (as indeed without) there should be the utmost possible measure of liberty – liberty of association, of discussion, of teaching, of study. The only limit to this liberty that we can regard as valid is that of academic discipline.31

It was not to be the last time he expressed such a view. When the commission reported John gave it a favourable review in Spike.32Quoting the commission's view that, while the university in New Zealand offered 'unrivalled facilities for gaining University degrees … it is less successful in providing University education', he added that it was 'melancholy to see one's own worst criticisms endorsed – a sad triumph, a sorrowful vindication'.

Of real University teaching [John continued] there is at present, we all admit, practically none; of research (the tremendous importance of which for a University is stressed at length) we know nothing but the name; but will the Government even think of standing the expense for providing for all this? in paying an adequate staff a decent wage; in giving it the chance to do more than grind the feeblest elements of science and arts into inadequate skulls; will it, above all, give professors and lecturers the freedom of teaching, which is the point perhaps of most vital importance in the whole report?

John was not optimistic.

The Free Discussions Club filled the pages of Spike with accounts of its 'long grapplings with Truth'. While the Debating Society had a higher public profile – it was going through one of its great periods at that time – John by temperament was not a debater; his stutter would have made it very difficult. Only once was his participation noted. He was much more in his element in the Free Discussions Club.

Every year [Professor] Hunter opened the season with denunciations of some branch of obscurantism, a Hunter more and more indignant as the evening wore on; the modern press and democracy, Anglo-Catholicism, the part of Woman in Modern Progress, academic slavery in America (what a furore was caused by Upton Sinclair's The Goose Step) – all were pulled to pieces.33

In 1921 Hunter led off on imperialism and the self-determination of peoples; there followed the Rev. Wyndham Heathcote on the church and social reform (his views gave evidence of 'deep and original thought', Spike reported), a discussion on the role of women and an investigation of 'the so-called Achievements of Bolshevism' led by W.A. Sheat ('little originality of thought was displayed'). Later evenings were devoted to the white man and his rivals, and to spiritualism.34 The pattern continued. The club had its visitors: the Rev. Dr Gibb, of St John's Presbyterian Church, tireless in the causes of disarmament and world peace; Walter Nash, Wellington bookseller and aspiring Labour politician, on unemployment; A.P. Harper of the thoroughly conservative Welfare League warning of the insidious progress of the revolutionary movement in Britain; Harry Holland, who 'laboured valorously to wreck our patriotism'.35 Besides Hunter, I.L.G. (Ivan) Sutherland became a regular attender following his return from Glasgow, where he had gained his PhD, and his appointment as Hunter's assistant lecturer. He provided psychological explanations for the world's problems.36 At this time John did not warm to him, finding him too pious, but that was to change greatly later on.

Among the younger members of the club, R.M. Campbell and Reo Fortune stood out. Dick Campbell was president of the Students' Association and a star of the Debating Society, with a mercurial mind and an unstoppable tongue. Even then he seemed to know everyone of importance and the answers to all questions. He also seemed destined for power and influence in the future. It was harder to imagine what Reo Fortune was destined for. John described him at the time: 'a hardy atheist of 21, the most insufferably dogmatic person I ever met in my life (I hope I never meet any more so) … He is a philosophy student who believes in freedom of speech & shouting down opposition; but a very friendly lad withal.'37 Reo became subeditor of Spike, for which he too wrote passable verse, and was a tramper until he left for Cambridge and the study of anthropology.

Fortune was to marry Margaret Mead, the American anthropologist, whom he met when they were both doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. The marriage did not last; he later married Eileen Pope, another Victoria College tramper. He eventually became lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University.

After John's response to the bush during his Akatarawa trip, it was hardly surprising that he was a founding member of the college Tramping Club. The taste for walking considerable distances was a family one, exemplified especially by Uncle Joe. John's parents walked with their young family over many of the Wellington hills and around the shoreline of the harbour. The Tramping Club was started in 1921 by Edwin J. Boyd-Wilson (more generally known as Prof), the new professor of French and a man of terrifying energies both in the classroom and outdoors: 'he built, he gardened, he slew deer and goats and fish, he had been a passionate footballer, the Tararuas were his second home … In the bush, some timid scholars felt, it was possible to regard him with less fear than in the lecture room.'38

For John, at first, tramping had to compete with harriers on Saturdays and being church organist on Sundays. He and his brothers Keith and Geoffrey had joined the Olympic Harrier Club in 1920. Their cousin Dick Osborne was already a member, as well as John's student friend Ken Griffen and a number of other Victoria College athletes. John proved a useful long-distance runner (he won the Wilson Memorial Cup for a three-mile race) and when I was young we sometimes persuaded him to show us the medals he had won and had carefully kept. Keith was a better runner and became club captain. Eventually, tramping won out. What it meant to John becomes clear in his history of the college.

… of all the clubs of that day, the one most touched with morning was the Tramping Club. The first Sunday afternoon excursions faded into insignificance beside the first September week-end expedition to the Orongorongo, when fifty students straggled over to that watery magnificent valley, and a less number arrived at the top of Mount Matthews; and that gentle walk itself became nothing in comparison with snow-clad or tempest-smitten Tararuas, the exploration of lost spurs and brown-running stony rivers. Cold words cannot register that glory. There were cold words, such as those on a Labour Day week-end: 'some fifty miles of walking … over every type of country-road, bush-track, trackless bush, and river-bed … two crossings of the Rimutakas; the first by Matthews Saddle … interesting enough, but not to be compared with the second traverse, made by map and compass near Bau-Bau trig. Ours was probably the first party since the early surveyors to cross these bushy ridges; certainly, no woman had gone through there before.' But the college women went, in their 'gym-frills', or, dresses relegated to swags, in stout and well-tried bloomers. How was the elegance of the Tararua Club despised! There were tough days that became legendary with the participants: the descent of the long ridge from Alpha to Renata and to the Waiotauru stream, the mist and the rain and the supple-jack, eight miles in a twelve-hour day; crawling against the wind in Palliser Bay; the start at two in the morning, the first steep pull after breakfast. But oh the stars at two in the morning, the deeps of the bush, the sun in the river-valleys, the sweep of the eye from the hill-tops. Fathers might uneasily feel the weight of swags, but they were repulsed with contempt. Mothers might hesitate – it was a generation ago; but it was all right, Professor Boyd Wilson was to be the chaperon; their daughters tramped … The poets went tramping, and the trampers became poets; for a while Spike was redolent of manuka and wet fern and the sun on hot hills. No one, unfortunately, kept statistics of rivers crossed, or of the billies of tea that Boyd Wilson boiled.39

The club extended John's circle of friends. Among them were Jack Yeates and Lorrie Richardson, science students who were both to precede John in going to England and postgraduate study; Bill Joliffe, who went on to Edinburgh to study forestry and returned to the New Zealand Forest Service; Jack Tattersall, who became a lawyer in Napier; and Harold Holt, who was to have a successful career in the family timber business. The ebullient Bob Martin-Smith they all foresaw as a future Labour politician; instead, he made his career in adult education.

It was in the Tramping Club, too, that John got to know Elsie Holmes. Her background was very different from his. Her father, Robert Arthur Holmes, had left London while still in his teens for Adelaide, where he began a career in the Union Bank and married Mary Lucille Lamb. They were a very active couple. Mary was an extremely good tennis player who in her youth had partnered the great Australian player Norman Brooks in mixed doubles; later she showed the same ability as a golfer. Robert rowed competitively as a young man, and on a trip home to England had taken Mary on a holiday rowing down the Thames and camping each night. Later he turned to trout fishing. Their first two children, Edith and Charles, were born in Adelaide but, before Elsie was born (on 15 January 1900), they had come to Wellington, where in 1911 Robert became the New Zealand manager of the bank. After Elsie there was another son, Peter, to whom she was always very close.

The family belonged in that Wellington world vividly recorded by Katherine Mansfield. Katherine's father, Harold Beauchamp, was, like Robert, in banking. Charlie Holmes was a school-friend of Katherine's brother Leslie; Edith a friend of one of her sisters. The Holmes, too, had a holiday bach at 'the bay'. Elsie went to Miss Baber's school in Fitzherbert Terrace (formerly Miss Swainson's school and later Marsden) and was dux. By then Robert had retired from the bank and in 1919 he and Mary and the two daughters went on a trip to England and Europe. Charlie, who had served in the war, was working for Dalgety's, the stock and station agents, and had recently married. Peter was left as a boarder at Waitaki Boys' High School, which he loathed. In England the Holmeses took a house at Richmond and Elsie met numerous relations. For the winter of 1919–20 they moved to Cannes in the south of France and in the spring travelled to the Italian lakes and to Venice. Robert had planned to retire in England but, once there, he formed the view that the weather was not what it had been when he was a boy; the party returned to New Zealand at the end of 1920. Just over a year later Robert bought a house above the Western Hutt Road with a large garden where he could indulge his passion for roses.

He was far from happy with Elsie's decision at the beginning of 1921 to enrol at Victoria College. It was not what he wanted for a daughter of his. But she was not attracted by a life of tennis parties and bridge; she had her father's determination and forthright manner, and she got her way. He was upset again when she started tramping, later joined in this by her close friend Averil Lysaght (who was to become an equally close friend of John's) – how far Robert was mollified by Boyd-Wilson's presence as chaperon we do not know. Nor do we know what Elsie's mother thought about it. Elsie completed her BA in French in three years and graduated in May 1924. At the same ceremony John received his MA and his brother Keith his BSc. In 1924 she attended the MA classes in French, but she had been badly advised and did not have one of the prerequisites for gaining the degree, and so did not sit the final exams.

Elsie and John's relationship appears to have developed during 1924. The June number of Spike had an article (signed 'Viator' but written by John), 'The Truth about Tramping', which with great gusto purported to put right the previous 'extravagant eulogies' of the club's activities. There was also a touch of self-mockery:

… there's those two bards, R.F.F[ortune] and J.C.B., who appear – heaven knows how! – with such monotonous persistency in the pages of the Spike. They must be young and innocent. I doubt, from a perusal of their lines, if they have ever been on a tramp. There's that thing of J.C.B.'s called 'Tramping Song' … what does he say, in the midst of lines about tuis, rata, clouds, white roads, and all the conventional poetic appurtenances? –

'And praise we now the Tramping Girl, etc., etc., etc., … and bright she trims the cheerful evening fire.'

Absolute typical Rot! Who ever heard of a girl messing round with the fire at all? They sit on a good dry log and eat. That's about the extent of their participation in the festivities.

The article continued with an account of a poor fresher, lured out on a tramp by a charming girl (clearly Elsie), and the miseries he faced.

John provoked the reaction he hoped for. The next number of Spike carried an editorial statement (by John) saying what a lying wretch the writer had been. The statement about women had given greatest offence – a 'gratuitous and scurrilous attack of the most unprincipled and debasing kind on the fair name of women'. 'Not only do they on occasion tend the fire', the editor claimed to have discovered,

but they cut bread and butter it (insufficiently to be sure) – they fetch water – they supply chocolate – they make tea – they deal out stew – they mix milk – they put up tents – they collect bedding – they scrape out porridge pots – their merry laughter and constant flow of wit is the life and soul of an expedition …

It was good fun, and was also intended to interest Elsie. There was a social gulf between Hopper Street and the Western Hutt Road, of which they were both conscious, and which at times seems to have left John more than usually uncertain in courtship. Gentle – or not so gentle – mockery could alternate with abject expressions of his unworthiness of her. At least on paper, however, he was never inarticulate.

For Christmas that year he gave Elsie a pocket edition of Housman's A Shropshire Lad. Many years later she wrote that this was his first present to her. That Christmas too they were both members of the college party which tramped through the Urewera from Waikaremoana over the range to Ruatahuna (the linking road was not yet through) and down the Whakatane river to Ruatoki. For the time it was adventurous; the New Zealand Free Lance carried an account of the tramp,40 and noted the 'remarkable feature of the trip is that several ladies were members of the party, and manfully carried their swags throughout'.

They went by train to Napier and the following day, Christmas Day, they continued to Waikaremoana by service car. After spending two wet days walking and boating at Waikaremoana they crossed the lake by launch to the mouth of the Hopuruahine river and the tramp began. From there the track, twenty-five miles over the range to Te Wai-iti and on to Ruatahuna, followed very closely the route later taken by the road. They camped near the Ruatahuna schoolhouse. Next morning they first visited Mataatua with its meeting house, Te Whai a Te Motu, built for Te Kooti; the building and its carvings had taken eighteen years to complete and had opened in 1888. They looked at it with excitement, John later commented, 'like men who saw the last flames of a dying fire – but that was before we heard of the Maori Renaissance and an art revived'.41

Then, in spite of warnings from the local Maori that the river was in flood, they started down the Whakatane. It was over forty miles, with four days of very tough tramping – rain every night and countless river crossings – before they emerged at Ruatoki. The Maori they met were hospitable, baking fresh bread for them and selling them wild pork. At Ohaua, on the second night, a venerable kaumatua, Te Kotahitanga, who had campaigned with Te Kooti, showed them his ancient breech-loader and told them about old battles. His stories were translated by a Maori who had settled there more recently. They arrived at the inevitable impossible ford and had a steep climb to avoid it. 'It is a painful memory, that hill', John later wrote, 'bracken probably grows that way on hills that trampers scale in Hell; it was above our heads and there was no track'.42 New Year's Eve they camped just above Putere; a sentimental night, John remembered, with stars. The next day they reached the metalled road that took them on to Ruatoki. The storekeeper told them that Elsie and the other four were the first Pakeha women to have tramped through the Urewera – Elsie, with very fair hair, seems to have made a particular impression on the Maori they met. It was a memorable experience – the wild cherries were never forgotten. Six years later John wrote about it for C.A. Marris's Rata New Zealand Annual, 43a nostalgic piece, and a plea for preserving in the Urewera 'some last lost refuge for the spirit of [New Zealand's] native beauty'.

The next Christmas tramp was to the South Island, to the Waimakariri River with its magnificent beech forests on the river flats and the slopes above them, and encircling snow-covered peaks. Christmas Day was spent in the train from Christchurch to Arthur's Pass. John, with Jack Tattersall, Bob Martin-Smith and Harold Holt, climbed a then-unnamed peak of about 7000 feet near Mount Armstrong. John and Elsie and two others climbed another peak, probably Mount Davie, which was somewhat higher. This was possibly the first ascent since it was climbed in 1913 by A.P. Harper and his party.44 John and Elsie had been to Ruapehu, and they climbed Egmont (Taranaki) with Averil Lysaght not long after the Urewera trip, but they were trampers rather than climbers. The Waimakariri trip did not seem to have been remembered with the same enthusiasm as the Urewera. At the time, however, John knew he would be leaving for England later in the year, and his poem 'Waimakariri (January 6th, 1926)'45 reflects some of his feelings at this prospect:

This is the last time I shall stand and see The stars above this valley and its stream – The last time – and this stream, these stars for me Henceforth will be distant as any dream. . . . . I see afar in darkness whitely stand The unscaled peaks, the passes we have trod – These are the ancient dwellers of this land, Snowed, silent, and remote, each like a god. After this night I shall not see them more Like this, nor tread their snows, nor feel their cold, Yet will they stand, I know, and lift their hoar Summits toward the stars even as of old. The stars! the stars! immutable they reign – Thick in the eyes' full circle throb and burn Their million fires that stab the heavenly plain – O frozen peaks! O stars! grant me return!

At the Beginning of 1924 John had been appointed an assistant lecturer in history at Victoria University College on £200 a year. Examining was paid separately and could bring in another £50 or so. He saved all he could and was full of plans for travelling overseas and for a future with Elsie. He wrote to her at length whenever she was out of Wellington:

It's a ghastly game this saving; & if I didn't see a prospect of Cornwall for you & me I would give it best & plunge on books & records & travelling & trust to luck about getting home. Never mind, Miss Holmes, there's a good time coming in a year or two, & don't you forget it! Meanwhile the boy swots & even intends to start marking papers this afternoon, & smokes recklessly (as many as two pipes a day sometimes) & writes letters to you & poems about you & wishes for a letter from you every day & wishes to God you were back. And when he isn't doing any of these things he gazes at the rain & if it isn't raining he wonders how soon it'll start again … I have written quite a long poem about you saying what a fine person you are, but after the way you gloat I have a jolly good mind to throw it away or dedicate it to Florence or Lydia or Muriel Clouston or someone. It is in 48 lines, some of which are not so bad as the others, but I am stuck for an adjective of two syllables with the accent on the first in the last line which annoys me very much – indeed reduces me to frenzy at regular intervals. If I can think of anything in any way satisfactory I will send it up to you, for I must show it to someone or burst, & be patted on the head like a dog bringing in a dead rat he has found & you're the only person I can show it to.46

That letter ended with the news that he had applied that day, 25 August 1925, for a postgraduate travelling scholarship. He hoped to go to London University to work for a PhD, with a thesis on the New Zealand Company, in which he would follow up the work he had already done for his MA. The application was successful, and John was further awarded one of the small number of free return passages the shipping lines offered each year to scholarship winners going to Britain. The officers of the Unitarian Church wrote a warm note of congratulations: 'especially gratified … because of your long association with the Church as Organist and Member of Committee'.47 Sir Robert Stout followed up with a testimonial: 'a man of high character and great industry'.48 John did not keep papers at all systematically, but he did keep both of these.

The final months passed quickly. There was an Easter tramp on Ruapehu in which Elsie's brothers Charlie and Peter were included. John wrote a review for Spike of Jean Devanny's novel The Butcher Shop.49 He did not care for it – 'not a great novel; it is not even a good novel; it is, in fact, in some respects an inconceivably bad novel' – but he cared even less for the action of the New Zealand Board of Censors in banning it as indecent, and he attacked the very idea of censorship in a 'modern country'. He faithfully attended the Free Discussions Club until he left. Finally, the Students' Association gave him a farewell, presented him with a college blazer, and F.P. Wilson 'expressed his regrets at losing so keen a student and lecturer'.50 The night before he sailed, at twenty to one, he wrote a note to Elsie to say that he loved her and that he still had to finish his packing.

As John made Clear in Spike, he often saw Victoria University College in a critical light (though it was not the only thing he saw that way), but in later years his time there as a student and assistant lecturer took on something of a golden glow. I do not think he ever enthused about the teaching at that time and research was virtually unheard of. He remained something of a sceptic about formal courses and lectures, but he always recognised that education could be gained in many ways. Ten years later, when he published his history of the University of New Zealand, he wrote that, if such a work were to have a dedication, it would be 'to those at Victoria University College, mainly my fellow students, who … first taught me something of the meaning of a university; and particularly to' (and he gave just the initials) Thomas Hunter, Max Bickerton, Dick Campbell, Reo Fortune, Bob Martin-Smith, Elsie Holmes, Averil Lysaght, Lorrie Richardson, and to the memory of Harry Espiner.

4London, 1926–27

On Friday, 6 August 1926 at noon John sailed from Wellington for Sydney on the Maheno. Family and friends were there to see him off, but he dashed back home to pick up his toothbrush and shaving gear and just made it back in time.

I rushed on to the wharf, to find … Ernest & my uncle anxiously regarding the distance & my Father I suspected in a very much worse temper than he looked, loaded with insurance policies & letters of introduction from Bobby Stout; & then my Mother gave me further parcels, biscuits, lemons, & Lord knows what; & Mrs Hooper a map of London & another letter of introduction; & other people other things – heavens alive! I could hardly stagger up the gangway! … & then came the shower of streamers … & the boat began to move & I had a somewhat hard job to keep a cheerful grin on my face.1

Elsie had counted on the ship leaving late. She finished her morning's teaching and was driving into Wellington in her father's car (lent for the occasion) when, from the Hutt Road, she saw the ship draw out and head down the harbour. John walked the deck until he could no longer see 'the Tararuas & the road to Gollans Valley & Fitzroy Bay & the Karori Beach … & then went down to the Saloon & had a good meal, on the principle of getting in hard & solid while the going was good'.2 Three days of seasickness followed. Two breakfasts were mastered but no dinners before the ship arrived in Sydney on 10 August, six hours late because of the weather experienced in the Tasman.

There John began a series of letters to his parents and to Elsie. Each generally contained from twelve to fourteen pages, though the last written from the Osterley to his parents ran to twenty-two pages and one to Elsie from London, thirty pages. The letters provide a remarkable record of the voyage – six weeks in which enduring friendships could be forged – and of his London years, of his introduction to things he had previously only read about.

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre at Victoria University of Wellington has put these letters from John to his parents on the web. They can be accessed at www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/name-207379.html

Those to his parents (posted every two weeks) were widely shared within the family and outside, with the Hoopers and others. Yet they always began 'Dear Mummy', a sign of his closeness to her but also of his concern for her health. She had not been really well for a number of years before he left. Once a regular exchange of letters had been established, John would comment on his father's account of what the family had been up to, and make witticisms at the expense of his brothers, especially Keith, and observations which he hoped might shock his aunts. After that he would recount what had been happening. He must have been encouraged in writing by knowing how greatly his parents shared his interests – how they, given the opportunity, would have done many of the things he did. His parents replied faithfully, though there were times when his mother was not well enough to write. Ironically, her letters have more life than his father's; his father had never shaken off the solemnity of his youthful style, and they were both conscious of how confined their lives were compared with John's. Their letters reflect a deep love and great pride in what he was achieving, and at times a little anxiety about his views and actions – as well, on his mother's part, about how he was managing his clothes and what he was eating and drinking. To Elsie he wrote profusely of how much he loved her, often recalling times they had been together in Wellington and away tramping, before giving her too an account of his doings since his previous letter.

