Akaroa Harbour, South Island, New Zealand. (From the original water-colour by P. Bousfield)
Contents
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2/12/37.
“Where the small birds with their harmonious notes, Sing to a spring that smileth as she floats.”
—Brown.
A Scene in the Akatarawa Valley, near Wellington, North Island, New Zealand.
(Rly. Publicity photo.)
Railways
Magazine
Magazine
Registered at the G.P.O., Wellington, N.Z., for transmission by post as a Newspaper.
“”
For Better Service.Service Copy.
Published by the
New Zealand Government Railways Department
Vol. XIII. No. 6.
Wellington, New Zealand
September1, 1938
Railway news from all the world speaks of progress in the industry. How interesting this is to the public depends principally, of course, upon what they, as individuals, are likely to gain from it.
If they are interested in transport as a spectacle of contest between one form of conveyance and another, it may be said with confidence that the “iron horse” has his nose in front once again.
If they want the Railways as something they themselves can use and enjoy, the news of the day is equally pleasing.
From England comes the tale of the two miles-a-minute run on the L.N.E.R. with comfort all the way. America tells of its New Broadway Limited running the 903 miles between New York and Chicago in sixteen hours, including the heavy going through the Alleghenny Mountains. The other day our own little “Red Terror,” the managerial inspection car, which has led the way in railcar development in New Zealand, did the 426 miles from Wellington to Auckland, including the climb over the central mountain plateau, in eight hours fifty-six minutes, while still better performance is promised from the new Standard Diesel type passenger railcars already undergoing eminently satisfactory trial runs in the North Island.
On the railways of the world, steam locomotives and trains are being transformed into land fliers of the new romance. Stream-lining, air-conditioning, more cylinders per engine to increase efficiency, track improvements, and a luxury in the interior finish and furnishings of cars, to vie with the best that hotels or steamships can show, these are among the methods the more enterprising railways are adopting to retain their leadership in the transport field.
And they are finding a ready response from the public to the new conditions of railway travel. While increasing congestion slows up road traffic, new enterprise speeds up and increases the comfort of railway traffic.
Thus it is that many who had developed the habit of making their longer journeys by road in private cars are being won back to the railways, and become enthusiastic regarding the all-round comfort and satisfaction to be obtained from train travel under the new conditions.
Other aids to railway progress in other countries besides ours are found in staff-housing, staff-training and railway health organisations, in technical reorganisation and in appropriate co-ordination of the various means of transport.
New Zealand is keeping well abreast of the times in its railway developments, and the progress made all along the line of the physical front of the railways is an inspiration not only to those engaged in the industry, but also to the public who own and use this means of transport for their business and pleasure.
General Manager's Message.
Value of Consultation.
Last month I paid a brief visit to Australia to attend the biennial conference of the Australian and New Zealand Railway Commissioners, a conference which, by the way, will next time be held in New Zealand, during the Dominion's centennial year.
The greatest impression left on my mind from the present visit was the value to all concerned of consultations of this kind. The way had been prepared by a gathering of selected senior officers from all the Australian States and New Zealand some months previously, at which preliminary technical discussions were held and recommendations made for the Commissioners' Conference to consider.
The wealth of experience in every phase of railway activity revealed as a result of these two conferences was of great value, I am sure, to all who attended, and the respective railway systems stand to benefit considerably from the free exchange of views and the practical consideration given by each of the Commissioners present to the problems of transport in the various States represented. In this connection I wish to pay tribute to the unfailing courtesy and gracious hospitality extended by the various Railway executives and organisations with which I made contact during my visit, and I look forward to the opportunity which New Zealand will have in 1940 to make some return for the many courtesies shown towards the New Zealand representatives.
It has become a well-established practice amongst railway organisations to pool their knowledge for the advancement of railway interests generally, and from many years experience I can say that any inquiry directed by letter from one railway system to another receives the most thorough and painstaking reply. But helpful as this assistance is, it can only have its full value when considered as a forerunner to personal consultation between the authorities concerned.
The importance of verbal discussion between representatives is, of course, recognised largely in national and international affairs, but the value of the principle applied to industrial and transport organisations such as railways, which operate in every civilised country, is clearly revealed in conferences of the kind to which I have referred.
I may say that the 1938 conference was of special importance in view of the very marked changes which have occurred in the transport field in the past two years, and the many new features which have been introduced in an effort to keep pace with a constantly rising demand for still higher standards in the quality of service given by the Railways and their auxiliary transport agencies.
The results of the work of the Conference will, I believe, be beneficial to the people of Australia and New Zealand, and result in the introduction of improvements which the various Commissioners unanimously agreed would be for the good of the industry as a whole.
General Manager.
ByS. J.
)
Dr. J. W. Mellor, F.R.S., 1934.
There are a few elderly and older people throughout the English-speaking world who are free to maintain against all-comers the hypothesis, startling as it may be to the self-satisfied class under forty, that the world reached its highest point of excellence in all that pertains to the creative, or knowing faculties of man during that period that they lovingly refer to as “The Nineties.” Certainly it was during the decades that centre round the beginning of this century that the University of New Zealand conferred its degrees upon those few New Zealand students who lived to occupy commanding places in world-wide fields of learning.
A few months ago in the “Railways Magazine” the passing of the world's greatest physicist was fittingly commemorated by Dr. Marsden when Lord Rutherford passed away. In this article is commemorated the life and death of the world's greatest chemist, Dr. J. W. Mellor. These two leaders in the allied world army of science were both ever eager to acknowledge their debt to the same Alma Mater of Learning—the University of New Zealand. Though they graduated from different colleges—Rutherford from Canterbury and Mellor from Dune-din—they attended lectures during virtually the same years, carried out the most brilliant work of their careers during much the same period at towns far away indeed from their Dominion homes but so close together as Manchester and the “Five Towns” of Staffordshire, and they finally died within a few months of each other in London. The work and status of Rutherford in Physics is known to all New Zealanders, but that of Mellor in the wider field of Chemistry is not less outstanding and definite, and not less worthy of affectionate pride from all New Zealanders. Although the boy Mellor was already ten years old when he arrived in New Zealand, all his schooling was obtained here; and when he left for England in 1899 at the age of thirty all the formative influences of his outstanding life-work were already behind him and his future greatness seemed assured to his teachers and associates.
He has left the world an enduring monument in his magnificent “Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretic Chemistry,” a huge work (in 16 volumes) which, taking as it does, the whole world of Inorganic Chemistry as its province, yet surveys the vast field so thoroughly and with such detail that it would seem there remains no further word to be said. But a more spectacular proof of his greatness came during the Great War. The steel industry was suddenly confronted with a situation that threatened the life of the Nation when Continental supplies of refractory materials and of many necessary steel alloys were cut off. Dr. Mellor offered his services to the authorities and so prompt and successful were the results of his research that the industry was enabled to meet the stupendous demands of the war almost without intermission or delay. I am unable at present to check the source of the quotation, but some well-known English technical magazine declared that while it was, of course, incorrect to claim that any one man such as Foch, Clemenceau or Lloyd George had won the war, the claim could most nearly be advanced for Mellor. It is known privately that he was offered, or at least approached concerning the offer of, a peerage; but his innate modesty and simplicity and the moderate wealth, or poverty, he enjoyed, alike prevented his acceptance of the honour. In conversation he explained the reluctance by saying that since his health prevented his “doing his bit” in the trenches, his scientific labours should be given freely as his contribution to the service of his country.
Huxley said that “Science and Literature are not two things but two sides of one thing.” This fact is well illustrated by Mellor. He was deeply read in English literature, even in the most technical portions of his mathematical and chemical work his use of language was clear, forcible, and, at times eloquent, while in “Uncle Joe's Nonsense” book he reveals himself as a cartoonist of striking ability and a creator of delightful humour and most amusing conceits.
* * *
His father was Job Mellor, a loom-tuner in the Yorkshire woollen mills. He was a model of tireless patience, and never was man more appropriately named. Not well-educated by our modern standards, he was a keen reader and adaptable in all things. In later years he built his own house in Dunedin and also used to make his own
Joseph William Mellor was born in Lindley, a suburb of Huddersfield, in 1869. The reproduced portrait of the family group—the children comprised four girls and two boys as may be seen—shows a handsome and dignified couple, who cannot fail to impress by their appearance of intelligence and sterling worth. The family arrived in Lyttelton in 1879 and spent two years in Kaiapoi, where the father worked in the woollen mills and the children went to school. In 1881 they all went south to Dunedin, the magnet being, of course, the woollen mills in the Kaikorai Valley. Here the father built the house referred to above and the family settled down. Joseph went to the Linden School (by the way, did you know that part of the Kaikorai Valley was then known as Linden and that
still raises familiar echoes in scholars of that school?) There he was looked on as an ordinary industrious schoolboy of no outstanding merit. Leaving school in December, 1882, he started work as a handy boy in the employ of H. S. Fish, the prominent citizen, mayor and Member of Parliament, whose vituperative speeches prompted the famous epigram of the 'nineties, “While in England we get our fish from Billingsgate, in the Antipodes we get our Billingsgate from Fish.”
Joseph then progressed through Simon Bros.'s boot shop to McKinley's boot factory, and finally to the boot factory of Sargood & Sons, where he worked for some years.
The wind of Learning bloweth where it listeth, but the forebears and early life of Mellor bear close resemblance to those of Rutherford, his peer. Young Rutherford was the more brilliant, but Mellor the keener after knowledge. Only a few months ago the only chord of memory evoked by the mention of Mellor's name in the breast of a certain Dunedinite who was Mellor's foreman in Sargood's factory was that of a quiet studious boot-clicker, pondering over mysterious books in lunch hours and every spare minute while the factry drone was still.