John made good use of the eleven days he had in Sydney. He stayed in the YMCA. He met with Jean Harvey, a nurse and family friend from the Unitarian days in Wellington, with whom he went to a recital by Chaliapin, 'wonderful, marvellous', and two J.M. Barrie plays, Quality Street and What Every Woman Knows, part of a season of Barrie produced by Dion Boucicault. He went out to Manly, 'pleasant on the ocean side but ghastly on the harbour side'; he walked a lot, and was alarmed at traffic going at thirty miles an hour; he discovered the most astonishing ice cream. He inspected the university library (160,000 books) and was dazzled by the lavishness of the university union building and the paintings lent by the art gallery and hung there. 'I wouldn't mind taking [it] up … & plonking it down in W'gton'. Sydney, he judged, 'seems pretty well to ooze money'.3 He visited the Mitchell Library and noted they had material relating to Cook's voyages. It was 'strongest on history & topography, travel & so on [but had] nothing like the collection of rare & beautiful things the Turnbull has'.4 He spent some time there looking for material for his projected thesis on the New Zealand Company. On the Sunday afternoon he visited the Domain to listen to the speakers.

I never heard anything so funny. There were crowds there, all split up into groups, some big, some little; & they were being addressed – my word they were! Politics, economics, religion, debates, personal insults, mere meanderings, diagrams on blackboards, patriots, parsons, an I.W.W. man – I never saw anything like it. And there was one cheerful old unshaven ruffian lurching round, saying at intervals in a lugubrious voice (eye twinkling all the time) 'Hung by the neck! … Hung by the neck!' & selling ballads on recent deaths & murders & executions. I bought three (1d each).5

On 18 August, three days before the Osterley was due to sail, he was able to move aboard, 'such a swish single-berth cabin … on the top cabin deck, with a port hole opening on the sea; nice & white & spacious'. He wished that Elsie was with him. He added to his wardrobe, as befitted a first-class passenger, acquiring:

two prs of white trousers @ 16/6 pr; 1 pr of evening shoes @ 16/6 pr; two back studs & one front stud (in case anything goes overboard with the roll of the ship in the Great Australian Bight) @ 6d ea; 2 wing-collars @ 1/- ea; & one dress tie @ 3/6. As I had a dress tie already & also a made-up one in case of hopeless failure, you may think this extravagance … But the manner of the purchase of the tie was this; I said to the bird in the shop 'Can you tell me how to tie an evening tie?' And such was his willingness to demonstrate that I found myself in the generosity of my soul offering to purchase same if he could teach me to tie it satisfactorily. For he said 'Certainly; single-end or double-end?' To which I rejoined 'Search me'. And he then began to explain. It seems that a single-end is much easier to do up, is much more elegant to the view, sits on the collar with an air the older fashion never knew, does not hinder the breathing, is provocative of much less bad language & has a further large variety of virtues. Also it is as worn.6

In his next letter he reported 'that blasted tie is a washout. I put it round my neck & began to tie it in the most airy manner, but I'm blest if anything happened'. So he fell back on the made-up one, which seemed perfectly satisfactory, '& I shall probably continue to wear it & damn the consequences'.7

On board the Osterley were ten travelling scholars in all, four others who, like John, were travelling first class, having been awarded free passages. Three were lively young Australians from Sydney. Ian Henning, a French and German scholar, was going to the Sorbonne; 'a man of most extraordinary theories'.8 Raymond McGrath, a postgraduate student in architecture, had already done architectural work in Sydney but his interests ranged much more widely. He had edited the student paper Hermes. He had shown considerable artistic gifts with a particular talent for woodcuts, having compiled a bound manuscript collection of his own poems and prose ('good prose & less good verse', in John's view) with illustrations by himself and his sister Eileen, as well as a printed book of twenty-four woodcuts - 'some of them are stunner, particularly some designs to illustrate W. de la Mare's poems … I don't know what sort of an architect he is, but I shouldn't mind getting him to design a house for me on the strength of his woodcuts'. Poems were exchanged and read; McGrath, it was agreed, would illustrate John's book of poems when it came out. McGrath, John judged, 'has very sound ideas'.9

W.G.K. Duncan (known by John always as Dunc or Dunkie – it was still the age of surnames) had graduated in philosophy at Sydney University with a thesis on progress and was heading for the London School of Economics. There is an unsympathetic portrait of Duncan at that time as Jonathan Crow in the Australian writer Christina Stead's novel For Love Alone (in her undergraduate days in Sydney she had had a passion for him). A little later, when she had followed him to London, she described him in a letter to her sister: 'He has a thorough-going indignation for (what he conceives to be) all forms of oppression, depression, impression, repression, suppression, compression and (irrational self-) expression, in short for all forms of everything which does not represent (what he conceives to be) Liberty and Justice.'10 John took an altogether more positive view: 'We do a good deal of arguing; so much so that the place has rather the atmosphere of a miniature VUC. The Sydney lads are right controversialists.'11 Duncan proved to know 'a whole lot about social problems, also has a sense of humour … He is mad on Bertrand Russell at present. Henning says one day "Who is this Bertrand Russell, anyhow?" Duncan looks at him wonderingly for a moment & then bursts out "Good God? have you ever heard of Jesus Christ?" He is going to London too which is cheerful'.12

The fifth scholar travelling first class was Olive Rowe (referred to by John almost invariably as Miss Rowe), a Canterbury classics graduate on her way to Oxford. Her fiancé, Ted Low, a Rhodes Scholar, was also on board, but not having a free passage was travelling third class. Although she had edited the Canterbury College Review for two years she was, regrettably, rather less of a controversialist; 'the lass lies low & says nuffin', John reported.13Finally, completing their table was Whinfield, the third officer, who proved well able to hold his end up against the students.

Henning, in a letter home, gave a first impression of John:

Poor old Beaglehole has a terrible time with his name. A little English lady (you know, the How long have ye been out? type) came up to him the other day and asked him: Are you Mr Begleyhole? The best of it is that Beaglehole stutters every time he tries to say b's, so it takes everyone quite a time to find out what his name really is. They generally end up by asking you after he has gone what they understood you to say your friend's name was. He is a very decent chap and plays the piano very nicely.14

The first-class food called forth extended and enthusiastic comment. 'It's not much use trying to be a food reformer', John told his mother, and hesitated to describe dinner lest 'her hygienic soul should shudder and wilt'.15 The young Australians shared his enthusiasm. A week after they sailed John learned to his horror that he had missed afternoon tea every day, not having heard that it was on. Deck sports, in which he developed a taste for quoit tennis that became a lasting addiction, gave one an appetite: 'my word! you do eat on board', he wrote in a later letter, all scruples abandoned:

It gives a man a unique opportunity to get experience with food; the meaning of culinary French, & so on; & the combinations you can work out are astonishing; Potage à la Russe, Saumon, sauce Mantua, Roast Turkey, ice-cream, & coffee – there's one sample. We are experimenting a bit with liqueurs, too; each bloke shouts a round, @ 6d a head now & again. Crème de menthe & Benedictine we have tried so far, the first sickly pepperminty stuff, but the Benedictine was good. Don't tell Bobby Stout.16

Before leaving Wellington John had promised Sir Robert that he would keep off 'the drink'.

The Osterley called at Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle. In Melbourne John met again with Maie Ross, his old friend from Whitcombe's, now selling crockery in Myers Emporium. In Adelaide he called on Ernest Hale (the former Unitarian minister in Wellington) and his family. The chief difficulty Hale faced, wrote John, was 'contending with the excessive wealth of his parishioners'.17 There is no mention of Beagleholes; any links between the New Zealand and Australian branches of the family seem to have long since disappeared. John checked the bookshops, reporting at length to his father (but not to Elsie, who already had her doubts about John's addiction to buying books) on prices, bargains and finely produced editions. The art galleries won enthusiastic reports, especially the Melbourne gallery:

… they have some wonderful stuff there; a magnificent Raeburn which puts all the other portraits, by Reynolds or Romney or anybody completely into the shade; about four Corots, Sargents (Landscapes), Watts (portrait of Tennyson), Burne-Jones, D.Y. Cameron, Van Eyck (a wonderful brilliant little thing they paid £21,000 odd for), Pissarro, Monet, C.J. Holmes, Madox [sic] Brown, Maris brothers, Orpen, John, Turner (great water-colour Okehampton Castle) P. de Wint, Morland, Reynolds, Romney, etchings by Rembrandt, Whistler, Mèryon, Pennell, Haden, Brangwn [sic], Durer, a lot of Australians …18

As in Sydney, he cast an envious eye over the universities.

All this for him was the 'merest fore-taste of what's to come'.19His mind was firmly fixed on what lay ahead: 'all these colonial towns, as towns are the same, after all; & apart from one or two pictures, none of them are worth more than a damn'.20 As they neared Ceylon he wrote, 'it is a pleasant sensation to be crossing part of the earth that has really some history behind it & not just a few tuppenny-ha'penny scraps & tenth-rate politics', and he was thinking of changing his thesis subject to 'something in political theory; however we'll see, – the NZ Coy may still be the handiest subject to work on'.21 New Zealand was clearly being left behind in more than one sense.

Colombo was the first place by which he felt really excited since leaving home.22 They had twenty-four hours there and for John it was a revelation.

I never saw a place with such beautiful surroundings, such wonderful streets and avenues – trees, millions of them, lawns, parks. We passed down a great avenue with wonderful bungalows on each side – all belonging to the English civil service. But gosh, no wonder the Conquering Race doesn't want to leave. I shouldn't if I had a bungalow & grounds like that. But some belonging to the rich natives are beautiful buildings too; there was practically nothing really ugly or merely pretentious that we saw … We passed through a big native quarter … Havelock town, when all the population was coming home from work. Talk of colour! And the Buddhist priests in yellow stuck out … the shops [were] all open & most of the houses; every possible thing for sale, rope & lollies & coconuts & vegetables; even one or two butchers.

He visited a silk merchant with McGrath and had great difficulty in restraining himself from plunging helplessly on stuff for Elsie and his mother, 'silks & shawls & kimonos & ladies' pyjamas; finally the bloke evidently judging McG was a man of experience started bringing out garments of even more intimate intention; but we managed to stifle a blush & intimated politely but firmly that we weren't buying lingerie on that occasion'. Before their eyes a conjuror grew a mango tree from seed to flower and fruit – John sent home to Elsie the leaf given him as proof. Late in the evening the party returned briefly to the ship by rowing boat, but engaged it to call back for them at five in the morning for a final look

around the town on foot or per rickshaw to the native markets … continually being rushed by diamond-merchants or bead-merchants or beggars or small boys singing Tipperary in a way peculiarly their own or merchants – with shops just round the corner with the most wonderful bargains in elephants or gold rings. All of which we managed to shake off at not much cost to ourselves.

His account of Colombo, written from the Red Sea (to be posted at Suez), ended with more excitement. 'My first sight of Africa at Cape Guardafui had me well worked up.' A little later, with the mountains around Sinai on the right and on the left the ranges of Egypt, John, as reported by McGrath, pointed towards Africa exclaiming, 'Do you realise that Cleopatra ruled over that land; that these waters are liquid history!'23 Clearly pleased with the phrase 'liquid history', he used it again in his letter to his parents.

Passing through the Suez Canal they saw labourers working by hand to widen it. On their arrival at Port Said John was shocked when they were

immediately assaulted by thousands more niggers to do the coaling. Well, I never saw anything more like hell. Talk of exploiting cheap colonial labour; in about five minutes on both sides of the ship there was an entirely black zone – the air so black that from up on the top deck you could just see long lines of indistinct figures walked [sic] up planks to tips in the side of the ship with no interval between them whatsoever. The lighters were so crowded that how they managed to do any work at all I don't know. They worked barefoot & practically naked; & how their feet escaped the spades with which they were digging the coal into buckets is a miracle. One poor devil got an eyeful of the stuff; & there he stood, agonising & crying like a child, as we went past on our way to the shore. Very pretty … However there were diversions for members of the exploiting West like us; a conjuror was on board about as soon as the ship anchored, & my word he did some clever things.24

After a long wait they got into small boats and were rowed ashore: 'Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, the amorous adventures of Cleopatra, the Sphinx & Pyramids …' Resisting invitations to 'exhibitions of the can-can' – 'we all thought hard of our Aunties & turned these very attractive invitations down' – they examined everything else that was going on:

Antique horse-trams, sheiks, guttersnipes, what looked like illegitimate left-overs from the war, street cleaners, Arabs, Greeks & Dagos of all sorts & conditions, Egyptians, donkeys, cafés … We examined a Russian orthodox church, well-built, but full of shrines & a department for selling tin-pot little charms; & it was delightful to see Duncan, the hardened rationalist, who was the only lad with small change on him, tipping the man who showed us over with a couple of bob for the Church funds.

They were caught up in a great procession, with drums and incense and hundreds of red, green and white banners covered with crescents, which they discovered was part of a celebration of the Prophet's birthday. They got back to the ship just before it sailed, John having bought 'a couple of hundred best Turkish cigarettes for 5/- 100', and having had to 'repulse a bootblack with some warmth when he arbitrarily took control of my foot; for which however I was afterwards rather sorry, as I don't like behaving like the Conquering Race'.

The voyage through the Mediterranean, calling at Naples, Toulon and Gibraltar, brought more historical associations; John's admiration for Garibaldi, 'that eminent swashbuckler', grew a good deal when he saw the sort of country he fought over. At Naples 'the lads' again repelled the efforts of their guide to get them into 'the can-can'; here the promise was to be shown 'in living form the delightful poses characteristic of the wall-paintings of Pompeii'.

John continued to sing the praises of his Australian companions, especially Duncan and McGrath. 'Duncan & I indulge in the most enormous arguments; or I support him against Henning or McG.; or McG & I uphold art against the others, or I gives harangues to all & sundry'.25 McGrath he judged to be in many ways 'the pearl of the bunch', whereas Henning was 'inclined to take life a bit too seriously'. Of Miss Rowe he rather despaired; she preferred 'not to argue at meals', and when finally roused 'called them all materialists but would not say what she meant'. She was, John believed, a 'bit mixed as to our characters though, especially mine; as she has to reconcile the vehemence of my controversial methods with the sweetly chaste character of my verse, some of which McGrath showed her'.26

The voyage drew to an end, and the last round of deck sports was held. John was defeated by Duncan in the final of the bucket quoits but 'won the egg & spoon race hands down, for which I got an order for 4/- on the barber's shop, & took it out in a tobacco pouch'. With McGrath's artistic talent and Whinfield's cooperation (he provided chains which they dragged, making a great clatter, as they made their entrance down the stairs and into the saloon) the four young men starred at the fancy dress ball as four ghosts. John spent one of the last days writing a

Great Epic … the Osterliad, in six cantos, rhymed heroic couplets, six f.cap pages of type, about 200 lines. A truly wonderful achievement … It is in honour of Whinfield chiefly, & ourselves secondarily. Canto I is a general description of W. Canto II is an impressive apostrophe to the hero. Canto III is the longest & a description of one of our meal-time free discussions, with W. in the chair; Canto IV is the description of a thrilling game of quoit-tennis, Whinfield & Beaglehole v Duncan & Henning; Canto V is a historical disquisition on great navigators of the past, W's superiority to them, his eminent services in the war etc, etc. Canto VI is the grand finale, summing up & driving home the lessons of the previous five, & hailing W. as the consummation of the divine purpose of the Creator.27

The Osterliad was an achievement, carried off in the style of a neo-Byronic Don Juan. To Elsie he wrote that it showed 'the disgraceful way in which I behaved on the voyage';28 certainly it conveyed his high spirits as well as his fluent pen:

Canto III Whinfield's singular judicial detachment from common argument and error. With what an equable and balanced mind Oh Whinfield, hast thou held the scales inclined Neither to this side nor to that, when strife Tremendous, cataclysmic, life for life Has burst upon our table! See the words Abrupt, explosive, fly like angry birds From seat to seat, the personal abuse Which custom does not stale nor over-use. Henning lays down the law. First Henning lays an axiom down, which seems To him self evident, to Duncan, dreams. To which Duncan retorts that he is a damn fool. Duncan assaults the youth, he bares his teeth He feels his native controversial heath, And "Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell!" shouts – Our Duncan with his philosophic doubts – His hatchet face enlivens, rings his voice! But who is this who cavils at his choice Of argumentative material, who? McGrath has still faith in the universe 'Tis the respectable McGrath, and through The mazes of his childlike faith he goes With halting step, and frequent short repose To show the reasons for his great decision; For our McGrath has Ideals, Art and Vision. To which Beaglehole is able to give only a qualified approval. Lo! rises Beaglehole and savage, hot Throws knife, spoon, fork, self in the melting pot. His raucous voice attacks the startled ceiling He outrages a lady's every feeling. He snatches words from Duncan, from Miss Rowe, He damns all priests and parsons, heralds woe To superstitious Mac and luckless Henning In frightful language quite unfit for penning. Miss Rowe seeks peace and quietude. Miss Rowe assumes a headache, blanches, bites A trifle languidly, and thinks of knights Of ancient chivalry

On the typed copy which John sent to his parents he wrote a marginal note: 'Miss R was very keen on chivalry, though she also believed strongly in the equality of the sexes.'

who never rended The sanctities of life, nor e'en offended A delicate damsel's feelings of what must Forever constitute the right, the just. Duncan's heresy and Beaglehole's opinion of McGrath. Duncan proceeds to nationalise all women Beaglehole thinks the light of truth burns dim in The hypocrite McGrath,

Marginal note: 'We called McG & H hypocrites because through saying nothing at moments of tension they got a reputation for politeness & perfect gentlemanliness with Miss R; but behind her back agreed that she was etc etc etc.'

who'd sit and eat Obliviously at Socrates' great feet. Henning reduces the Eternal to a diagram. Henning elaborates a paradox The most appalling even of his vast flocks. He draws a diagram

Marginal note: 'Henning was great on diagrams – he drew one of immortality.'

with spoon and fork And steadily proceeds to talk, and talk. Henning has no great opinion of human nature; and the combat waxes general. 'Does human nature change?' with seraph smile He asks, and all his face expresses guile. Duncan and Beaglehole proceed to shout, Henning retires in psychologic rout; Miss Rowe demands why they are not put out. The combat waxes hotter, birth control Marriage and nigger labour, how to coal A ship, should strikers be allowed to live? Are women worthy of their high prerogative In being allowed to vote, if so what then? What would you rather be, women or men? Beagle blasphemes against the ancient Greeks Miss Rowe is stirred to unaccustomed activity. Shocked to the soul, Miss Rowe emerges; seeks To slay the offender, wrath darts from her eyes She seems a dozen times her usual size. Duncan again attacks Henning. Duncan with dastard economic jeer Sneers at whatever Henning holds most dear And now McGrath stung to the very heart Proclaims the evangel of his conquering Art, Whinfield's sublime detachment. And thou, great Whinfield, what through all this time Hast thou been doing, Officer sublime? He gives his judgment, which temporarily depresses the combatants. With steady hand, full mouth, judicious brow Thou hearest all the evidence, and now Stoop'st from Olympian heights, and as we long For commendation, say'st we all are wrong. We droop, and dully think of wasted lives But all is well. But lo! thy magic smile our soul revives!

Duncan typed it out and they presented it to Whinfield at their last lunch with a 'magnificent box of cigars we bought at Gibraltar'. As they hoped, he gave them each one of the cigars. After a brief call at Plymouth and spending several hours fog-bound in the Thames estuary, the Osterley finally docked at Tilbury on the afternoon of 1 October. John caught the boat train up to London.

2/10/26 Saturday: 1st morning in London – S. Kensington: so far so good.29

To John Everything looked extraordinarily familiar; 'St Paul's, the Royal Exchange, Admiralty Arch, Trafalgar Square'. On closer inspection he had some reservations about the interior of St Paul's, and the Albert Memorial he judged 'a hideous abortion'. 'I'd heard that this was pretty bad, but nothing, no picture, no description, can come up to the horror of the original.'30 Two years later Kenneth Clark put it more succinctly in The Gothic Revival: 'the expression of pure philistinism'.31 There were notes of welcome from Lorrie Richardson and Jack Yeates, old trampers from Victoria, the latter 'largely condemnatory of the country'. They met the next day. Richardson had just submitted his PhD thesis at Imperial College and had been awarded a fellowship that turned into a permanent job at an agricultural experimental station at Harpenden, north of London. He seemed to like England on the whole, but he and John were silenced by Yeates's flow of invective and vituperation. Yeates was full of doubts about ever getting his Cambridge thesis finished, forthright on what a failure he was (in fact he was to finish it successfully in the minimum time), and generally down on the country and the climate. He could not wait to get back to New Zealand.32 John, however, after inspecting the Institute of Historical Research – 'much to my liking' – and going to his first concert, informed the family in Wellington that 'this country will do me for a while, climate or no climate'.33

After a few days in the Hotel Madrid in South Kensington (recommended by Whinfield; 7s 6d for bed and breakfast), John and Duncan were soon settled in a large room on the top floor of a house at 21 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, their landlady 'a retired Indian army nurse & superficially quite decent, but with an immense contempt for the subject races'.34 In the square: 'The houses aren't very handsome … though from some aspects they have a certain dignity – it's the square that makes them – the lawn & the trees in the middle'.35 John continued:

We have two beds, one of which, a big affair occupied by me, swings back up to the wall by day. The other is a stretcher affair that doesn't occupy much room. Also a sofa, covered during the day by my rug, which at night covers me. Also two fairly satisfactory armchairs & three small chairs. Likewise a table with two extensions that drop down at the side when not required. Likewise a chest of drawers. Likewise a marble-topped sort of table for washing up on, the repose of shaving materials etc. A bookcase, divided ½ & ½ between us. A gas fire with a burner at the side for our kettle. Two cupboards for clothes just outside the door. In one of them the gas meter – one of those bob in the slot things invented expressly for the purpose of diddling coves like us, I suppose. Bathroom just across the landing.

The rent was 17s 6d a week each. Living expenses, other than lunches, proved to be five to seven shillings each with a diet mainly of wholemeal bread, raisins and marmalade, plus whatever fruit could be picked up cheap, mainly apples (4d a pound for cooking apples) and dried figs. Lunch was bought for 1s 3d or 1s 6d or even, at the vegetarian Food Reform Restaurant, for 11d. They got the Times and a bottle of milk every morning, the Sunday Times on Sunday and the Times Literary Supplement on Thursday and their bill on Monday. 'So everything goes like clockwork.'36 With £3 a week, John reckoned on '£2 for living in all its details & £1 for pleasures – or rather education in a broad sense, books, music, plays etc. What a man needs is about £1000 yr for 5 yrs.'37 Money was to go on being a preoccupation, with the university fees of twenty-one guineas a year, plus twenty guineas for the degree on completion, being a standing cause for complaint.

London was almost overwhelming, the first months a veritable feast of music, of bookshops, of sheer intellectual excitement. Part of John's first letter home from Brunswick Square was written just after he had got back from his first promenade concert:

Well, I've been in the 7th Heaven – the London pavements were like air beneath me as I walked home, & they glistened like silver; the trees in the square as I turned the corner were the abode of magic; the street-lights sang to the policeman underneath them & I positively looked for a pavement artist to give my last penny to (I found one too, though it was after ten) … Bach, Handel, Mozart – you can't beat 'em; I wouldn't give two damns for anyone else … You never heard anything like the Bach fiddle concerto! & played by Jelly d'Aranji like a flaming angel.38

'Let's have some cocoa to celebrate', he said to Duncan, and they did.

In the first weeks there were concerts by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham ('& an extraordinary spectacle he is'39) and Albert Coates, the New Queen's Hall Orchestra with Sir Henry Wood, the Philharmonic Society with Wood again, and with Bruno Walter. There was Gilbert and Sullivan (Ruddigore, 'the music is great, but a lot of the conversation terrible bunk'40), the Royal Choral Society singing the Verdi Requiem and the Philharmonic Choir in Bach's B Minor Mass (he heard this a second time a few weeks later). There were Saturday afternoon concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with no charge for admission. There he heard Myra Hess play Bach and, he assured his parents, he had put something in the collection box. McGrath booked seats for the Russian Ballet:

I have been to the Russian Ballet twice, & am going again if I can run to it … Some of it is great stuff … L'Aprés Midi d'un Faun was jolly good, & Prince Igor stunner, likewise Petroushka [sic], & some of the dancing in The Swan Lake; do you remember how we used to see pictures of all these in the Sphere in the old days before the war. I want to see the Fire Bird, so that probably means another 2/4 going plush.41

The problem was that there was too much to go to.

… tomorrow there are about four concerts I want to go to, & also a lecture by Bertrand Russell … the chief concert is Kreisler playing Elgar & Brahms concertos with the London Sym. Orchestra & Landon Ronald. After a prolonged & horrible conflict of loyalties I came to the conclusion that I would certainly be able to hear B.R. again, but possibly not Kreisler or the Elgar concerto; so I went & got the last 5/9 ticket, not without a good deal of calculation & perturbation of spirit … I am darn sorry to miss Russell tomorrow but it can't be helped. To make up Duncan hears a lot of him – he follows him round like a dog.42

The lecturers heard were a mixed lot: 'an astonishing number of them have been duds – Arnold Toynbee for instance one night put across the most elementary tripe about the Pacific as a political centre in the most pitiful puerile style'. Toynbee subsequently redeemed himself somewhat with a lecture in a Fabian Society series (Mr Hooper had sent over the details from Wellington) in which John also heard Sidney Webb, 'a little insignificant cove' who 'spoke in a conversational way … with some jokes, unfortunately not loud enough to hear',43 and George Bernard Shaw. 'Place crowded, with a good number of adorers who rippled as soon as he opened his mouth. Good stuff, but not extraordinarily out of the common for him.'44 Shaw the dramatist won greater praise, Man and Superman, being 'the finest thing all round for play & acting combined I've seen in my life'.45 This was the shortened version; John was so carried away that a few days later he and Duncan went to the full-length production. 'We got to the queue at 4, too late to get a seat, got inside about 4.30 & stood till 11.15. All for 1/6 & by cripes! it was worth it! … I wouldn't have missed it for £25 …Gwen Frangçon Davies did Anne, a wonderful performance, & a cove called S. Esmé Percy [played] Tanner … a great & glorious performance.'

The bookshops were endlessly seductive, with John & Edward Bumpus's in Oxford Street being perhaps the greatest lure. There is hardly a letter among all those John wrote home that does not mention books – books read, books admired, books bought, books coveted but too expensive. Soon after arriving he bought books to send back to members of the family for Christmas, choosing a facsimile edition of Blake's Songs of Innocence (Ernest Benn, 1926, 12s 6d) for his father, but then deciding to keep it for himself. For his mother, something she could get her teeth into, the memoirs of the portrait painter Benjamin Haydon,46 'also I think it will turn out to be one of those books you will be able to quote at meal-times & put markers in for me to read selected passages if I can just spare a minute or two now & again'.47 Then he could not resist a 'couple of little supernumerary presents', a volume of Victorian letters for his father and E.M. Forster's Pharos and Pharillon for his mother. 'Fair dinkum, that E.M. Forster has a style to marvel at.' For himself he enthused over the Nonesuch Milton, 'one of the best books I have ever seen', but at £4 10s he had to say 'Nuthin doin'.48A little later he made up for that by buying the Selected Essays of Edward Thomas, 'with twenty four wood engravings by R. Ashwin Maynard & Horace W. Bray, one of three hundred copies (Nos 51–350) printed on Van Gelden paper & bound in blue buckram', published by the Gregynog Press. 'I've been considering it since the beginning of December. It is a very beautiful book.'49

'It strikes me I am pretty heroic to get any work done under the circumstances',50 John wrote, 'all I want to do is to sit down & read, history or otherwise, & get up & travel'.51 No one he had seen in the university seemed very interested in overseas or research students, but John finally met with Professor A.F. Pollard, 'who is a great man … with the result that I shall probably be working under him on political theory of some sort, I think the idea of sovereignty [in Tudor England] … Pollard reckons that would be far more broadening to the mind than working on NZ history.'52Pollard was a great figure among the historians of his generation; he contributed 'more than any other single man or single institution to the professionalization of history in the early twentieth century'53and virtually created the school of history in the University of London. His historical interests were in the Tudor period and were above all political and constitutional. With a mind that was 'very good at untangling legislative and constitutional knots', he none the less lacked imagination, was neither 'sensitive nor subtle',54 and was inclined to sniff at anything that did not fit in with his own researches. To both colleagues and students he could be thoroughly intimidating.55

John's meetings with him were not easy. John had heard from a fellow student that a lecturer had just finished a book on sixteenth-century political thought (J.W. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century). Why would Professor Pollard not have mentioned this? John asked. Professor Pollard and Mr Allen never speak to each other, he was told. John considered switching to the seventeenth century. Then, realistically recognising that Allen could hardly have 'cleaned up the whole of the century', he went back to the Tudor idea and took along an outline of a proposal to Pollard. This Pollard 'proceeded to tear to pieces in a manner rude, if not insulting. However it is something novel for me to have a prof take enough interest in me even to tread on me; so although I was a bit dashed at first I haven't been unduly depressed on the whole.'56

Worse was to follow. He revised the proposal. Pollard was highly critical:

suicidal to have any sort of plan – only a rehash of other men's ideas, of no value at all; political theory all bunk; political thought of no effect at all. Suggested one or two constitutional history subjects which would be fruitful to work on. I said I had always been interested rather in the philosophical aspects of history. 'Yes' he said 'sheer drivel, in fact'. Finally I happened to mention the letters PhD & he was so horrified he nearly fell off his seat. Couldn't possibly do it – he was under the impression I was after an M.A.… 57I told him I was one already & had been accepted as a PhD student by the Univ. Homily on wonderful character of London MA. Almost superhuman character of London PhD. Well, says I, would I be wiser to get back to NZ history which I know pretty well. Finally he thought yes, I might get a PhD on that. So I have to see Newton the colonial man.58

In his letters to his parents John put a brave face on all this; he had worries enough with the news that his mother was ill again and confined to her bed. To Elsie he wrote, 'The main trouble about the mix-up is that it makes me horribly nervous whenever I talk to a prof; & you know the effect nervousness has on me'59 – a reference to his stutter. Over fifty years later, Duncan still remembered how Pollard had shattered John's morale.60 Pollard, the 'great man', thereafter became 'that swine Pollard'. A.P. Newton, the Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, 'turned out very decent'.61 In his view the subject of research was relatively unimportant; what was needed was the most intensive grounding in historical method and research. 'But as I was a colonial student, & wd probably be occupying a colonial chair (which I thought unduly optimistic) the best thing to do would be to take a colonial subject & work under him'. They settled on the subject of instructions to colonial governors between 1783 and 1840, the years between the loss of the American colonies and the emergence of the idea of responsible government – 'I'm afraid it won't turn out to be especially readable when finished'. John then changed his registration from University College to King's, which was Newton's college. 'It is a bit of a crash to be attached to the one representative of the Church of England among the London colleges! Though as I do spend most of the time I do spend in a college, which is very little, in the L.S.E. that doesn't make much difference, except to my self-respect.'62

While the young colonial was being put firmly in his place by Pollard, he found an ally – more than an ally, a friend, a hero almost – in H.J. (Harold) Laski, newly appointed to the chair in politics at the London School of Economics (LSE). John had gone to a lecture by Laski and been so stirred that he wrote to him and asked his advice about the thesis. Laski invited John to visit him and helped him draft the second proposal for Pollard. After its poor reception, Laski initially suggested that John should switch to the LSE and work under him on a history of the Whig party, but he came to agree with Newton that work on a colonial subject would provide good training and a degree that would ensure John a career. He added that John should come and see him at least every month and tell him how he was getting on, and there was a standing invitation to tea at the Laskis' 'at home' any Sunday afternoon. More than his advice, Laski's human warmth transformed John's outlook. Returning to Brunswick Square to tell Duncan about it, he was 'walking on air'.63A little later he wrote to Dick Campbell:

This … Laski is a weedy undersized shrimp of a fellow, & now holding down Graham Wallas' job. He is about 34. God! what a mind! I heard his inaugural lecture, the finest formal thing I ever heard in my life … He wrote all the editorials in the Workers Weekly during the General Strike, of unhappy memory, & stands by every word of them. He is a perfect lecturer, & friendly & companionable enough to be a colonial. God bless him!64

Laski's biographer, Kingsley Martin, in a phrase later quoted by John, saw 'the clue to Harold's strength and weakness … in his desire to love and be loved. His argument', Martin wrote, 'might be derived from Marx, but at the final test he was a follower of William Morris rather than of Lenin.'65 At the Laskis' on Sunday afternoons one might meet almost anyone: fellow student, cabinet minister, trade union leader, Indian nationalist, American jurist or playwright. And the talk! If the company was remarkable, the talk was even more remarkable: 'I never heard such conversation before', John wrote, though he did on one occasion report, 'I went to Laski's on Sunday afternoon & heard some pretty good yarns – one or two of them touched up since I heard them last'.66 Ultimately, perhaps, Laski was too good a talker to write the great work on political thought that some believed he had in him. That work, however, provided the pretext for Laski's indefatigable scouring of the second-hand bookshops. It was another bond between him and the bookish young New Zealander. The book collecting can be followed, the flavour of the talk captured, from two remarkable volumes of correspondence between Laski and the American Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes. In reviewing those volumes, twentyfive years after he first met Laski, John sought to sum up the man. At the same time he revealed more than a little about himself:

They [Holmes and Laski] were both, intellectually and emotionally, humanists. They inherited, they passed on, the great tradition of eighteenth century rationalism, they were men of tough and acute mind, of esprit; but each in his own way too was a romantic; the mind of each was touched by an enchanted music that led him beyond the efforts and entanglements of the ordinary day.67

Laski too was an outsider: a radical, a Jew, 'friendly & companionable enough to be a colonial'. This was to become something of a yardstick.

It was two months before his thesis subject was sorted out and John started work at the Public Record Office, 'thankful to have got something to bite on at last'.68 He had not wasted the intervening time. As well as attending lectures, concerts and plays, writing letters and exploring London, he had spent an early weekend at Trimley, near Felixstowe, with his uncle George Butler, an artist, and his wife Jeanne, who had left New Zealand in 1905, and their two adult children, Berrie (also an artist) and Brian. He warmed to these relations and admired some of George's landscape sketches – 'a lot better than his big stuff'69 – and portraits. He helped cut firewood and walked, 'the first time I have exerted myself since leaving home'. On leaving he was 'blowed if Auntie Jeanne didn't hang around my neck & kiss me. Which I judge, on so short an acquaintance, was taking a decided liberty.' She redeemed herself somewhat by sending him off with a pot of chutney and some cake to take back to London. A little later she followed up with a box of pickled eggs.

In the same letter to Dick Campbell in which he sang Laski's praises, John urged his friend, who had been awarded a postgraduate travelling scholarship, to come to London and to the LSE to study for his PhD:

… believe me, the man who gets a Travelling Schol. & does not come to the London School of Economics & Political Science has treated his lady Fortune in a shady & miserable fashion … My dear Mr. Campbell, come here; it is the centre of the universe. Harold J. Laski remarked to me tonight that he would rather be a crossing sweeper in London than a millionaire anywhere else, & by cripes, he's about right.70

It was all very well to echo Laski's rhetorical flourishes but there were things about England that John found difficult to accept. The treatment of the miners as the 1926 general strike ended struck him as 'pretty rotten … The way the owners are putting in the boot is sickening; & the way the Govt stands by & keeps the ring for them is disgraceful.'71 London brought him face to face with misery and poverty, and in a letter at the end of November as winter drew in, he wrote:

We have been having pretty brummy weather lately, with a real dinkum fog on Thursday – an interesting thing for the first five minutes, but ghastly after that; the darn thing nearly chokes you & you spend half the time in blowing smuts out of your nose. Then in the middle of it a bloke sticks me up & wants me to buy a box of soap – nothing to eat since yesterday, ready to drop, etc etc. The same old yarn. So I buy his soap. The night before another washed out specimen I could have knocked out with my little finger pushed matches at me as I was going into the Institute; I said Well they'll always come in handy, I suppose; & gave him 2d for a box. He looked at me doubtfully – 'Well, it's more than they're worth you know' he said. 'But I've been in the infirmary for 15 months, & I don't know what I'll do if I have to walk round all night'. I thought a bit & then chased after him & asked him how many more boxes he had & gave him 6d for the last one, & he just stood & gazed at me as if I had been the Lord God Almighty. Fair dinkum, when a bloke gets that low it's time they had a change in the country. Another white-faced cove sits in the street down Kingsway all day with his chest covered with medals & knits kids caps & socks for a living, & a wife & Lord knows how many children. And up in Birmingham a crowd of working women got together & signed a petition for a birth-control clinic or free access to knowledge of same or something … & the Bishop of Birmingham rose in his blasted episcopal righteousness & damned the life out of them.72

He wrote of the knitting ex-serviceman in a poem, 'The veteran', published in the New Zealand Times:73

Pale face, breast medalled, ancient threadbare coat In the wet street perpetually he sits, While half the unheeding world roars round and past, Moving with rapid fingers, still he knits. Ill written sign – 'to keep a wife and child' – This is the old unending end of man; With sharpened anxious features strained and set The instrument works out the given plan. Bright-coloured wools, a red, a blue, a green, Childs' caps and socks, the ordinary things, With hands that may have killed he knits and knits – A street where no one smiles and no bird sings.

Characteristic of much of the verse which he was writing prolifically – it was a more literary age than today – it lacks the life and immediacy of his letters. It provided an opportunity, however, to earn a guinea or two from the New Zealand Times, as had his article 'Going Home', which they had published a little earlier.74That opportunity disappeared with the demise of the paper shortly afterwards.

After the Unitarian Church and the Free Discussions Club, John reacted strongly to the Established Church: 'so far as I can see the only religion that will be any use in the long run will be a secular religion, if you can have such a thing', he wrote, after reading C.E.M. Joad on the subject in Thrasymachus, or, The Future of Morals. 'Dress it up if you like & get emotion behind it, but make it a force for & in this world & keep it in this world … Meanwhile about the only reason I can see for the existence of parsons is that it is a polite way of giving mental deficients the dole',75 a comment clearly intended to shock Auntie Win. In the early months of 1927 and again the following year, the subject 'of most hectic and lengthy controversy'76 was the revision of the Prayer Book. John followed it closely with a kind of fascinated horror – 'the most extraordinary argument! the most extraordinary people!'77 – and cut out the reports from the Times to send home to his father.

For his first Christmas in England, having called off a trip to Paris with Lorrie Richardson for financial reasons, John accepted an invitation to stay with the Johnson family in Manchester – 'a filthy hole, dirtier than London'.78 His brother Keith had come to know the Johnsons while he was working and training as an engineer in the Vickers Metropolitan factory there and had fallen for their elder daughter Fronnie (Frances), who was planning to follow him out to New Zealand at the end of February. John had already met Fronnie when she was down staying with an uncle and aunt in Rugby, and visiting them he had had his first taste of the English countryside, 'so neat & clean & trim & well arranged'. 'Father Johnson' was a Unitarian minister who described himself as a 'Christian imperialist' ('I asked him if the two things were entirely compatible, but he didn't have any doubts on the point'79) and had a passion for the poetry of Walt Whitman. While he did not seem 'at all backward about his own knowledge & accomplishments', the rest of the family, in John's eyes, seemed 'pretty comprehensively ignorant for such a father'.80 John, remarkably, was almost overwhelmed with the eating and drinking: 'Christmas Eve was bad enough, but Christmas Day was disgusting', and it went on and on. Some of John's views rather scandalised members of the extended Johnson family:

I went to church last night after an argument with Fronnie of considerable duration as to whether anybody's feelings would be hurt if I stayed away (unfortunately went to sleep during the sermon, but I was upstairs in a corner by myself so it didn't matter). Well, the organist like a silly ass, for a closing voluntary played the Hallelujah Chorus & the whole crowd stood up stock still in their pews; but I who had had to stand while he did the same thing the morning before hopped out & walked home. And letting this slip casually out, you never heard such a horrified outcry! Mrs J. quite paled. F's breath taken away. Father J's sister struck all of a heap. But this was nothing to the sensation caused when[,] the conversation having drifted via standing up generally & God Save the King & London customs in connection therewith, I had the face to suggest to Father J's sister's husband, who was going off in a paroxysm of more or less inarticulate admiration of the Br Empire that perhaps the said empire would come to an end some day from the instability of its social system, & added not with entire truth that I was a Socialist. They all paled distinctly & leapt from their chairs as if I had stuck a pin in all of them simultaneously … they all praise the Lord thankfully when Father Johnson says I'll grow out of it – he was worse than that once.81

John was in great demand to play the piano 'as a soloist & for songs (Watchman what of the night etc)' and learned, under protest, to play whist. He was taken to see Heaton Hall, formerly a stately home, now an art gallery with 'glorious watercolours of the Norwich school… Cox, Cotman, de Wint etc; & a fine house'. He had a day's tramp in the Peak District with Fronnie and some neighbours, and had a look at Manchester University and the John Rylands Library. 'Studying the bourgeoisie' took up so much time that he was able to read very little apart from Dean Inge's England; 'acute in some places but in others extraordinarily prejudiced or extraordinarily ignorant, & now & again both. Very rocky on imperial problems & the dominions.'82 After a fortnight he returned to London with some relief and mixed feelings about his future sister-in-law.

If the account he wrote to his parents was characteristically lively and full of cracks at almost everyone's expense, especially that of his brother Keith, his letters to Elsie make it clear that his first Christmas so far from home had left him very homesick. On Boxing Day he wrote her a 'special little letter', fifteen pages devoted to telling her how much he loved her. Their letters, in the time since John had sailed, had left them both unsettled and anxious. Elsie, less demonstrative of her feelings, must at times have felt overwhelmed by John's flow of words in letters and verse. He urged her to read Emerson's 'Give All to Love'; 'if you haven't it at home you can get it in the Oxford Book of English Verse, which is in the V.U.C. Library',83 but he wrote out one verse anyway. She was also to read '"To Meet, or Otherwise" in Hardy's Collected Poems p 292 … It is a Stunner, & as soon as I read it I thought, Well, I agree with that, & not a minute I spent with E. has been wasted.' He wrote of the times they had had together, especially tramping; for her birthday on 15 January he had bought a small manuscript book at Bumpus's into which he copied all the poems he had written to her and a number of others which he believed she liked, and he had posted this early in December. He enthused about the views on love and marriage of Dora Russell (at that time married to Bertrand Russell) and urged Elsie to read her, quoting from her book Hypatia:

To live with vigour, body & mind & imagination, without fear or shame or dread of death; to drive these baser passions from the hold they have upon our morality & our politics – this is what we ask of modern men & modern women. They can come to it only in reckless love of one another, a passion that gives again & again without fear of hurt or exhaustion.

John found this 'very noble'. 'I should like to think we loved each other like that, & I think we could – don't you?'84 What could Elsie have said in reply? He recommended Marie Stopes's Married Love and Wise Wedlock and sang the praises of Holland, where 'they have proper govt. teaching on birth-control; & consequently they have a much better educated & sensible & truly moral people there than anywhere else'. He was full of ideas on how much a married couple needed to live on; he was anxious that Elsie should visit and get to know his mother. He was clearly missing her dreadfully and wanted above all for some certainty about when she would follow him to England. Elsie did not find it easy to respond. She remained uncertain, conscious of the differences in their backgrounds: were they too great? could she match John's intellectual interests? was he not making new friends with whom he would have much more in common? There was perhaps nothing remarkable in this emotional turmoil for two people in love and twelve thousand miles apart. A return of letters took well over two months. What was remarkable about John and Elsie was the amount they wrote and the importance of the letters in their lives. This, as much as what was said, tells us how much they meant to each other at that time.

It is difficult now to recapture that sense of distance between New Zealand and Britain, and the dependence on letters to bridge the gap. Time and again in his letters both to Elsie and to his parents John waxes eloquent on the shortcoming of the postal system. After four months in London, he wrote to his parents:

The ultimate mystery to me is the way the NZ mail behaves. Now if you want a fit subject on which to exercise your noble pen in the columns of the Evening Post, here is a chance for you. I don't believe I've got it on the same day in the week more than three or four times since I got here. In the first month or so I gathered that Thursday was the normal day for it to arrive, since when it has come on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday & Saturday – once it came on the preceding Tuesday, but on the other occasions from two to five days later. What happens this week? I hadn't had a mail since my last Saturday in [Manchester]; so naturally I looks in the Times on Wednesday expecting to see 'Incoming Mails: Tomorrow: NZ' Nothing. I looks in on Thursday – Nothing. I looks in on Friday. 'Saturday Jan 22. N.Z.' Saturday morning I leap out of bed & tear downstairs to the hall table. Nothing. I get into a tube & blow down to the Bank of N.Z. (a) to draw a cheque (b) to look for mail. Notice up 'NZ mail due on Monday Jan 24'. On these occasions if Duncan happens to be with me he draws his hat down close over his ears & walks hurriedly in the other direction.85

In London again after Manchester, he got back to work in the Record Office and the British Museum. Newton was improving in John's estimation; 'an extraordinary range of knowledge, & he puts it across well',86 though he lacked a sense of humour, 'a bit portentous with all his virtues, & he generally misses the point if you say anything flippant at one of his seminars'.87 Newton had visited New Zealand and admired Dr Hight, who taught history at Canterbury, but on hearing that John had been taught by F.P. Wilson he gazed at him 'in a quizzical sort of way "I should say that you've had rather a rough row to hoe in your history" he said'.88

At the imperial history seminar which Newton ran for research students at the Institute of Historical Research, John was meeting a number of interesting fellow students, most of them 'colonials or yanks'; 'the English high-brow girls I have met give me the pip, & the men on the whole aren't much of an improvement; give me a Boer or an Aussie any day.'89 The 'Boer' was Cornelis Willem de Kiewiet (de K or Dickie). Born in Holland, he spent his youth in South Africa and graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1923. He then taught for two years in Southern Rhodesia and, when he and John met, he was already well into his thesis on British relations with the South African republics in the 1850s and 1860s. They found they had much in common. 'He has enlightened views on diet, so I gather', John reported to his parents, '& politics & quite a number of things'. 'We seem to talk the heavenly bodies in & out of the sky more nights than not.'90 The 'yanks' were a 'charming Canadian girl of sense & intelligence', Adelaide MacDonald, who in her passion for Jane Austen rivalled John's mother and, what was more, 'she approves of buying books',91 and an American, Helen Allen. An English member of the seminar and assistant librarian at the institute, Harry Ross, also made the grade. With Duncan and McGrath (who after a critical survey of schools of architecture had decided to study practical bricklaying and plumbing at the Brixton school of building, and in any time left over to go to a wood engraving class at the Westminster school of art), they formed a congenial and lively circle.

John and Duncan 'decided to have a party', he reported to his parents in March:

so we bought 1¾d worth of milk extra (½ pint) for cocoa & a bob's worth of biscuits & 21 crumpets; & 4 pennorth of chocolates which we ate before the party started. The personnel was my cobbers mostly from the Institute & it was a noble stroke in the cause of amity between nations; they were de Kiewiet (S.Africa) Ross (England) Miss MacDonald (Canada) Miss Allen (U.S.A.) added to which we had Duncan (Australia) & me (N.Z.) We had an uproarious time swapping national jokes; & when the time came for supper you would have been speechless in admiration at the organisation I evolved. The two girls toasted the crumpets & batted in the butter; Ross, being an Englishman & comparatively helpless watched the milk to see it didn't boil over & tried to warm a plate for the crumpets simultaneously, with the result that the milk very nearly did boil over; Duncan & I made my patent brand of cocoa, & de K, being a canny lad & a true colonial got out of the way & down on the biscuits.92

The socialising continued. Helen Allen, who lived in the same house as Adelaide, had a piano in her rooms. As always, John was called on to play. Helen, another great writer of verse, shared John's passion for Bach and many of his intellectual interests. The group as a whole became very close, giving one another moral support, reading one another's draft chapters, and later on proofreading theses and sharing the anxiety of all research students: would there be a job at the end of it all?

During the Easter break John and Duncan went to Bristol to a National Union of Students Congress which had the ostensible theme of the Art of Life. They were not impressed:

From the point of view of intellectual stir-up, it was a sheer wash-out … D & I, in our poor benighted colonial ignorance, & thinking we'd be up against mighty men if it came to a row, put in all the time we could mugging up Havelock Ellis & the Bertrand Russells … But jingo! a milder mannered, more conventional, stick in the mud thoroughly respectable English gathering you never saw. 350 of them there were, of whom perhaps ten had any guts. I must say these ten or so were pretty good in a way; spoke very well, & had cheerful grins, & had travelled a good bit, & could clap at the right time in a speech in French or German, but I didn't hear a single new idea there … Certainly I got the impression that the average English student is no more bright nor brainy nor throbbing with modernity & unplumbed depths of agonising thought than the average NZ student; though that is not to be taken as a compliment to the N.Z. student.93

The guest speakers were a mixed lot. Bertrand Russell was pretty good but said nothing new, Margaret Bondfield very good, Lady Astor 'a great disappointment … a perfectly hopelessly muddled mind'. She 'came down like a ton of bricks' on Duncan when he said his favourite form of leisure was lying in the sun – 'just pandering to the body', in Lady Astor's view. John's greatest obloquy was kept for Sir John Reith: 'if you ever want to get the real dinkum repulsively sanctimonious brand of business-success talk you couldn't apply to a better man than Sir J. Reith.'

There were social events, dances (to which John did not go), folk-dancing, 'fiercely denounced by the modernists' (to which he also did not go), a concert in which he supplied 'the brass, woodwind & percussion on the piano in Beethoven's Prometheus overture' and 'managed to start & finish triumphantly with the rest of the scratch orchestra'. Conference excursions took them to the Cheddar Gorge ('hailing too hard to see anything much'), the caves and Cheddar itself, which he thought 'hopelessly vulgarised, like every other village in this hopeless country by yellow signs & advertisements on all the houses for Pratt's motor spirit & other curses of civilization', and to Wells, Glastonbury and Bath, which made a more favourable impression.

Back in London, John, Duncan and McGrath all bought bicycles, talked of for some time, at Selfridge's: £5 7s 'for a mangle painted green weighing ½ ton, complete with bell, carrier, oil-can, pump, lamp, insurance policy & guarantee for 50 years'.94 After several trial runs he set off at Easter for the Peak District of Derbyshire with Lorrie Richardson. They were away for eleven days, covering about 375 miles on their bikes and getting in four days' good hard tramping. 'By jingo! It was a good trip, & a great relief to get into the open & look rough again.' They slept out, pitching their tent under hedges or stone walls, selecting, on principle, spots where trespassers were firmly forbidden. John was warming to the English countryside and its villages and to Norman and Early English churches but, he sadly concluded, 'Grouse appear to be the most important thing in England, the peak & apex up to which the whole of western civilisation works'.95 Returning south they called at Cambridge ('I never saw anything more beautiful than some parts of Cambridge') and met with Jack Yeates, who was leaving to return to New Zealand in June. 'We did our best to convince him that he was committing intellectual suicide, but in vain.' They camped at Grantchester and looked around Rupert Brooke's Old Vicarage. Then back to London, to opera, plays, concerts and work.

John's musical experience was broadening. In January he had been to a production of Wagner's The Mastersingers by the British National Opera Company. 'They don't go in for highly-paid stars' but 'it was good enough for me, in my first modest introduction to Wagner'. Then after Easter he went to Tristan and Isolde at Covent Garden, 'straight from the P.R.O. [Public Record Office] at ½ past 4 & by queuing up then got quite a good seat for 3/- in the gods. The show started at 7'.96 He judged it first-rate, some of the greatest stuff he had ever heard. Sigrid Onegin sang Brangane – 'so there is one ambition of my life fulfilled, to hear her in the flesh' – and the other singers were mostly up to her standard. His only regret was that it was the last performance and he cursed himself afterwards for not going two or three times. 'I must get a piano score, I think, & work at it properly.' To mark the centenary of Beethoven's death, the Léner Quartet were playing all his quartets and John got to four of the recitals, 'but the music is so highbrow that it is pretty hard going when you haven't heard any of it before, especially after a series of late nights & a few hundred West Indian dispatches'.97 After a London Symphony Orchestra concert, at which he had a seat behind the orchestra, he reported on Sir Thomas Beecham's conducting:

He is a big cove with a singular assortment of mannerisms; conducts without a single score & in the slow movements without a baton; smiles in a peculiarly pleased way when anything particularly pleases him & purses up his lips & hisses horrifiedly when anything is too loud. He stops conducting altogether sometimes & just lets the orchestra go on … Cripes, though! he delivers the goods.98

The bikes continued to be put to good use as summer advanced. One Sunday John, Duncan and McGrath rode down into Kent via Greenwich, where McGrath pointed out the fine points of Wren's Greenwich Hospital which later became the Royal Naval College. After tea at Shoreham in a garden 'full of gorgeous tulips & flowering fruit trees'99 – but no mention of Samuel Palmer, whom John discovered only some time later – they had a three-hour ride back into London. Two weeks later it was Surrey, and then at Whitsun weekend, at the beginning of June, John and Lorrie Richardson went down to Kent again, taking Harold Holt, who had turned up in London ten days earlier after spending over a year working and travelling in North America. 'Harold hadn't been near a bike for about 10 years, & as we did about 150 miles or more in the two days we nearly killed him.'100 They visited Canterbury and had a good look over the cathedral. John was struck by the glorious stained glass and magnificent organ, but other comments of his rather shocked his mother with their irreverence. That evening they 'hopped over a fence & camped in some bird's park' a few miles on from Canterbury. The next day they visited Dover ('a rotten place, with a notice on one side of a pier Bathing Males only & one on the other side Bathing Females only; so we spat on it & left') and Folkestone on the way back to London. 'A great trip … to celebrate which I had 2d of geyser & a hot bath.' John was discovering Edward Thomas's England of villages and countryside, of a man-made and age-old landscape. 'The country outside London is very beautiful … when you get to it; I must say I like the English civilised type of beauty very much, as contrast to the ruggedness of NZ, but the trouble is that London keeps spreading like a cancer'.101

The term finished at the end of May. 'Just remember', John wrote to his parents, 'that even now I am the greatest living authority on colonial governors' instructions in the last ¼ of the 18th & the first ½ of the 19th century, even if to be such is of no conceivable use whatever.'102 On 2 June he left for Holland with Helen Allen and Adelaide MacDonald. They landed in Rotterdam, had a day in The Hague and then, met up with de Kiewiet in Amsterdam. Amsterdam struck John as the most beautiful city he had yet seen, 'full of a quiet dignity, very green & well-mannered & charming'.103 From there they went to Antwerp and then Brussels. Everywhere the art galleries made a great impression. Early in the year he had enthused about an exhibition of Flemish art at the Royal Academy in London; accompanying it had been a small exhibition at the British Museum of Flemish illuminated manuscripts and miniatures: 'Glorious things', John reported, 'it would be worth a cove's while to take a trip to England purely to see these.'104 He bought Roger Fry's Flemish Painting on its publication. Now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague he found 'some very good Vermeers … I have contracted a love for Vermeer, & Rembrandt's Anatomy lesson which is a great thing.'105 The Rijks Museum in Amsterdam had Rembrandt's Night Watch, 'certainly one of the most magnificent things I have ever seen, & four Vermeers, some of the most exquisite, & many other Rembrandts & Lord knows what else beside – a perfect orgy'. In Bruges he was struck by Van Eyck and Memling. 'There's something very satisfying about these primitive birds, in spite of their sameness of subject; but my word, brilliance of painting!' The painters John admired were largely those he already knew from books at home; what excited him was the brilliance of the originals compared with the reproductions he had grown up with. He had yet to discover painters who were new to him, and especially those working at that time.

The group was proving very congenial. 'My travelling companions are very bright,' John reported to Elsie, 'though Dicky bores me occasionally with accounts of his soul & his views on women.'106 He thoroughly approved of Helen's 'low-bred sense of humour highly shocking in an otherwise cultivated American lady'.

At Antwerp they had a programme of pictures and museums mapped out but, getting to the Plantin-Moretus Museum ('a wonderful place') first of all, they ended up by staying all day. It was the establishment of the sixteenth-century printer Plantin, which had continued as a family business until the end of the nineteenth century, when it was sold to the government for a museum and then restored and kept as it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is a big square, with a courtyard in the middle, two stories & three at one end; living-rooms, offices, warehouse, proof-readers' rooms, type-setting & printing rooms, the place where he cast all his own type, kitchen, library & so on. I was never in a more fascinating place in my life. One big room is kept as a small museum of printing, with the Gutenberg bible as the star item, & lots of other first-rate things. I'm beginning to believe that the first printers did the best printing. All the type-faces are on show, blocks, copper-plates, bundles of proofs, half-corrected, accounts etc, just as if the place had been cleaned up for Sunday & the family were out for the day. Marvellous place … very hard … to drag oneself away from.107

John's fascination with and enthusiasm for printing were a foretaste of things to come.

After Brussels (wonderful patisseries noted, and the Palais de Justice, 'the most atrocious erection on earth next to the Albert Memorial') they stayed one night in Cologne and spent all the time they had there in and around the cathedral. 'It's something to have lived to have seen this Cathedral.'108 For once John was at a loss for words: 'it's simply no use trying to describe it. It's the sort of thing you dream about … I'll merely remark that to visit Cologne Cathedral is an emotional experience of the first magnitude & leave it at that.' He was to see the cathedral next in 1955, bombed and largely destroyed, a wrenching reminder of its breathtaking past. They left Cologne for Coblenz with many regrets, spent a day on a paddle steamer travelling up the Rhine to Mainz, and then caught a train to Heidelberg. There, in a bookshop, John and de Kiewiet discovered a great series of facsimile reproductions of etchings and woodcuts. 'Rembrandt & Durer & all the rest of them; absolutely stunner reproductions, & dirt cheap … We got a good many between us, but when we get to Munich we are going to have a regular orgy.'

After a perfect day in Heidelberg, they found their way to Neustadt, a small town in the Black Forest, 'one of the luckiest chances of the whole trip'. The pubs were full but with the help of 'numerous bright children who tore all over the place with great excitement & zeal'109 they were able to get two rooms in two private houses 'among the most charming people imaginable'. John was totally won by the place. 'I have never seen a more pleasant, good-natured, smiling country, & the people fit it.'110 They spent three nights there and left most reluctantly. 'Our two old ladies coyly presented us with button holes of carnations & many smiles; & we shook hands most feelingly & said Aufwiedersehen with the utmost emotion. They were dear people & gave us bed & breakfast for about 2/6 a time. We were slaughtering their sons & grandsons a little while ago.' John's father was moved by the last comment to observe: 'were they not, or their people, slaughtering our sons and grandsons also a little while ago?'111

Then Zurich, and on to Innsbruck, which was

surrounded by the most magnificent hills on all sides; & the streets are full of shorts & hob-nailed boots & the shops of boots & shoes & swags & rope & ice-axes & other desirable things … Other things that are cheap here are beer & liqueurs – Chartreuse 10d a bottle. But as you are not the experts in these things that I am I shall draw a judicious & tactful veil. I wish I could do a bit of climbing round here, but alas! & alas! We are leaving tomorrow night for Vienna, which I am told is the finest city in the world.112

Vienna disappointed – 'since the war the life has gone out of the place'113 – with the exception of the bookshops and the coffee topped with whipped cream – 'perfectly marvellous, nay peerless stuff'.114 They visited Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburgs, 'interesting historically & for its park … but for sheer brutal vulgarity you never saw anything like its interior decorations'.115 John bought a new pair of spectacles, the best Zeiss glass, for 9/-. They had horn rims in contrast to the steel rims he had worn until then. The rest of the party thought them 'very classy'. They moved on to Munich, where they spent a week and wished it was a month. Accommodation was cheap but it was made an expensive week by the price of food (3s or 3s 6d for a meal) and the opera. Beer, on the other hand, was cheap: 'you could get enough beer to drown in for a few pfennigs – gone are the days when under the influence of my Primitive Methodist aunts & other relatives I engaged with ardour in prohibition campaigns' – this was John writing to Elsie.116 A festival of Wagner and Mozart was on. Adelaide shouted the party to Parsifal (magnificently done) to celebrate having got a job at Toronto University. They shouted themselves to Tristan, and two each went to the Marriage of Figaro and to the Magic Flute; John found the Magic Flute disappointing, saved in his view only by 'the overture and about three good songs'. He bought the scores of Tristan and Parsifal and The Mastersingers. There were more museums, more galleries. 'You can see', John wrote, 'that I am absorbing art like a sponge.' But a critical note entered:

What gets me down about the picture galleries in Europe is the vast wall-spaces they devote to Rubens. Wherever you go you find acres & acres of canvas & miles on miles of rooms devoted to his perfectly maddening facility. The man didn't paint, he spawned monsters … It's about time some public-spirited curator rolled up his sleeves & had a bonfire. Munich would be an admirable place to start.117

He left Germany enormously impressed with the country and the people. 'Of course we didn't meet any Prussians, but everybody I know who has been to Germany has the same tale to tell & the same admiration for them.'118

The party broke up in Paris. John stayed for a fortnight with Harry Espiner, his old Victoria College friend, who had been there for five years and was a year off finishing his French doctorate. Boyd-Wilson had offered him a job back at Victoria, but his own view, shared by John, was that he would be a fool to go back. 'The only reason any NZer I have met over here, bar Yeates & Holt, wants to go back', John wrote, 'is to see his people, & even Holt is succumbing to the attractions of civilization.'119 They went to Rouen for three days, which they found very picturesque and full of memories of Joan of Arc, who was imprisoned and burned there. 'The oldest houses go back to about the 15th century. Not very sanitary of course, but that doesn't matter a curse to the French, sanitation being a subject to which they do not seem to have turned the national attention with any great ardour as yet.'120 There was a fine cathedral, and some magnificent glass – '& let me tell you I have got the stained-glass bug pretty badly'.

Back in Paris, he visited the Louvre for the fourth time and discovered that he had still seen only about an eighth of it. Whistler's portrait of his mother, in John's view, 'bears comparison with anything in the whole place', Holbein's portrait of Erasmus was 'first-rate', he found more of his favourite Flemish primitives and a good Vermeer, but what thrilled him most was the Winged Victory. He bought some more books – though at 125 francs or just over a pound he decided Ulysses was too expensive – and had to borrow a suitcase from Espiner to get them back to London, together with a quarter-litre of Curaçao for Adelaide's farewell party and a little bust of Voltaire, for five francs, 'to which I pray every night'. The fares for the trip had cost just over £13.

In London, he returned to Canadian constitutional history and Earl Grey's defence of the colonial policy of Lord John Russell's administration; to the Proms, 'going steadily along with great success & biting criticism from Ernest Newman';121 to more theatre and to enjoying life with his friends. One Saturday John visited the Wallace Collection with Helen Allen, after which she, Harold Holt, Lorrie and de Kiewiet met at Brunswick Square for tea. After a lengthy meal they adjourned to Helen's flat, where John 'performed on the piano with great vim' and they 'swapped travel yarns & sociological & political discussion & jokes & other lies'. Thrown out of there ('no noise after 10'), they returned to Brunswick Square for a 'discussion on typewriters with practical demonstrations by de K', who was in the process of typing his thesis. The next day John and Lorrie got out their bikes and 'blew down into Surrey for the day'. Two weeks before this, John and Duncan had ridden to St Albans to see the abbey. Harold left to return to New Zealand, 'cursing his fate & his lack of money'. His views had changed remarkably in the three or four months he had had in Britain.

Others were arriving, among them Bill Joliffe, on his way to Edinburgh University, and Dick Campbell, who enrolled at the LSE and found himself a room next to the House of Lords 'so as to be on the spot in moments of crisis'. He reported that the New Zealand Labour Party's great grievance was that Coates (for whom he had worked as private secretary) was 'taking away all their grievances, somewhat to the alarm of Coates' own party'.122 Campbell was quickly absorbed into John's circle of friends, and they began their 'Winter Salon season' with a party which sparked more than any party John had ever known.

Present Miss Allen, Messrs Campbell, de Kiewiet, Duncan, Espiner [over from Paris], Ross, me. Refreshments, one large & thrilling cake provided by Mrs D.E. & Miss Beaglehole & sent over per R.M.C., wiv tuppences in it (including one Australian, therefore no good for English circulation & only good for charity); my celebrated cocoa, cider, Curaçao. Discussion: the late war, the peace, Lloyd George, dairy control, America, Dick Seddon, Bobby Stout, the weather, Pres. Wilson, presidential prospects in the U.S., foreign policy of Ramsay MacDonald, Raglan election, ducal tours, Billy Hughes, family endowment, S. African flag, Ph.Ds, the School, the Institute, distinguished profs, relative merits of lecturers, & other subjects. They are a bright lot. But these clear headed economists like Duncan & Campbell put the wind up me when they get going properly; they know everything, & they always argue straight to the point, & they have memories like magnets & they talk brilliantly. However I as host only had to sit back & cut the cake & make the cocoa & say What's yours? in an ingratiating tone.123

Campbell was making his mark with the New Zealand High Commissioner. 'As Jimmy Parr said to Campbell, on his return from Geneva as official NZ delegate in the cause of peace & international understanding "You know, I don't trust any of these foreigners".'124

The news of the composition of the party for the European tour had been received by John's parents with a certain disquiet. With his mother, at least, he had been fairly open about his feelings for Elsie, and Elsie had visited her a number of times since John's departure. Where, they wished to know, did things now stand? The reply, in John's third letter after getting back to London, was characteristic, if hardly straightforward:

Daddy wants a respectful answer to some very delicate queries as to my degree of intimacy with various ladies. Well now this subject is indeed such an intimate one that I don't know whether I am justified in answering it at all, in however respectful a manner, let alone in a letter that I suppose will be food for general consumption. I make no remark on the highly indelicate nature of the inquiry. That a father should endeavour so to tyrannise over the Soul of his son is indeed a dreadful warning of the fact that the 19th century is still with us. Turn but a stone, & start a swing. I might refer him to the Way of all Flesh & ask pertinently, does he wish to see me (a) in prison (b) running a 2nd hand clothing shop, with a wife secretly on the drink? I might ask, why should I, a man of London, Viennese, & Parisian experience, let alone Wellingtonian, be subject to the ordinary shackles of life, let alone leading questions from his parents. I might say, Is this right, is it just, is it generous? I might demand, how would you like it if your son turned round & said, What did that lady call you when you trod on her toes the umpteenth time at the Savage Club Ladies Night After Entertainment Dance? I might demur, Well, this is the sort of intimate attack on my morals I am accustomed to get from Fronnie but to think that a Father should ever treat me thus! I might plead the hot blood of youth & let it go at that, proudly & contemptuously. I might say in the sacred words of J.E. Flecker 'I am Don Juan curst from age to age, By priestly tract & sentimental stage' etc. I might lose my temper & exclaim Well upon my heart & soul this is too much! But I do none of these things. I answer as respectfully as possible, with dignity, with a certain cold reserve possibly, but as one who knows his place & how to address a Father. Let me say therefore that Yes, I am on fairly familiar terms with all my friends, including the lady ones; that the girls I have left behind me are neither forgotten nor discarded, but temporarily in abeyance; that it is off with no old loves, or alternatively, however off with old loves it may be it is on with no new ones, though possibly a more elastic definition of 'loves' might bring a different answer. To the remark on the disregarding of the usual conventions I answer What conventions? And further ask for a definition of the words 'disregard' & 'usual'. And for all further information on my philosophy of social-relationships I refer you to the broadminded tolerance & wide understanding of Auntie.125

Not letting it go at that, John added that he had invited Helen Allen to go with him on a visit to his Uncle George and family: 'she pointed out that on the whole it might be unwise to cause a scandal either in Trimley St. Mary or NZ, to the force of which reasoning I was of course bound to agree. But you will see that I am quite unscrupulous in intention, even if practical considerations do hold me back.' The letter concluded, 'With love from your very respectful son'. The enquiry was not repeated.

De Kiewiet finished his thesis in October. John rallied round in the last stages. 'I went up to his place one afternoon at 5 p.m. & left at ¼ to 4 next morning – we both worked straight through, he typing & I proof-reading & correcting, with 5 minutes off now & again for teas & 1.30 toast, & an occasional doubtful story.'126 His own work was progressing well and he expected to finish at the Record Office in December and to start writing in the Christmas vacation. All his 'bright particular historical cobbers' would have left by the end of the following summer and he was thinking of trying to get his own thesis written by June; 'even if I don't put it in then, I shall have it off my mind, except for revising, & have the summer free'. Besides, he wanted to finish reading Jane Austen.127 He had 'at last' made a start with Pride and Prejudice when staying with the Butlers at Trimley in September, 'after which I may say that I feel for Jane Austen almost the reverence I feel for Conrad'.128 He told Elsie what a pleasant surprise the news would be for his mother: 'you must know that to Mrs D.E. Beaglehole Miss Austen is practically Bible, guide-book & tram ticket in one. If she was lost on a desert island she'd say give me Jane Austen & a bag of wholemeal flour & I'll be content.'

He decided that Newton was becoming quite polite to him, and

… it almost looks as if when de K goes I shall take his place as the white-headed boy. I won't mind if I can dig another schol out of it. There is stacks of work to do if only you can get the chance of doing it. I could put in about 20 years very nicely doing a history of British colonial policy since 1783; & it's easy work compared to poetry.129

What's more, he wrote, 'though this may be unpardonable conceit, I think I can write a darn sight better than any colonial historian I have come across over here.'130 He had read J.S. Marais's The Colonisation of New Zealand, just published by the Oxford University Press, as well as A.J. Harrop's England and New Zealand (Methuen, 1926), and was clearly irritated. Marais had written the book that he had meant to write and, he clearly believed, 'if Messrs Harrop & Marais had got out of the way, the job would have been done a lot better'.131

Dick Campbell lent John a copy of the New Zealand Parliamentary Debates with the report of the debate on the second reading of the War Disabilities Removal Bill, which would bring to an end the civil penalties still placed on conscientious objectors after the war. John was horrified at the narrow-minded intolerance of many of the speakers opposing the Bill, especially that of the Hon. G.J. Garland, an Auckland member of the Legislative Council since 1918, who had argued that Germany remained hostile to the rest of Europe and only her circumstances prevented further aggression. With memories of his time in Germany still fresh, John wrote a 2000-word letter to the editor of the Evening Post. It showed his growing skills as a writer. He began with the politicians: 'On the question of the immediate or remote causes of the war it would ill become a mere historian to argue with a Legislative Councillor. And on the psychology of present-day Germany a Dominion politician is doubtless the repository of ultimate wisdom.' He continued with an almost lyrical description of the visit to Neustadt, the village seemingly growing out of the land with its surrounding hills and its cheerfully companionable people, the two charming old ladies who provided his party with rooms and were so desolated to see them leave.

Come back, they said, and we will teach you the Schwarzwald accent! There is nothing, we said that we want to do in this world so much as to come back to Neustadt! Auf wiedersehen! said our charming old ladies. Auf wiedersehen! said we, wringing their hands, and set off down the hill to the station. Neither they nor the thousands of other hardworking, modest, friendly people we met in Germany, in trains, on the streets, in parks, in galleries, in third and fourth class railway carriages, seemed to nourish any insatiate desire to fly at our quite defenceless throats.

John wrote of the German students he had met in London, 'clearheaded, unaffected, passionately interested in a more adequately organised world', before ending, rather bitterly, with a comment on the lack of understanding and imagination, of generosity, on the part of his fellow-countrymen revealed in the debate, 'which to any travelled New Zealander who has observed with candour, who has thought sincerely and dispassionately, makes any country rather than New Zealand his spiritual home'.

McGrath thought it was the best thing John had written, de Kiewiet typed it out for him and, somewhat to his surprise, the Post published it.132 It was reprinted in the New Zealand Worker133 and later in Spike.134 John's parents reported favourable comments. Hunter thought it a 'very fine effort'; Peter Fraser, member of parliament for Wellington Central, wrote to express his appreciation;135 and years later Eric McCormick remembered how he had read it in Spike and first became aware of John as a writer.136

John's view of New Zealand was not improved when he visited the New Zealand High Commission:

The place is full of what I will not, for politeness sake, call lying circulars, but may perhaps describe as publications projecting a rose-tinted view of life in the Britain of the South for the emigrant & retired army-officer. 'Yes', says one of the lady staff in my hearing to an anxious enquirer, 'You'll find that every town has a first-class girls' school absolutely first-class.' At which I said to myself, My oath! & left.137

With November, winter was closing in. 'The weather varies from bad to worse with occasional incursions into worst … the water in the morning pretty well gives you rigor mortis in your bath.' John and Duncan learned that they were known in the house as 'those cranky boys who have cold baths in the morning & whistle like parrots all day'.138 The concert season began again. There were more free recitals at St Martin's. The Léner Quartet gave a series of six historical chamber music concerts for which John paid nineteen shillings for a season ticket; he once again went to Bach's B Minor Mass, this time performed by the St Michael's Singers. He heard Gustav Holst conducting the Royal Choral Society in his Hymn of Jesus, which John thought great stuff, and Pablo Casals play a Haydn concerto – 'he is the goods'. The London String Quartet played two of Beethoven's last quartets, which John confessed he hadn't 'got hold of yet'. The London String Quartet was a complete contrast to the Léner and pleasing for a change, 'masculine where the Léner is feminine, vigorous where the Léner is languishing'.139 He went out to Golders Green with Helen Allen to hear La Bohème, and The Mastersingers once again, put on by the British National Opera Company. Just before Christmas he took Duncan and McGrath along to the Messiah 'to pump some culture into them … Beecham, London Symphony Orchestra, two choirs combined … Beecham really transforms the thing'.140 At the theatre he saw an Old Vic production of The Taming of the Shrew with Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, 'not a pleasant play but very well done', and also Strindberg's The Father which he found terrific, 'exceedingly gloomy but exceedingly good. Like other fathers.'141 Edith Evans in The Way of the World proved a great actress, the play a first-rate thing.142

The prospect of Christmas led to a laborious morning in Bumpus's choosing books for the family. Aunts were sent Christmas cards done by Berrie Butler. John also had the idea of having his own card printed, using one of his poems and a woodcut by McGrath. The printing was done by the Cambridge University Press, McGrath now being at Clare College and 'having them well under his influence'.143 He and John combed London to get paper they approved of, finally settling on 'a sort of Austrian semi hand made' they found at Selfridges. This cost '15/- for 100 sheets & envelopes to match. The printing only cost 8/-, so … I got 100 perfectly good Xmas cards for 2¾d each.'144 John chose a poem written at Innsbruck a few months earlier, the two last stanzas being:

The hills, the hills again! I come From peaks that cut a southern sky – How shall I see these wind-stripped rocks And feel no stir, nor make one cry? They stand, they lift the heart, they stand; There is no tide of change that kills The passionate companionship Of the aloof, unheeding hills!

John had worked with printers in the days of editing Spike, but the collaboration with McGrath marked a further step in the development of his interest in what was to become a lifelong fascination with printing and typography. His parents were delighted: 'the finest thing of the kind I have seen', his father wrote.145

Newton pushed his students into having a seminar dinner. Arranged largely by Helen Allen and John it was a flash affair, costing four shillings each, held in a little place off Soho Square where they went right through from hors d'oeuvres via roast chicken to coffee. John played the piano. It left him with mixed feelings. Four shillings 'would cover 4 days' lunches at the Food Reform joint. I generally get a meal there for 11d these days & spend what I save at Bertorellis on the evening meal. The soup there is the best I've tasted since I left home.'146 Another four shillings went on Christmas dinner. He had decided to stay in London and get on with his writing, turning down an invitation to the Butlers. He and a group of young men went out to a pub McGrath was very keen on, for its architecture and situation, the Bedford Arms at Chorley Wood. Henning, whom John had not seen since they arrived in London, came over from Paris for the occasion and, as well as McGrath and Duncan, there were a friend of Henning's from Paris and three 'architectural cobbers' of McGrath's. The conviviality was such that John thought it wise largely to draw a veil over it in his letter home, 'or at least give a genteel version', while the success of the occasion led the group to gather again (at 21 Brunswick Square) to celebrate New Year's Day, to hire a harmonium for the week (a shock to John when it was delivered up the stairs), and to produce a typed programme, 'a somewhat esoteric document', which he sent home. On Christmas Day he also fitted in a 'flash Christmas supper' with Helen Allen, de Kiewiet and a Canadian student, and that completed his 'tale of debauchery – not half so long continued, solid, or wearing' as the previous year.147 Rather, he was able to do a fair amount of work.

Helped by Christmas money from home, he bought a new overcoat (his lady friends were making pointed comments about the one he had brought with him from Wellington) and also A.V. Dicey's The Law of the Constitution and Law and Opinion in England that he had long been wanting. He went to The Way of the World again, with McGrath and Henning: 'I could sit & listen to Edith Evans in the second act all night'. What was more, he was able to report to his mother that he had finished Emma and started on Sense and Sensibility.

5London, 1928–29

Jobs, A Great Preoccupation of research students, come into John's letters almost from the time of his arrival in London. On first meeting with de Kiewiet, they talked about prospects in South Africa: 'Capetown University wouldn't be a bad place for a job … they have a good library & a good staff there; & a good orchestra in the town, & according to de K have a good deal of intellectual stir & a pretty vigorous native culture; while the lucky blighters are only 17 days from England.'1 He talked with Newton:

He reckoned that 2ndary school teaching in England wasn't a bad business, & gave you time for research; but I am not to [sic] keen on kid-whacking. Also that the Colonial Education Service was a good thing; it would probably be in Africa somewhere, looking after the education of little niggers – organising, not teaching, except native teachers. Rise to about £1200, retiring at end of 20 yrs on £600 yr. And of course a cove would have the opportunity of getting well browned up & wearing dinky white clothes & a sun helmet, or shorts; but somehow I don't think it's my line. He told me to write to Hight & see if he can tell me anything about N.Z. prospects … Of course, once in N.Z. you're dead so far as history is concerned. On most other things except books & tramping, as far as that goes.2

John was not alone in his view of New Zealand. A letter from Professor Hunter gave a very gloomy view of the University of New Zealand – 'In this country we might be ready for a university in 2000 A.D.' – and went on to say that the 'object of the Travelling Scholarships was to make a New Zealander … realise that there were other people on the globe. If they are forced by economic circumstances to come back to N.Z. that is bad luck; if they come back by choice it is a clear indication that the scholarship was wrongly awarded. The atmosphere here is stifling.'3

The question was hopelessly tangled for John, not only by his relationship with Elsie, his worry about his mother's health and his feelings about New Zealand, but also by his growing confidence in what he could achieve, given the opportunity. To be praised by a group of friends and by Harold Laski, people whom he admired and respected, was for him a largely new experience.

In April 1927 Elsie wrote that she and Averil Lysaght had decided to come to England in twelve months' time and planned to stay for six months. John replied enthusiastically. The news made him feel 'ever so much happier', and they should, he thought, get married straight away and have a honeymoon in Cornwall.4 A letter or two later there was another plan: 'I really think a week or so of summer on the Thames would be a very fine honeymoon for us, even if we are not able to get married.'5 His letters to Elsie in the following months were more settled and much happier than they had been through his first 'awful, endless' winter. There were still crises but he largely took them in his stride. Averil Lysaght changed her mind about making the trip. However, a friend of Elsie's, Kathleen McKay, another banker's daughter, took Averil's place. John had never met her and wondered whether she would approve of him. Any uncertainty produced a fever of apprehension. 'I think I must still be in love with you from the terrific ferment your news threw me into', he wrote to Elsie about the changes of plan;6 and he worried that being so dependent on letters they were getting a bit out of touch with each other. 'It will be a terrific relief when you get here, & we can see how things really do stand … I wish to blazes you were going to arrive tomorrow. There are too many complications in this life & apparently it is no use trying to work them out by letter.'7 In November came the news that Kathleen had pulled out. Elsie was in doubt as to whether she should still make the trip. Her parents would be far from happy if she travelled alone. John cabled at once urging her still to come. Elsie cabled back to say that she would stick to her plan to arrive at the beginning of June and, subsequently, Kathleen was able to come after all.

While John was in Paris staying with Harry Espiner in August they had talked about the future. John wrote to Elsie at that time:

I am going to look into the possibility of going to the States for a year … I am getting more & more reluctant to go back to N.Z. permanently, as every other person I know here hates the idea of going back to exile in their native countries. I am seriously thinking of trying for a job in Canada, or in the States for a while; the only thing is that I hate leaving my Mother for good & dragging you away from your people. But going back to N.Z. as an assistant [lecturer] with no prospect of anything else seems the last thing on earth … what's the point of going back to N.Z. & committing intellectual suicide.8

In his letter to Elsie after her cabled confirmation that she was coming, he wrote five pages once again reviewing the job situation.

I am coming to the conclusion that what I am cut out for is a writer & a teacher. I can teach history, of a sort, in N.Z. if I have a job in a university, though not as it ought to be taught, crippled as they are at V.U.C. both by the shocking lack of books & the shocking presence of F.P. But I am primarily cut out for a writer; & I want if possible to write on history. Well what can I possibly do in that way in N.Z.… If I go back to N.Z. permanently I shall never write a line worth a damn …9

And then, inescapably, he is drawn back to his mother. 'I am worried in a ghastly way about her sometimes. If she were well & strong I could propose staying away 10 years with a light heart.' He compared himself with de Kiewiet: 'Dicky is all right, as he has had the good fortune never to be on good terms with his parents; but whatever I do I'm afraid I am going to be thoroughly miserable.'10 And his mother was far from well. From July 1927 very high blood pressure forced her to spend most of her time in bed and there were times when she could not write. John's cousin Joan, who had just finished her nursing training, came in to look after her. His father enclosed an extra note with his letter of 4 December (his parents always read each other's letters so they would not repeat the news) to say that his mother's condition was causing much anxiety and that Dr Bennett thought John should be told. A fortnight later, another special note reported that his mother was very much better. After Christmas she was able to be wheeled out into the garden on fine days. At New Year the doctor said it was possible she could go on satisfactorily for years. 'As things are now', John's father wrote, 'there is no reason for your turning anything down.'11

Before John received his father's first note, things had come to a head when, through Newton, he was offered a lectureship for two years at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in South Africa. He was attracted by it; he had heard it was the best university in South Africa after Capetown and thought he 'might be able to hop into F.P.'s job after it'.12 The catch was that it began in July. He would have a 'hell of a rush' to finish his thesis and Elsie was now due to arrive just when he would have to leave. Newton urged him to accept. Laski was away and could not be consulted. Duncan told him to accept. Helen and McGrath thought it was 'worth a gamble' to stay in London. De Kiewiet 'didn't know what to say'. John turned it down, mainly, it would seem, because of Elsie.

Thirty years later when I, in the early stages of my PhD research at Cambridge, was offered a short-term job at Liverpool University John's advice was to turn it down and to 'work like hell on the thesis'. 'I know the difficulties of making a decision', he wrote to me, 'I was offered a job for 2 or 3 years myself in S. Africa when I was doing my thesis, but I think I did the right thing in turning it down.' (JCB to THB, 30 May 1958.)

His parents were concerned that it was on their account and wrote to say that he must do whatever was best for his career, as long as he kept up his letters to them. The decision having already been made, the news of his mother's improvement cheered him. Then, as though that good news drew his thoughts back to New Zealand, he wrote to Elsie:

I understand you wondering about the hills & the sea & living in a place like London. I have been pretty homesick myself lately for the hills & the harbour; you know for some things I desperately want to go back to N.Z., although in other ways the thought gets on my nerves … however I slang N.Z., I do love it too, & love it desperately … If only it wasn't so far away from everything.13

Meanwhile his thesis was progressing. In January he typed out the third draft of his introduction, sent a copy of it to his parents, and reported that he had almost finished writing his first chapter.14 Laski read the introduction and was enthusiastic:

No sooner do I put my head in the door than he shouts 'Beaglehole, that's a simply corking piece of work!' And that was only a beginning! And then he says Have you seen the new edition of Keith? (i.e. Responsible Govt in the Dominions, standard work, 3 vols, new edition 2 vols, very expensive) Yes, I says. Have you got it? Have you got the old edition? (No, No) 'Well, how would you like my old edition? – I've just got the new one' Little Johnnie goggles as if he'd been offered the keys of heaven, but at last manages to make strangled sounds of gratification. Would Laski put his name in it? Yes, give me your pen. – 'J.C.B. Amico Amicus H.J.L. 6.2.28' Well! what do you think of that from the greatest man in the world? … Fair dinkum, that was about the brightest spot of my stay in London so far.15

This letter to Elsie was written the same day: John was bubbling with excitement, and for once his punctuation, generally meticulous, was out of control.

There were more concerts to go to, although, as he pointed out, 'if you go to concerts it means the ruination of work; if you don't, you may never get the chance again'.16 He was not deterred. He went to a harpsichord recital by Mrs Gordon Woodhouse and decided he must get a harpsichord; to the Vienna String Quartet, who played a Schönberg quartet, new to John, which he found 'very good in parts';17 to a concert of choral music at Southwark Cathedral; to a performance of César Franck's The Beatitudes by the London Choral Society, 'a pretty feeble thing to start with, & very feebly done'. Taking a break from Jane Austen, he had bought 'Chatto & Windus' complete Rabelais for 6/- as a makeweight against any undue refining influence' Jane might have on him,18 and was immersed in The Education of Henry Adams (given him by Helen). Thomas Hardy died and John went with Helen to the funeral service at Westminster Abbey:

by a great stroke of luck [we] got in to the Poets' corner … among the nobs. It was a quite simple but very impressive affair, & any cove ought to be glad to die to have such pall-bearers.

The pall-bearers were Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw, Barrie, Kipling, Housman, Baldwin, MacDonald and a representative each from Oxford and Cambridge.

A fine looking bloke is Galsworthy, likewise Ramsay MacDonald; Baldwin short & ugly – perhaps I should say excessively homely; Low gets him well in the Evening Standard. But Shaw looks as impressive as anybody I've seen. Barrie a wee little cove … The Abbey was full & the choir & organ first-rate; one of my favourite Bach preludes on the organ but played too fast. I stood, of all places to stand at the burial of Hardy, under the bust of Longfellow.19

John sent his father cuttings from the papers and a copy of the printed funeral service, 'not over-well printed'. A little later Asquith died: 'This makes three good deaths recently – Hardy, Haig & Asquith. Duncan wants to see a great philosopher go now, after these three, & says plaintively, Why not Hobhouse? But I say firmly, No, my boy, let's get rid of the politicians while the going's good. I'm voting for Balfour.'20

The 'Institute gang', John reported, had been having a fair amount of fun. They had a birthday party for two of them, 'a considerable rough-house at times' and he 'nearly broke the piano'. For a change from Bertorelli's, where they generally fed, they tried a Chinese restaurant and 'had a wonderful blow-out for two bob apiece'. In early March the crocuses and daffodils were out in the squares and John vowed he must get through Mansfield Park and 'settle Jane before the spring is properly with us'.21 His next letter reported that he had got to the end of volume two: 'I must say she does pick on appalling people to write about; & the tragedy of the business is that you can't stop reading about them'.22

John had planned a week in Cambridge but, when McGrath put it off until the next term, Helen suggested that he should go with her to the Cotswolds for a week. They took their research notes, found rooms in houses at the opposite ends of the village of Painswick, worked at their theses in the mornings, met for meals, and walked and explored in the afternoons, even when it snowed. They visited Gloucester to see the cathedral and discovered a second-hand shop with the 'biggest mess' of books John had seen in his life. Helen found a first edition of Tennyson's In Memoriam inscribed by the author, which she bought for 1s 6d. John was deeply frustrated by finding odd volumes of various works he coveted but not a single thing complete. The day before returning to London they went to Tewkesbury to see the abbey, which confirmed John's predilection for Norman architecture. They each bought brass candlesticks and John lamented that brass and pewter were becoming fashionable. From Painswick he wrote a long and enthusiastic letter to Elsie (she would receive it at one of the Australian ports on her way to England): the village was beautiful, it was in a beautiful part of the country, he was with a particularly charming girl, but what he really wanted, he wrote, was for Elsie to be toasting her toes at the fire next to where he was writing.23 With this letter he enclosed his poem 'In the Cotswolds', which begins

Yes it is beautiful, this old, old land: These houses root their being in the earth …

but goes on to conclude

A wind strikes – and my opened eyes are blind With gazing on an unseen distant place; My deaf ears hear Orongo-rongo's stones – Bloom bursts on wind-swept hills within my mind.

John's father was appalled that he and a 'young lady should go off together into the country like that … Are all the conventions of age-long respectability being broken down … My dear boy, you should be careful!'24 By the time John read this, Elsie was in England and, for once, he largely let the comment pass.

The postponed trip to Cambridge took place at the end of April. John had intended to work at the branch Record Office and to write some more of his thesis, but for four days out of the six the weather was wonderful, Cambridge at the height of spring was irresistible, and he did not do a stroke of work. After looking at 'Lord knows how many colleges', all that remained in his mind was a 'confused vision of quadrangles & courts, fellows' gardens, huge lawns, grey stone, bricks, punts, & the ceiling of King's College Chapel'.25 Clare College, where McGrath was now a research student, John judged to have the most perfect and harmonious buildings of any, as well as 'fine gates & a wonderful avenue & one of the best bridges in the place'. The Cambridge trees were marvellous, they turned 'a flat fen into a paradise'.26 His mind went back to Wellington:

If I were a millionaire I should certainly buy up all that is left of the Hutt Valley, & build a residential university there, in small colleges on the quadrangle system. But it would be co-educational, with men & women in the same buildings; & heads of colleges indiscriminately male or female, & there wouldn't be any proctors, & very few rules; so the place would probably be put down by the government, & the boys & girls returned to Dick Seddon's atrocity at Salamanca.27

McGrath had fallen on his feet at Clare. He had already designed a letterhead for the college stationery with a woodcut of the college coat of arms, and had just agreed to do some typographical ornaments for the university press. His illustrated diary of his summer trip to Spain was to be published in the Architectural Review, 28 and he was helping edit the Clare College magazine ('the best got-up thing of the kind' that John had ever seen), for which he both wrote and made woodcuts. 'I wish' John wrote, 'I only had half his capacity', but noted that McGrath had yet to make a start on his thesis. McGrath published poems by both John and Ian Henning in the magazine. John's, 'Molecular Theory', was also published (with a woodcut by McGrath) in another Cambridge magazine, the Venture, edited by the young art historian Anthony Blunt, later to achieve notoriety as one of the 'Cambridge spies'.

Noiseless, unnursed, the country rose Is born, and quietly it goes: The unheard bright anemone Blooms for the eye alone to see. Never a sigh, never a groan Utters this unmarked casual stone, There breaks no breath from this dull wood To hear, I know, nor ever should. Yet do I know that stone, wood, flower Travail and sicken every hour – Deep, deep about the hidden core A thousand systems meet at war. A thousand suns are brought to birth And shattered in the very earth Beneath my feet; without a sound Pulses the long-tormented ground. And yet, I think, could I but hear Once, suddenly, with quickened ear, Might I not start, as saw my eye A petal fall, to catch a cry?

John used the poem and woodcut for his Christmas card for 1928.

'McGrath's Laski' (John's words) was Mansfield Forbes, a Fellow of Clare and one of the creators, along with Arthur Quiller-Couch and I.A. Richards (recruited by Forbes), of the new English tripos which, for the first time enabled Cambridge students to do a whole degree in English. Forbes himself had graduated in history; his academic interests were idiosyncratic, his lectures exciting, quirky and unpredictable.

One of his most influential courses was on romanticism, defined very widely, from William Blake to Joseph Conrad. His lectures were liable to turn into seminars, or Forbes would not turn up for two or three weeks, after which he materialized to talk enchantingly about a poem, following its ramifications into music, painting and especially architecture, his first love. Forbes did not like formal supervisions, but many testified to his readiness to talk in all sorts of places.29

Forbes welcomed McGrath's friends. He had splendid rooms, full of books and paintings and drawings, on a corner of the college building. On one side he looked out on the great back lawn of King's, on the other across the Cam and Clare bridge to the Clare Fellows' Garden and the trees along the Backs. It was 'as desirable a life as you could wish for', John wrote, 'bar matrimony, if your wishes run that way' (only bachelor fellows lived in college). Forbes invited him to a dinner at high table ('one of the speediest meals I ever went through') and to a breakfast to meet a man who ran a school 'on very modern lines'. The schoolmaster

Theodore James Faithful, 1885–?, author of Bisexuality: An Essay on Extraversion and Introversion (London: John Bale and Sons, 1927), and other works on social credit, sex education, psychology, and socialism.

seemed 'a very sound cove' but was 'balmy [sic] on libido & introverts & extraverts', which was, in John's view, all very nice but not the simple explanation of the universe that it appeared to be to its expounder. Like Laski, Forbes provided John with a model of a university teacher quite unlike anyone he had experienced at Victoria.

John discovered the Fitzwilliam Museum, inspected the bookshops pretty systematically and bought a few books 'including a folio Hobbes 1750, for 30/- & a ditto work of James I for 21/-. A bloke must have some folios for a foundation to his library.' He went to see Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder Arms and with McGrath to a production of The Devil's Disciple. They cycled to Ely to inspect the cathedral, 'a very mixed sort of Cathedral, but a fine Norman nave',30 and the following day, his last in Cambridge, he went and lay in the hot sun in the Grantchester meadows by the river and dreamed of the perfect university. 'What a place we could have in N.Z. if we loosened the purse strings & only tried!' – this was to his parents; to Elsie he wrote that he had been 'thinking continually' about her.31

Elsie and Kathleen were due to arrive in England on 4 June. John said very little to his parents about the prospect save that 'it will be pleasant to see them again',32 but his anxiety is revealed in a letter to Challis Hooper:

The emotions in this young breast quite defy exposition; the only thing I can do is to pray (or at least to hope desperately) that the first sight of each other will clear up all difficulties … It will be 22 months since we said good-bye, she in despair, I in confidence; & we have been spending about the last year wondering how much we have unconsciously moved apart. You certainly can't tell much from letters. Would it be better for both of us if I decided to fall in love with my very intimate friend H. – & persuaded H. to fall in love with me (which might be difficult) – who has so very many tastes & inclinations in common with me, as well as being a historian working on the same period? … It's all very distracting I can tell you, to a bloke who ought to have but a single mind, & that centred not upon 20th century women, whether N.Z. or American, but upon the 18th & 19th century British Empire – a quite important subject, though one not quite so palpitating.33

Elsie and Kathleen moved into a room in 21 Brunswick Square and John had a break from the thesis ('Australian land instructions', with which he was getting 'fed up to the teeth') to show them around London. They went to Kew and to the zoo, neither of which he had been to before; to Hampton Court; to the opera (Carmen and Verdi's Otello); to his first revue, Clowns in Clover; to a second revue, Many Happy Returns; to the Victoria and Albert Museum, again his first visit, though it was to become one of his favourite haunts in London. Galsworthy's Justice he reported to be 'actor proof, always able to get its effect', but Stravinsky's Apollo Musagetes at the Russian Ballet he found an 'extremely poor thing'.34 His most startling piece of news (to his parents) was that he had, at Barker's sale, bought two new suits for £12 5s. This can have been due only to Elsie's influence.

'The news', his father wrote, 'just about knocked us out'. (DEB to JCB, 2 September 1928.)

To regain his composure, he went to the Tate Gallery to look at the modern French paintings. Early in July, with no fixed plans, the three left for a holiday in France.

On the way to Southampton to catch the boat to St Malo, they broke the journey at Winchester, making a pilgrimage to Jane Austen's tomb and house. John wrote a short note to his mother enclosing a postcard of the house.35 There was no time to look at Southampton but, John wrote, he 'got quite an agreeable thrill from being for a whole 24 hours in Hampshire, the land of one branch of my ancestors',36 one of very few such comments in all his letters. As with his trip the summer before, he wrote a detailed account in his letters home: on food and wine and the price of everything, on French sanitation, on historic towns and cathedrals and the awful flood of development along the coast of Brittany and Normandy. He discovered omelettes and rhapsodised about cheese: 'when I think what N.Z. is & what it might be, even in such a matter as the production of cheese, I blush for the divine process'.37 From St Malo they went to Dinan, then Mont St Michel, 'a wonderful place, now organised with the greatest energy & efficiency for fleecing the tourist', and on to Constances and Bayeux. John found the tapestry very interesting and far better than he expected, 'full of life and colour'. The weather was holding out miraculously. 'Beer good.' After Bayeux came Caen. The end of the letter John wrote from Caen is very characteristic:

In the evening of our Bayeux day we came on to Caen. For noise & dirt this is the equal of any French town I have been in, & beats anything in any other country – until you have been in France you have no conception what noise & dirt can be. There go a collection of dogs barking uproariously now, an engine has just shrieked, a tram clangs, in a minute a motor lorry will hurtle up the hill & then a sporting car with the throttle out, here comes a train with appropriate piercing whine, & soon there will be a street row; let alone the perpetual motor horns, used with enthusiasm & persistency on every possible occasion. We went down to the sea again this afternoon, for a final bathe before turning completely inland; it was by steam tram, & a filthier & slower mode of conveyance I have never tried. A most extraordinary race. There go the dogs again, & a loose cycle rattling over cobbles. Caen has some fine churches, the Abbaye aux Hommes & the Abbaye aux Femmes, founded by Wm the Conqueror & Matilda his wife, to appease the papal wrath at their having married within the forbidden degrees, as the guide-books repeat ad nauseam … The abbeys are mostly fine plain Norman work, the men's very dignified, the women's full of delicate & beautiful sobriety, which manages to make its impression even over the efforts of the Micks to ruin it. Really these Micks do not deserve to have fine churches – they have a positive genius for vulgarity which can be equalled by few non-conformist sects, however half-witted. And the way those two abbeys are built in! Compare the English cathedrals! – the C of E may be only fit for the dust-bin, but at least it has some dignity in its dissolution. But the Catholics go wallowing in the desecration of beauty to the world's end. – St. Pierre's has some fine Renaissance work, & there are some good secular buildings scattered about the town. There is a good river also, up which I rowed the party last night; we disembarked & had rolls & cream cheese & cakes & grapes & wine under a haystack – a meal of the premiere classe for about 9d each. Then rowed down again in the sunset. A great country, apart from the disadvantages retailed above.38

'Elsie sends you her love', he added, 'she thinks you might be interested to learn that she has had her hair cut.'

After Caen it was Lisieux, centre of the cult of the recently beatified Saint Thérèse (John was fascinated and ironic), and then Rouen, which he had visited the year before. The stained glass seemed 'even more miraculous' and the town 'even more pleasant'.39 What was more, the place they stayed in had a marvellous supply of running water, hot and cold, in all the rooms; as against that, everything else sanitary in the house was out of order. They continued to Paris and stayed for over two weeks, meeting up with Henning, 'busting away on his thesis', and with de Kiewiet, who had recently moved there on a University of London grant, was already 'correcting Henning's French for him' and 'willing to give anybody advice on anything within the country'. They explored the sights and the weather continued to be 'unbelievably brilliant … [it was] the most extraordinary thing about the trip'. The second most extraordinary thing, in John's view, was an exhibition of modern painting. 'You, who have only seen reproductions, really don't know what modern art is capable of. I endeavour invariably to preserve an open mind; but this left me weak.' He does not report who was exhibiting except for the Wellington sculptor Margaret Butler, who was showing two heads: 'have you ever heard of her? not bad'.40

Henning joined them for a visit to Chartres, where John found the windows in the cathedral 'almost as perfect as anything could be', though he added that he did not think they had 'any individual window to touch two or three of those at Rouen'.41 While Elsie and Kathleen were entertained by well-off relations, John joined Henning and de Kiewiet to visit Malmaison, one of Napoleon's country houses, which had become a museum of Napoleon: 'a fearful place! What an utter vulgarian he was! The more I see of palaces & emperors the more I despise them.' Fontainebleau was similarly condemned: 'the woods there are fine, the palace is another museum of junk of all periods'. Why does royalty 'reach such abysmal depths of vulgarity?' Between the expeditions they went to museums, to bookshops, up the tower of Notre-Dame to see the gargoyles, to the theatre and films – Chaplin in The Gold Rush again, a Buster Keaton comedy, and a new French film of Edgar Allan Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, which John warmly recommended to his parents: 'the best and most interesting film' he had seen since The Gold Rush came out.

In their last week in Paris John spent another day in the Louvre, inspecting 'Chinese gold-lacquered boxes, pottery, & French pictures'.42 Outside the Louvre they ran into Helen Allen with her rich and talkative aunt ('she said she always had a great admiration for us in Australia because of the way we treated our women; & I agreed; yes, we were pretty good to the girls') and they were taken back for a lavish afternoon tea at the Hotel Palais d'Orsay. 'A pity we can't muster a wealthy aunt somewhere in our family', John wrote.43 There was an expedition to Versailles and a final gathering at Henning's. Henning wrote to McGrath with an account of the party:

we celebrated Beagle's departure in sparkling wine and vodka. All went well until the time came for going, I put on the lights at the top of the stairs and Beagle tottered down and tried to get out. It was half past twelve and the concièrge must have been fast asleep. Soon the staircase began reverberating with Beagle's sonorous and stentorian roar: 'Le cordon, s'il vous plâit'. By the time the sound got to the top of the staircase it was a bit blurred, I didn't know whether to put it down to the Vodkas Beagle had had or to the Vodkas I had had, or just to the distance. Anyhow it was blurred, The roar died down by a quarter to one, and I heard some disconsolate feet pattering along the flags in Cherche-Midi and round the corner into Abbé Grégoire.44

Elsie and Kathleen went on to Belgium, John back to London.

The Trip had been a great success in a number of ways. 'It was', John wrote in October to Challis Hooper, 'invaluable for getting in touch with E. again, which as you can imagine, was not too easy at first. But we are pretty well settled in mind now, & as soon as a job comes along, you may look for developments.'45 The difficulty was that after Grahamstown there were no more offers. John had applied for a Rockefeller Fellowship, £300 a year for two years, which he believed would be enough to marry on. It would provide the opportunity to start on a biography of Sir James Stephen, the under-secretary at the Colonial Office (and grandfather of Virginia Woolf), in whom John had become increasingly interested as he worked on his thesis. He was encouraged to apply for the fellowship by Laski and J.R.M. Butler, the Cambridge historian and British representative of the Rockefeller Foundation. At the end of May he heard that he had been unsuccessful. 'Everybody is pretty disgusted', he wrote to his parents, 'but I have wasted no sleep on it.'46 McGrath wrote: 'If sincere wishes could have achieved anything you should already have skipped over half the continent in a Honeymoon Chariot drawn by seven Rockefeller horses'.47 John's later comment to Challis has the ring of truth: 'That Rockefeller refusal was a cruel blow, you know – the hardest to date in my life. It meant a complete overturning in my plans for E & everything. I didn't realise it bang off, but it becomes solider & solider every day now … Of course I am merely one of 1½ million odd unemployed in this country, & I can at least thank my stars I'm not a coalminer.'48

Butler suggested that he apply for a studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge. A 'quaint plunge into mediaevalism it would be at the age of 27 after NZ & London',49 John wrote to his parents, but he applied nonetheless. Laski heard of a job at Manitoba in Canada and John applied for that too. He was offered neither. McGrath wrote sympathetically about the Cambridge outcome, adding that he did not take seriously John's 'NZ and extinction', and went on: 'You see I am optimistic about the world even though Dunkie has been with me for a week.'50 John considered a Commonwealth Fellowship to the United States, but they could be held only by single scholars, and this 'put them out of the question'.51 He applied for the position of librarian at Rhodes House, Oxford. They appointed Vincent Harlow, an Oxford man, with two books already published by the Oxford University Press, who was eventually to become Beit Professor of British Commonwealth history at Oxford. There seemed a possibility at Manchester – 'But who wants to go to Manchester?'52 Newton went out to India to advise the government of the Punjab; perhaps he would come back knowing of something there. Nothing.

William Henry Beaglehole.

Mary Jane Beaglehole.

The family of Joseph Cawte Butler and Jane Butler. Back row: Ada (Paterson), George, Jane (Jenny Beaglehole). Front row: Winifred, Amy (Jackson), Jane, Jessie (Monaghan), Joseph, Annie (Nancy Osborne).

Number 49 Hopper Street (left), Ernest and Jenny's home where John was born and lived for twenty six years. Next door, number 51, the home of his Beaglehole grandparents. Number 51 was demolished about 1910 and additions made to number 49.

David Ernest Beaglehole with some of his books.

Jane (Jenny) Beaglehole.

John as a small boy.

Uncle Joe (right) as a guide on the Milford Track.

John with curls.

The Beaglehole boys: Keith, Geoffrey, John, Ernest, about 1913.

The gang of cousins. Back row: John, Dick Osborne, Keith, Sandy Paterson, Tony Osborne, Ernest, Harry Osborne. Front row: Stephen Osborne, Christy Paterson, Alan Paterson, Geoffrey, Ralph Jackson, Jim Osborne.

Ern and Jenny about 1915.

Keith and John.

Thomas Hunter, about 1920.

Photographer unknown, Victoria University of Wellington.

Victoria University College, 1926.

S.P. Andrew collection, F-18905-1/1, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ.

Tramping at Mount Matthews, 1924. John(sixth from left), Averil Lysaght (eighth), Elsie(ninth), Boyd Wilson (boiling the billy).

26 August 1926. John is seen off by his father as he sails for Sydney on the Maheno.

John wearing his Victoria College blazer, on board the Osterley.

John and Raymond McGrath.

Shipboard – Duncan, Henning, Miss Rowe, McGrath.

21 Brunswick Square (the house behind the lamp post). John and Duncan's room was on the top floor.

John and Lorrie Richardson on the road to Canterbury, 5 June 1927.

John at Neustadt in the Black Forest, July 1927.

John, 1929.

Elsie, 1929.

John, painted by his uncle, George Butler, July 1929.

Victoria University of Wellington.

In November a lectureship in Auckland was advertised. 'If I come back I should like to come back to Wellington; at least it has some hills.'53 However, he applied, and was turned down.

In Wellington, his father reported, efforts were being made to raise money to revive the Unitarian Church. What about John becoming minister? 'I wouldn't give them 2d', John responded. 'I have come to the conclusion that the feather bed for falling Xians joke about sums it all up; & I am on the floor … I'm not likely to be standing in the queue for the job, even if I am turned down on all sides over here.'54 Nor were his parents' suggestions that he might write historical novels or humorous sketches for Punch any better received. In January 1929 he wrote: 'there are some reasons why I should be very glad to go back to N.Z.; but it looks at present as if I shall have to go wherever I can get a job. If there is nothing doing at all I suppose I shall have to utilise my free passage home & trust to luck. That is about how things stand at present.'55

He had hoped that he might be helped in his quest for a job by the publication of his MA thesis on Captain Hobson. Laski had read the thesis during John's first year in London, been impressed with it, and suggested sending it to Professor S.B. Fay at Smith College in Massachusetts, who published a series of historical works for which it was just the right length. John spent three days bringing the references up to 'the requirements of modern historical research'. 'If that silly ass F.P. knew 1/10 of what he ought to know I should have been saved all this mucking about & probably got a good many more marks from old Grant for the thing.'56 De Kiewiet was puzzled by what John considered some pretty good jokes in it ('he doesn't go too much on humour'). John sent it off before leaving on his first European trip and heard in November that Fay would publish it provided John was willing to cut out a few sentences which seemed to Fay 'perhaps of a facetious nature & not quite appropriate'.57 John had the dual satisfaction of having it accepted and being able to vilify Fay for his literary judgement: 'I told [him] to fire away with his dirty work', he reported to his parents.58 The arrival of proofs, in February 1928, produced a further burst of indignation: Fay had messed around with his first and last paragraphs, which John said he had 'worked over like a slave'.59 After consulting Laski, John 'made a new beginning & end & substituted them for Fay's, wrote him a nice letter ordering 40 copies, & left the rest to luck'.60 The thirty copies in addition to his ten free ones cost him $15 and there was a further $10 for the author's corrections to the galley proofs and the dedication:

To Victoria University College Wellington, New Zealand this essay written in its shadow

In the preface he thanked Duncan and Harry Ross for 'their violent but salutary criticism'.

John received his first copy of the book when he was in Paris. Copies were sent to a number of papers in New Zealand and John waited impatiently for reviews. The first, and one of very few to appear, was in the New Zealand Worker of 10 October 1928. It was by Harold Miller, a graduate of Victoria and Rhodes Scholar in 1920, who had just returned to Victoria to succeed Horace Ward as librarian. Miller suggested that John, whose natural sympathies, he was sure, lay with Hobson and the missionaries, had been too kind to the New Zealand Company, which, in Miller's view, had 'swindled its emigrants right and left and left them a legacy of ill-will in the native mind that finally led to war'. Miller picked gaps where he wanted more information, but concluded (having begun with a favourable reference to John's writings in the Spike): 'From the man who can write like this in [a] master's thesis we can clearly look for much in the future'. Looking back in the year 2000, W.H. Oliver found the book, with its limitations of focus ('Can we easily contemplate a book on the events of the early 1840s in which the Treaty was not relevant?') and its racial prejudice, still 'quite a good piece of historical writing'.61

In the meanwhile there was a PhD thesis to be finished (John's prediction, at the time he got back from Paris in August, was that it should be done about October, 'except for typing & indexing & adding on appendices, & all the other boring God-forsaken jobs') and the excitement of a third year in London. The house in Brunswick Square had changed hands. The room which John and Duncan had shared on the top floor had been subdivided; 'sacrilege' in John's view but 'the things they will do here to knock an extra bob out of a house are appalling'.62 Duncan had moved to a room in Gordon Square but John stayed on in a room on the first floor, still overlooking the square but a long way from the bathroom. Once more he sent home a plan of how he had arranged the room. Over the mantelpiece he had a painting by McGrath (chosen when John was in Cambridge), below the painting 'I have got my Innsbruck medal from last year, flanked by 1 pair brass candlesticks & two pewter mugs; which I felt a sudden impulse to break off this letter after page 3 & polish, which I did … they look very classy now, quite a high-brow mantelpiece.'63 The impulse to polish pewter never left him.

There were changes too in John's circle of friends. As well as de Kiewiet leaving for Paris and Berlin, Harry Ross had gone to South Africa, to the job at Grahamstown that John had turned down. Helen Allen, who had completed her thesis, went back to the States for a month, calling at Toronto to see Adelaide MacDonald, and looking for a possible job. At the end of the year she was in Florence for a month, and while she was away Elsie had her flat in London. When Helen returned she spent more time in Paris and then went to Cambridge for the summer to prepare to teach at Vassar, the notable women's college on the Hudson River north of New York, to which she had been appointed. Duncan was spending some of his time doing WEA teaching in Kent but he and John still met frequently. Newton was off in India, and while he was away the seminar was taken by J.A. Williamson, the history master at Westminster School. Williamson was a great proponent of the view that British history could be fully understood only within its wider imperial context. He had already published a lot and John knew his A Short History of British Expansion, having bought a copy in 1922, its year of publication. Williamson, who was to become best known for his work on Drake and the Cabots, was in John's view 'about the best bloke in England at the colonial history game'.64 Williamson, for his part, quickly came to respect John's ability.

John's youngest brother Ernest was following in his footsteps. A student of Hunter's, he had completed an MA with first-class honours in 1928, and his master's thesis on propaganda already revealed what was to be his distinctive form of applied social psychology.65 Ernest too was awarded a postgraduate travelling scholarship and a free passage. He decided to work for a PhD at the London School of Economics, and John met him at the Tilbury docks on his arrival in London on 21 September. That evening he wrote to his parents with a full account of the meeting: 'He looks healthy enough though wearing a very low cap that appals even me … I have got him parked here, in 21, for a day or two, while he looks round for a room & generally gets his bearings, & have taken him down to the Food Reform Restaurant, so you may rest in peace.'66 Ernest, for his part, reported on John, writing most freely to his Uncle Joe:

Jack met me at Tilbury – just the same as ever. Rather untidily dressed, collar not matching shirt, long hair, ragged tie etc, but otherwise he has not changed at all. In fact, I think he has thrown off a lot of his old reserve. Probably because now he has more or less entirely got over all his stammering – speaks slowly of course still, with a certain amount of hesitation, but anyone who did not know him would merely think that he was a meditative person who had difficulty in translating his thoughts into words – not in speaking at all. Having thus conquered his stammering, he launches out quite brightly & we have great times round at B[runswick] Sq[uare].67

John's stammer had clearly improved while he was in London. 'It doesn't worry me a great deal now, except when I get excited or very tired',68 he wrote to Elsie not long before she arrived. He had just started seeing a 'voice-specialist cove', who had told him that three months would make a lot of difference.

The name of the specialist is not recorded. Family lore has it that it was the same man who treated the Duke of York, the future George VI.

Ernest's report suggests the treatment was a success. The irony was that some months later, when John applied for the lectureship at Auckland, F.P. Wilson's comments on his stutter appear to have been a reason for his non-appointment.69

Kathleen left to return to New Zealand, and then go to Australia, in the middle of October. John's misgivings before her arrival had quite disappeared; they had become close and lasting friends. She took gifts from John for his family; for his father a plaster cast of a medallion of Erasmus in the British Museum that he had arranged to have made. Elsie followed Ernest into cheaper lodgings, still in Brunswick Square, a few doors away from number 21, and the three of them saw a lot of one another. Elsie and Ernest knew each other well from the Victoria Tramping Club. John was to claim he found the advent of Ernest 'not altogether an unmixed blessing. He nearly drove me mad for a time', he wrote to Challis, 'till he settled down & began to pick up some friends of his own',70 but there seems to have been some brotherly exaggeration in the comment. They went out to Virginia Water and walked five or six miles; once again to Kew Gardens – 'Kew leaves any of these foreign parks … miles behind';71 and to Welwyn Garden City to join Lorrie Richardson for a day's tramp – 'charming country England in its autumn dress', John wrote, 'copper & red & gold'.72 There were concerts and plays. John clearly enjoyed being mentor and guide.

I don't know that I don't envy Ern his first year in London – I should like to keep on having first years for about five years, discovering fresh things every time – after a while, though you keep on discovering fresh things they haven't the same shock … you just take them for granted, unless they bowl you over completely, like the Turkish pottery in the V. & A. Let alone the Chinese.73

They visited the house in Hampstead where John Keats had lived and saw the mulberry tree under which the poet was said to have written his 'Ode to a Nightingale', then went on to visit Kenwood, the house (built at the time James Cook was setting out on his first voyage) lately given to the nation by Lord Iveagh. John found it 'superb': 'Adam, brought up to date with bathrooms & new oak flooring. You can't get away from it – civilised domestic architecture is a supreme joy. Only the library there was spoilt by over-colouring – & these show libraries never seem to have enough books in them.'74 Their interest in domestic architecture took John and Elsie to furniture exhibitions at Heal's in Tottenham Court Road and at Waring and Gillows, as well as to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. They saw elegant rooms and furniture, 'but when you come to the libraries what do you see? Beautiful furniture – wonderful writing desks, exquisitely wrought firescreens, but where are the bookshelves? … after you'd carried a few arm-fulls upstairs & come home once or twice on Saturdays you'd wonder where in blazes you were going to put your books.'75 The net result of these visits, John confided to Challis, was to make him and Elsie thoroughly dissatisfied, 'disgusted perhaps', with any house or furniture they would ever possibly be able to afford. The idea of having McGrath design them a house seemed more and more of a dream. With premonition, John wrote: 'we have practically decided to make our own furniture out of kerosene & fruit cases, with which many satisfactory modern effects could be obtained … Ah! to be rich & furnish a house in England! … At least', he added, 'I shall have my books'.76

His book buying continued. While ransacking the shops for something suitable for his father's birthday (he was looking for a 'decent copy' of Erasmus's Colloquies that he could not find and had to settle for a copy of Robert Bridges's latest essay 'just by way of something to go on with'), he saw a

very good folio Clarendon 3 vols History £1.1.0 1 vol life 15/- … The cove said he would let me have the 4 vols for 30/- & I am seriously considering it … if I go back to N.Z. & don't take them I shall be sorry some day … Yes, I think it would be a sin to let them go at that price. I could have a lot of fun polishing up the covers with Meltonian Cream too – it would do for a change from cleaning the pewter.77

He bought them. The 'autumn publishing season being now in full blast', he wrote in his next letter, 'it is perfect torture to me to go into a bookshop'.78

John's Scholarship had been £200 a year for two years. Now, in his third year, money was running very short. The final scholarship payment of £25 was to be made on completion of his thesis, though he reckoned at least £18 of this would go on the typing. Inspired perhaps by Laski's stories, John enquired from Bumpus's what they would pay him for a first edition of de la Mare's Songs of Childhood which he had bought for ninepence at McKay's on Lambton Quay in 1919. Bumpus's offered him 30 guineas for it.

I said I'd think about it … If I could only find ½ doz things like this, I could finance myself for another year. Daddy will no doubt point out that £31.9.3 is unearned increment & is therefore morally the perquisite of the state; I reply however that on the contrary it is the natural reward of the capitalist, & of his foresight, wisdom & hard-earned knowledge …79

Finally he decided to auction the book at Hodgson's – 'auction it', McGrath had written, and 'put on a reserve of £40'80 – and it fetched £40 10s, of which John got about £35.81 He took Elsie and Ernest to Lyons and shouted them a 2d cup of coffee each to celebrate, and then bought eleven books in the next two days, though several were remainders and only 1s 3d and 2s each. John finally accepted his father's offer of a loan, and was sent £50. In letters John referred to unnamed friends 'who would be delighted to let me have a loan for a few months or longer', but with no job in sight he felt unable to accept. What he did have, he believed, would keep him going in London for a further six months.82 When, just before Christmas, he heard that he had not got the job in Auckland, Ernest had the impression that he was relieved and that he would just hang on until his cash gave out in the hope that a job would turn up, and that if one did not he would use his free passage to return to New Zealand.83

Most of November 1928 was spent in revising his thesis, 'a cruel job'84 – which left him feeling 'in a considerable state of disgust with the British Empire historically considered, & the American elections, & the price of books & the way everything happens at once & so forth'.85 In the United States Herbert Hoover had defeated Governor Al Smith of New York for the presidency. 'A terrible business', John wrote.86 The American professor of economics at the LSE reckoned it was 'the blackest day in American history since the Fugitive Slave Law'. It was widely believed that an anti-Catholic vote had cost Smith the election. John's father demurred, and in a later letter John spelled out his critical view: Hoover was put up by the Republican Party – 'the biggest organisation of graft, big & dirty business, intolerance, sinister power, & filthy politics in the world … would you rather have a country governed by a Mick of genius & fair honesty, or by a mob of Baptist oil-kings & fundamentalist farmers'.87 The New Zealand election later in November, when the Coates government met its surprise defeat at the hands of the Liberals, led by Joseph Ward, and Labour lost its position as the official opposition, was greeted more equably: 'it won't do the Labour birds much harm to climb up slowly, as long as they're not too slow about it. I should like to see Peter Fraser as Minister of Education for a bit – Thank God Wright's out of it now any how. That will make it a bit easier to come back to N.Z. if necessary.'88

The thesis was finished on Saturday 8 December, at midnight – 'at least, I finished it all except a quotation I wanted from Burke as whipped cream to top off the fruit salad with; which I couldn't find'.89 He started to read 'all Burke through systematically' and found the quotation three days later. There was still a bit of tinkering to do and some final revision but, he was able to say, 'to all intents & purposes the thing is finished, bar the bibliography, & most of it is either typed or being typed'. Six typists were involved, including de Kiewiet, who did one chapter. John himself was to type the preface, table of contents, bibliography and index. Elsie was proofreading and Helen Allen doing all the indexing she could before setting off to Florence with her aunt. The thesis having been completed, John varied between 'thinking it a cut above ordinary doctoral theses & thinking it unutterable rot'.90 He hoped he would now have time to 'see life a bit'.

He made a pre-Christmas visit to Trimley to see his Uncle George and cousins. His Aunt Jeanne had died some months earlier and a little later George was to remarry (John was best man) and move to a house in Richmond. John took (and read) Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, 'thus completing the corpus of [Jane Austen's] completed novels'. 'The year 1928 therefore may be accounted a notable one', he wrote to his parents. 'Finished Boswell, J.A. & govs' Insts. What other age can show such a list?'91 Now, at his father's urging, he was considering Tristram Shandy, 'while the going's good i.e. before I get a job'. The difficulty was that having time to read simply brought home to him how much there was that he wanted to read. It was at this time that he recalled to Elsie an experience he had had before he left for London:

I remember once when I was at home reading a Times Litt. Supp having a curious experience – I had a feeling of utter despair & bewilderment, like being lost in a mental cyclone, at the limitless number of things to be known & books to be read, so that it seemed impossible ever to be anything but utterly ignorant or to do anything at all; & it's an experience I've never forgotten, it was so vivid. It almost frightened me physically …92

McGrath was in London just before Christmas. He, Ern and John spent an evening at Elsie's, 'entertaining & being entertained'. The next evening, with Duncan as well, they had dinner and then took a taxi to see a film with Harold Lloyd. The film was off so they saw The Gold Rush again – for John at least the third time. McGrath then left for Paris. With everyone scattered, the revelries of the previous year were not repeated. Nor was John cheered by the state of Britain:

Here's this Well of Loneliness suppressed with positively foully libellous remarks from the magistrates, God help them, & the coal business goes merrily merrily on, with not an effort to do anything fundamental to help it. So at Xmas we have a Lord Mayor's fund & give the miners dinner & then they starve again. Gosh, it makes me sick! I took along all my old clothes, & no doubt the Queen & the Prince of Wales & Stanley Baldwin have done likewise, & that's about as far as we get. What a govt! … if ever a country justified economic pessimism, it's England in 1928.93

On Christmas Day he stayed in bed until 11.30 and then went around to join Elsie (who was minding Helen Allen's flat) for a 'magnificent blow-out by way of Xmas dinner'. John provided balloons and red candles and a bottle of sauterne. Duncan joined them later for tea and a 'very bright evening'. At New Year they went out to stay at Lorrie Richardson's: 'Good walking there & an open fire … There was a fair amount of snow on the ground, & the cold bath in the morning was damnable.'94 They also went to the circus, to the Victoria and Albert Museum again, and John took Elsie to Peter Pan to celebrate her birthday. They went to some architectural lectures, to a recital by the Hewitt string quartet, and a lecture by Mrs Bertrand Russell, 'which was very interesting – Ern standing by the door & guffawing in a superior way at views put forward by members of the audience – he seems to have all the amused intolerance so characteristic of the family'.95 There was an exhibition of Dutch painting at Burlington House. John 'nearly wept tears of joy on meeting again a lot of the Vermeers I saw at the Hague & at Amsterdam, let alone the shoals of Rembrandts & all the other stuff … I have gone quite dippy over Van Gogh … very bold brilliant & swirling stuff'.96 And he was doing a lot of reading, 'in which direction I am making up for lost time over the last 2 years as hard as I can go'. He had finished Clare Sheridan's Nuda Veritas (his mother, he suggested, might like to shut her eyes over a few of the pages); he was even starting to read the Bible (he had bought a copy of the new Cambridge Shorter Bible not long before) and he was immersed in H.M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune – 'by jingo! He can write, that bloke!'97

The thesis was finally submitted on 1 February 1929. John offered his parents some details:

no. of pages: 726 + preface & contents pages – 7 (I mustn't forget the very classy typed title page I designed); no. of chapters: – 9, no of notes: – about 1250; weight: about 12 cwt, quantity of blood & tears & sweat involved: ∞ (that I believe is the mathematical symbol for infinity …); amount of disgust: ditto. However I managed to mention Jane Austen & quote Burke & Carlyle & Dr Johnson & Blake, so what more do you want in a thesis on colonial history?98

The same letter had news which was to shape John's future career. J.A. Williamson wanted him to do a book on Pacific exploration for a projected series on 'pioneering', 'not that I know anything about either the Pacific or exploration', John commented, though the proposal did have the advantage that he could, if necessary, do it in New Zealand using the Alexander Turnbull Library. Laski wanted him to start a book on the idea of empire. John wanted to spend a month or so on general reading, and then to have a job.

He was reading Katherine Mansfield's letters, which he had bought when they were published a few months earlier.

[I] have never been so moved by a book in my life. I had to leave off after the first volume & recover myself on Shakespeare & Sir Thos Browne. I feel I know her now better than all but one or two of my friends; but oh! how she has wrung my heart! To see her dying for 4 years & be unable to move a finger to help – frightful! It has made me want to blaspheme wholesale but what's the good? One gazes hopelessly & helplessly on utter tragedy. What a writer she was! Some of these letters are superb. And all that to come out of Karori! – as my Father said … what wouldn't I give to have spoken with her once! Well, no more humble, lovely, truth-seeking, generous spirit could one hope to meet with on earth, I think; I wish to God I could think that N.Z. realised it.

She – K.M. – had exactly my feeling for N.Z.… I wish I had a bit of her feeling for words.99

The thesis submitted, John and Elsie went to Oxford for a week. John thought the town magnificent, even in winter, and if he found the 'immense expanse of red white & blue stained glass' put into the cathedral by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1870 more hideous than anything he had seen anywhere, 'the Grinling Gibbons carving in Queen's Chapel; & the linen-fold panelling in Magdalen Hall & New College Hall, & the river walks by Magdalen; & the interior of St Mary the Virgin; & the quadrangles … & the ancient little streets everywhere; & the towers & turrets & spires & bookshops make considerable amends'.100 Blackwell's he found about the best shop he had been in, but he could not find quite the right book to send to his father. They saw the exterior of the new Rhodes House, designed by Sir Herbert Baker and just being finished. It was to include the library – 'what a place for a job', John wrote regretfully.101 He and Elsie were together for a week without the intrusion of anyone who knew them and were, John told Challis, happier than they had ever been before.102

His oral examination was on 22 March. It was, John said, 'like most oral exams – more or less of a formality & more or less of an anti-climax'. The examiners said absolutely nothing about the thesis 'as a whole either by way of praise or blame – I except Miss Penson, who did say she thought it didn't have enough dates in it, to which the others chivalrously agreed. They each asked a few tiddly winking questions … & then informed me after a suitable period for mutual consultation that they had decided to recommend me to the Senate for the degree'.103 He was disappointed that they did not offer him afternoon tea. John cabled the news to his parents and was indignant when the young lady in the post office said that PhD would be charged as three words. He sent the thesis to the Oxford University Press on Laski's advice. The Press were 'very careful to guard themselves from being encouraging'.104

Henning had also finished his thesis, had landed a temporary lectureship at Sydney (in contrast with John, there was nothing he wanted more than to get home) and came to London for a last look around before leaving. 'A good cobber', John wrote.105 This led to a busy fortnight with music and theatre and films, and then John took his bicycle and rode to Welwyn Garden City to stay with Lorrie Richardson. Elsie's elder sister, Edith, had arrived in England some weeks earlier, and she and Elsie were staying in a village ten miles from Richardson's place. They met several times to go exploring on foot and in the car that Edith had hired and Elsie drove. Elsie then went off for three weeks to drive Edith and her friend and fellow-teacher from Wellington, Erica Bridges, around south-west England. John rode back into London one morning to see a Russian film, Bed and Sofa, 'one of the best F[ilm] S[ociety] performances' he had been to,106 and before returning to Richardson's he typed out letters (and copies of his testimonials) to seven American universities asking about jobs. The weather was hardly propitious for cycling, with gales, heavy rain, sleet and snow, but it cleared for him to ride on to Cambridge to visit McGrath.

McGrath was away. However, Mansfield Forbes was hospitable. John stayed in Clare for two nights and dined again at high table; admirable food, he reported, but 'a very low intellectual level on the whole'.107 McGrath's life had changed. The previous August he had met and fallen for an American girl. He had reported to John at the time:

Forbes and I are in the middle of a Texan romance! Malfroy (Wellington N.Z. who knows you

J.O.J. Malfroy was a law graduate from Victoria. A keen rugby player, he had played for Wellington and for the New Zealand University team but was not, strictly, an international.

) turned up the other day with a charming American girl, whom Manny singled out for his immediate blessings. So he invited them to lunch with us on the river-bank in the Fellows' Garden. I enjoyed that meal … This Texas girl is one of those unselfconsciously intimate people who are so refreshing. Seems to be a quality of American women.108

Malfroy was supplanted – 'not a bad feat over an international rugby player', McGrath judged – and Mary Crozier (or Miss Texas, as she was generally referred to) played an increasing part in McGrath's life. They were to marry in 1930. Before John arrived in Cambridge on his bicycle, Miss Texas had been 'threatened with maternal recall to Dallas' and McGrath had gone down to London to try to sort out the situation.

At about the same time as that fateful lunch took place Forbes had leased 'Finella', a late Victorian villa on Queens' Road across the river from Clare, and McGrath had been appointed as architect for its transformation. John had already heard of some of the plans:

The glass vaulted ceiling of the hall is now disturbing us. Vibration and expansion having been disposed of we are now confronted with the possibility of the ceiling resonating to some particular note and flying to pieces. We don't know whether to put in a special plant to intercept sound waves of the particular frequency or to insure the structure heavily against the deadly note. Any suggestions? Forbes latest request is that whenever the [door]bell is rung a musket will be fired at the far end of the hall followed by a dull thud and a sound of falling glass. On either side of the entrance door there's to be a mirror and also in a niche out of reach a brush and comb and lipstick. These are only a few of the modern improvements contemplated.109

And a month later: 'The latest idea for "Finella" is a mirrored glass dome 8 ft in diameter (all in one piece) for the dining room ceiling'.110 Work had started towards the end of 1928 and John inspected the house several times, twice with McGrath when he got back to Cambridge. It 'is going to be a marvellous place', John wrote, 'plugged full of new ideas in decoration & ventilation & furniture & mirrors & patent finishes'.111 Finally, he cycled back to London with a stop on the way after lunch to read in the sun for about four hours.

'It is satisfactory', he had written home, 'to read some real books again, & not to be confined [to those] out of which history is manufactured in the B.M.'112 The Brook Kerith by George Moore he thought magnificent (he passed on a story he had heard from Mansfield Forbes that Freud thought The Brook Kerith 'about the greatest book in the world' and had read it twelve times) and he decided to cultivate Moore for a bit. However, he went next to Moby Dick and was impressed, though he thought The Brook Kerith had stirred him more, and between other books he finished Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, which his mother had read some months earlier. A.N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World he found a struggle: 'one of those confounded books which crease the brow & the soul alike of an ordinary bloke like me … I am coming to believe that history is a soft option after all'.113 He read more of Edward Thomas on rural England and Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, 'good, but about extremely peculiar people'.114 He recommended Gibbon's Autobiography, and All Quiet on the Western Front, 'tremendously powerful stuff' (just before he left London he heard from his father that New Zealand libraries had banned the book). He was 'lapping up' Graham Wallas's Human Nature in Politics and thought that, as Wallas was 'looking after Ern', his father ought to read it.

At the beginning of March John had reported to Challis on how things were going with Elsie. Their affections seemed permanently settled – with 'an occasional silent row' – but there appeared to be no prospect of getting married, and that worried John very much indeed. Elsie would not marry him until he had a job and of that there seemed little hope. It was 'a sort of constant sand in the wheels of love'.115 John had already told his parents of the decision to marry,116 and at the beginning of April he drafted a letter to Elsie's parents. Elsie was away touring and John wrote to tell her what a terrible job it had been and that he was sure she would get an immediate cable saying 'Disinherited'. He described the letter:

Par.1 expresses my diffidence at writing & my pride at prospect of becoming their son-in-law. Par.2 discusses briefly (very – 8 lines) my prospects of material advancement. Par.3 expresses my happiness if your happiness would make them happy. Par.4 requests forgiveness & sympathy … I have striven to be as amiable & modest as possible, while yet preserving a spirit of manly independence & subdued cheerfulness, I trust you will approve.117

With his pen in hand, no situation left him at a loss for words.

Elsie's parents took the news pretty well,

It is not clear if John's letter was sent. Mr and Mrs Holmes's letters appear to be a response to a letter from Elsie. It is possible that John's letter was posted after the one from Elsie.

though her mother wrote that 'luckily Dad's new roses arrived yesterday so he has something to occupy him'.118 Robert Holmes was sure he would never see his daughter again, but he put a brave face on it and cabled her £100 in addition to her usual allowance. The Holmeses were hurt that they had been told nothing earlier, though Elsie's mother said she was not surprised at the news and had been 'preparing the way with Dad', but John (who never held with formal engagements) and Elsie gave away very little to anyone. Ernest was clearly kept in the dark. At the end of March he was still writing to Uncle Joe on the 'Jack-Elsie-Helen triangle', singing the praises of both Elsie and Helen but venturing the view that it would be Elsie in the end.119 Finally, at the end of July (a week before the couple sailed for New Zealand), he wrote that 'I understand that Jack & Elsie are engaged – officially or unofficially I don't know which, & that just as soon as Jack lands a job he will get married immediately'. About Helen Allen, he added that 'she is as nice a girl as I shall ever want to meet & I will always have the impression that she was – well – that she was very keen on Jack & would have – but what matters this now?'120

John had had replies from the American universities, all saying, politely, 'nothing doing'. More of a blow to him was the news that the Oxford University Press had turned down his thesis for publication, 'exceedingly courteously & even complimentarily; but they think it too much of a dissertation & not enough of a book (that is the worst blow!!)'.121 Ernest thought John was so fed up with the thesis that he was prepared to 'pitch it in the corner and forget it'.122 Then came the final blow. On 18 May he got home from a weekend's walking with Elsie in Surrey to find a cable awaiting him with the news of his mother's death. 'I had been afraid of getting [the cable] for 18 months, & yet I never believed it would come', he wrote to his father.123 It was a terrible shock. Through all of the anxiety about jobs and the future there had been the thought that, if he had to return to New Zealand, his mother would be there. 'I always pictured myself getting away from the wharf & springing into a taxi & leaving my luggage behind, & arriving by myself & going straight down the garden to see her.' Ernest and he were not able to help each other much – none of the family found it easy to express their feelings except on paper – but Elsie was an enormous support, and letters from his father and Keith, when they eventually came, helped John a lot. But those letters were nearly six weeks away and before they arrived there was one from his father, dated 14 April, with the news of his mother's renewed illness and his father's concern. John wrote to his father with great understanding and love, and even in his first letter was able to include comment on the British election ('the govt have come a terrible crash, richly deserved'), the English countryside in spring ('it is the ideal England') and the publication of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga in one volume.

His parents had sent him two guineas to mark the PhD and 30 shillings for his birthday. He had pretty much decided, he wrote, to put the money together and get the Shakespeare Head edition of Plutarch's Lives in eight volumes if he could find a decent copy. 'Those Blackwell books have very often one bad fault which most books seem to have in this machine-ridden age – the pages are folded so badly that the print frequently rides up or down hill on the page, & I am getting so pernickety that these things annoy me damnably.'124 He was also attracted by a new edition of Pepys on India paper and a new Sir Thomas Browne, though it had the same fault as the Plutarch. He cogitated for some time, almost went for the Pepys, and then in a bookseller's window in Charing Cross Road saw the two-volume Nonesuch edition of Milton's poetry. At £3 10s it seemed very cheap, less than the Plutarch at £5, and it was 'a magnificent book, a fine italic type, & with designs by Blake for illustrations, first rate most of them'.125 'It may be an extravagance for one in my financially very rocky position', he wrote, but he bought it. Before he left he added the Shakespeare Head Plutarch, 'to celebrate my sojourn in & departure from England'.126

Under the terms of John's free passage, he was supposed to get back to New Zealand within three years of leaving it. Time was running out. The shipping company stretched a point and John pencilled in a booking, once again on the Osterley, leaving on 3 August. He wondered whether he should borrow more money (his father offered another £50) and hang on until Christmas, but Elsie was dead against borrowing any more, nor did John feel he really could. Ernest had the impression at this time that John was now sorry in a way that he had not taken the job at Grahamstown.127

He and Elsie went on another tramp, in Buckinghamshire and down the Thames, 'trespassing shamelessly & sleeping out in private woods'.128 The weather was magnificent, the best John had known in England. He went to his Uncle George's at Richmond several times to sit for his portrait. The first sitting was unproductive, Ernest told his father, as John ate such an excellent midday dinner that he could not keep awake in the afternoon, with the result that little could be done: 'typical of Jack, I fear – get a good meal when & where you can is his motto'.129 Ernest thought the finished portrait on the whole very good: 'Uncle George has caught him in a very characteristic attitude, meditative, face leaning on his hand, unruly hair, semi-profile'.130 George gave it to John, together with one of his watercolours.

John and Elsie saw their first 'talkie': 'an appalling thing called Fox Movietone 1929 Follies, appalling in construction, speech, song & everything else. If this is a fair sample, it looks to me as if the talkies are the worst thing that could possibly have happened to the cinema … however it must be admitted that perhaps it wasn't a fair sample.'131 There was a final visit to Cambridge, with Elsie, Duncan and Ernest, to farewell McGrath and have a last look at 'Finella'. John took an involuntary dip in the Cam when Ernest leaped suddenly on to a punt on which John was standing tentatively balancing a pole. It was a very good weekend; they left reluctantly.

John was finding it difficult to accept that he was really leaving London. In the middle of July Ernest wrote to their father:

So far there is no sign of him doing any packing – he must have at least three or four cases of books to put together, not counting his clothes & other junk, so I expect a pretty hectic time towards the end of this month. I presume it is my brotherly duty to stay in London myself to do what there is to help; one thing at least, he can't be so bad now as he used to be, what with Elsie to jog his memory – though, to be honest, Elsie told me the other day that even she despairs of getting him to do things – this in reference to seeing about his passage – sometimes apparently the only alternative to continual reminders is to let him go his own pace – the trouble being, of course, that Jack's pace in doing things is often so decidedly slow that it drives most normal people into virtual hysterics.132

The same day that Ernest wrote, John was writing to Challis that he was 'thinking about packing-cases, & damning the world & pretty well all that's in it'.133

A final possibility of a job arose. A chair in history was advertised at the new university college in Singapore. They wanted applicants aged between thirty and thirty-five; this was a snag, as John had just turned twenty-eight, but he thought that it was just possible his luck would turn. The appointment was to be made through the Colonial Office and Laski said he would put in a word with Sidney Webb, the new colonial secretary. By the time John sailed there had been no decision and there was the possibility that he would be 'hauled off the boat at Colombo or Sydney or somewhere by cable'.134 He heard he had not been appointed only after he arrived back in New Zealand. Another unsuccessful applicant, even younger than John, was Fred Wood, an Australian who had graduated with first-class honours from Oxford the year before.

Not knowing about Singapore complicated leaving. Decisions about final shopping were difficult when he did not know where he was going to be. An afternoon was spent rushing about with Ernest choosing a wedding present for Ernest to give them; they finally settled on a table lamp that could be as useful in Singapore as in New Zealand. Ernest wrote to his father:

I think it nearly broke Jack's heart that he did not have £100 or so to spend in Heals the great furnishing shop. He took me in one day to show me incidentally what he would like to get. Not much of the stuff would be strictly utilitarian I fear, but it showed a pretty taste & no mistake. He must hope to have money to spend next time he is in London: that is cold consolation …135

Adelaide MacDonald, Helen Allen and de Kiewiet combined to present John with the London PhD robes. It reminded John of how much his mother had looked forward to seeing him in a red gown, but it was a generous gift. Dick Campbell gave a farewell party, with asparagus and ice cream. He had completed his thesis and was off to America. Elsie's father paid so she could also travel first class with John on the Osterley. 'I needn't say', he wrote to his father, 'what it would be like without her.'136 On his last day in London John took a last bus ride along the Strand and up Ludgate Hill to see St Paul's as he had seen it the first time, and that night at one o'clock he and Elsie went down to Waterloo Bridge and gazed down the river.

We have no records of the voyage out. John wrote his father a brief letter from Sydney. There would be plenty of time to talk when he got home, he said. The trip had been 'middling to good' and he was in the best of health.137 They were having some days in Sydney, meeting Henning and his family, Jean Harvey, friends of Duncan's, and Eileen McGrath, Raymond's young sister, who was training to be a sculptor. They would be sailing from Sydney on the Makura on 20 September and would arrive in Wellington about four days later.

'It is Fatal for Youths of my temperament and tastes to come to England & Europe at the age of 25', John wrote to Challis just before he sailed for New Zealand, 'they should be set firmly to dig potatoes in the Wairarapa, with due & stringent safeguards against falling in love. Now I shall be coming back to N.Z. half-baked. Ah, well.'138 But if the last months in London had served him up some 'solid whacks of fortune', which cast a shadow over his return home, his time there had been exceedingly well spent. He had completed his PhD and he had had that 'intensive grounding in historical method and research' prescribed by Newton, which he in his turn was to pass on to his students. But the Oxford University Press decision not to publish the thesis had been a great disappointment.

John's good fortune, far outweighing the bad, was to make a group of friends who greatly enriched his life intellectually, culturally and socially. A brighter quartet than the four young men who sailed from Sydney on the Osterley is difficult to imagine; and then in London de Kiewiet, Helen Allen and Adelaide MacDonald also became a part of John's world. For the first time he had fellow students who both shared his intellectual and cultural interests and matched his academic ability. Our knowledge of John's London years is based largely on his letters home, which catch only in part their high spirits and enjoyment of life. This comes out in some surviving letters from McGrath to John, and a handful from John to Ian Henning. Their affection for one another is suggested by the way they rallied around when a thesis was being submitted, by the 'violent but salutary criticism', by the gift of the academic robes, by de Kiewiet's inscription in his second book when he sent it to John in 1937: 'To J.C.B. because we loved the same things as well as one another'. Over fifty years later, de Kiewiet recalled the 'very great influence' John had had on him, 'musically and stylistically'. At eighty-two, de Kiewiet wrote that 'I still think of him quite openly, as a needed friend and a warm influence'.139 John was always to commend de Kiewiet as an historian of South Africa to his students.

Individually, they influenced John in various ways. Duncan, the radical, with his Australian working-class background, sharpened (together with Laski) John's political interests and his contempt for the political establishment. 'As for the present [British] govt', John wrote in February 1929 in a characteristic political comment, 'it seems to consist of one brilliant man, Churchill, one very likeable personality (in private life), Baldwin, one very efficient & inhuman administrator, Neville Chamberlain, & about the biggest collection of blatant or obscure fools a country was ever cursed with'. His father had feared he was comparing Britain adversely with America. John denied it, but went on:

… while there are 200 tons of soot over London in the winter, while the London & Glasgow slums flourish, while the coal-mine mess exists, while the offer of men on the dole to do some public work for their money is refused 'because of some technical difficulty', while the 'Sunday Express' & 'Lloyds' Weekly News' & 'John Blunt' & Horatio Bottomley & Birkenhead make fat livings, & while a congenital idiot like Jix remains Home Secretary, & while people sleep on the Embankment in the shadow of the Cecil Hotel, then I consider I have a legitimate right to criticise … I'm on the side of the dissatisfied. And the same thing applies mutatis mutandis to N.Z. I believe in faith & tolerance & love & geniality. And I believe in scepticism & intolerance & hate & bitterness. And don't accuse me of lack of proportion.140

He was coming to recognise the growing importance of the United States in the twentieth-century world. He was also, for the first time, meeting and getting to know individual Americans, and reading and hearing more about their country.

I'm sick of these cheap English sneers at Americans; when it comes to a choice between interesting people give me travelled colonials or Americans every time … I'm coming to the conclusion that the States is one of the most important things to study in this here world, Babbit & Elmer Gantry ridden as it may be. It may be pretty batty in some ways, but I doubt if on the whole it's worse than England or N.Z.141

Raymond McGrath extended John's knowledge of the visual arts and gave him a taste of the literary world of Cambridge. He had already known about painting and printing from his reading and had some practical experience of printers from his time editing Spike, but McGrath made it all first hand, 'knowing' rather than 'knowing about'. McGrath's enthusiasm – for the Russian Ballet, for his discoveries on his travels in Spain (after which he became Don Ramón Majraz), for Scandinavian architecture, for his Miss Texas – was infectious. His talk of architecture and his work on 'Finella' opened John's eyes and contributed to one of his lasting interests.

With all of John's deep ambivalence about New Zealand, with his conviction that he must have more time away if he was to achieve what he believed he could, he was still thinking about what New Zealand might be. 'What a place we could have in N.Z. if we loosened the purse strings & only tried', as he said when visiting Cambridge. What is emerging is not just a dream born of nostalgia for home, but an idea of the positive qualities of the colonial mind. McGrath, Duncan, de Kiewiet were socially congenial; but, more, they exemplified the kind of sceptical yet civilised minds, the enthusiasm and directness, on which a new society might really be built. Other evidence is a comment on Henry Lawson: 'Did you ever read any of Henry Lawson's stuff? I have been reading While the Billy Boils lately & it is good stuff … Only colonial writing I ever read that got there; no waste words, no padding, not much description; but it couldn't have been written anywhere but in N.Z. or Australia.'142

The friendships of those years were given a particular intensity not just by the shared sense of discovering the world, but also by the recognition that, as on a sea voyage, this shared experience must come to an end. Adelaide MacDonald had gone by the end of John's first year, back to Toronto. Many years later, in 1958, she visited Wellington. They got on very well after thirty years: 'she and Elsie took to each other & the talk was full & free'.143 John met her again some years later in New York, where she had become the head of Unicef. Helen Allen went on to her position at Vassar. She left that on her marriage in 1931. She and John lost touch and never met again. De Kiewiet would have a distinguished academic career. After holding positions at the State University of Iowa from 1929 to 1941, and Cornell University from 1941 to 1951, he became president of the University of Rochester in 1951. McGrath published books on twentieth-century houses and on glass in architecture and decoration. He was design consultant for the BBC from 1930 to 1935 and responsible for some of the interior spaces in the new Broadcasting House in London.144 Later he became Principal Architect at the Office of Public Works in Dublin (1948–68) and professor of architecture at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Henning and Duncan both returned to the University of Sydney, Henning eventually becoming professor of French.145 Duncan joined the department of tutorial classes (university extension), becoming acting director in 1934 and director two years later. In 1951 he was appointed professor of history and political science at the University of Adelaide. John saw a little more of Duncan than he did of de Kiewiet and McGrath. Even if they had had time, it would have been almost impossible to sustain their particular friendships through letters alone. Adelaide MacDonald and the McGraths were faithful with Christmas cards. After a brief meeting in 1950 (the first since 1929), McGrath wrote, 'In future we must do a bit better at keeping in touch/Au revoir mon cher'.146 They met only briefly in later years.

At least John was making the return voyage with Elsie, and they were determined to marry just as soon as he could get a job. But one can understand his gloom – 'We're hopelessly handicapped out there by our distance from anything'147 – in a world where distances were still measured in terms of sea travel times, where an exchange of letters between New Zealand and London took almost three months and where one worried whether PhD in a cable was charged as one word or three. The years in London had, in all sorts of ways, developed John as an historian. Newton's seminar and his idea of an intensive grounding in historical method had played a part – though John was always to be sceptical of the value of a PhD compared with a good book – but probably this was less important than the stimulation he received from his fellow students and the breadth of his reading. He had deepened his appreciation of his British and European heritage, and through his letters as much as his thesis had developed his skills as a writer. He found it hard to believe that he would be able to work as an historian in New Zealand, but in the years ahead he was proved wrong.