For, as Mellor himself confided recently to his old schoolmate, life-long friend and brother-in-law, Mr. Arthur Ellis of Dunedin, he was a youth in his early teens when he first conceived his life-long determination—impossible of fruition as it might then appear—to become the foremost chemist of his generation. This ambitio seems to owe nothing to any external influence, although it is remembered that his father was always very interested in anything pertaining to that science.
It was a long walk in those mornings over the Roslyn hill to Sargood's factory, and a longer walk back in the evening, but every night was spent at the beloved studies. A “laboratory” was built in the garden of the home, not a pretentious building, only a 6 ft. by 6 ft. shed of corrugated iron, fitted with such meagre apparatus and books as his modest savings could compass. While the evening meal was in progress it was his mother's task—nay, the word “task” ill describes the work of love, since the studies of young Joe were already the pride and hope of the parents—to heat a brick in the kitchen oven, and immediately the meal was over the indefatigable student withdrew to the “tin-shed” for the evening, where he experimented and read by the light of the small kerosene lamp of yore and comforted by the hot brick enclosed in flannel.
It is interesting to learn that the “tin-shed” was still in existence a few years ago and that much of Mellor's modest apparatus was still housed there.
A further proof of his industry is revealed by the fact that, as the young scientist was too poor to buy the books he needed, he obtained a loan of many of them from various sources and laboriously copied the contents out in longhand.
There was of course little time for sport or other relaxation for one who lived such laborious days and studious nights but, as the outcome of the joint suggestion and co-operation of Mr. Arthur Ellis, he was introduced to chess in 1885 and became an outstanding player. For some years he acted as chess Editor for the Dunedin “Evening Star,” and was once or twice in the final heat of the New Zealand Chess Championship. I apologise for the word “heat” in such context, but was delighted to learn that in his maturer years in Staffordshire and London the only sport that could delay the completion of his monumental “Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry” was a game of penny poker or the more erudite solo whist.
His studies attracted the attention of the late Mr. G. M. Thomson, Science Master at the Otago Boys' High School, and father of Dr. Allan Thomson, the first New Zealand Rhodes Scholar. Mellor attended classes at the Technical School, of which G.M. was a Director and from there matriculated in 1892. By this time he had shown aptitude for mathematics also, and Mr. Thomson recognised a coming “genius” and arranged a bursary or scholarship to the University. He also assisted the arrangement with Sargood's whereby Mellor was permitted the necessary time off to attend lectures. I well remember the enthusiasm of Mr. Thomson after Mellor's fine work, “Higher Mathematics for Students of Chemistry and Physics” (to which students of mathematics could well have been added), was published in 1902, and his
The Mellor family group, showing J. W. Mellor, the world scientist to be, in the background.
J. W. Mellor in his B.Sc. grown, 1897.
The Professor of Chemistry at Otago in those days was the veteran Professor Black, a fine scholar of the olden type and a generous enthusiast, who was delighted when he recognised, after a few years, that Mellor had outstripped him in his own field. When the time came for Black to retire, it was suggested by friends in Dunedin that Mellor, then at Owens College, Manchester, should be brought back to succeed Black. But “No, no,” the old man protested, “he would be wasted here.” Certainly the war would have been harder to win if Mellor had returned to Dunedin!
In 1897 Mellor won the Senior Scholarship in Chemistry from Otago University, in 1898 he gained first-class honours in Chemistry, and in 1899 was awarded the 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship in Chemistry.
It is interesting to remember that Rutherford won his Senior Scholarship in Mathematics at Canterbury in 1892, and was awarded the Exhibition Science Scholarship in Electricity in 1894, while J. A. Erskine, probably the greatest genius of the three, took the Senior Scholarship in Physical Science in 1893, and was awarded the Exhibition Science Scholarship in Electricity in 1896, also from Canterbury College. Verily, there were giants in those days!
His University career finished so brilliantly, Mellor taught at Lincoln Agricultural College for a few months until the benefits of the Exhibition Scholarship could be utilised. Here in his 30th year he married Miss Emma Bakes, a young lady from Lincolnshire who had been brought up in Auckland. His training finished, his happiness assured and brilliant prospects unfolding, Mellor and his wife sailed from Port Chalmers in August, 1899, to take up his Research Scholarship at Owens College, Manchester, under Professor H. B. Dixon.
In 1902, now a Doctor of Science, Mellor was appointed Chemist to the Pottery Manufacturers' Federation and proceeded to Newcastle-under-Lyme, in the “Five Towns” where the pottery industry is centralised and concerning which Arnold Bennett was then writing those classic novels which prove him the greatest figure in literature that has yet emerged from the busy hills and valleys where the “Five Towns” cluster. This research turned out to be Mellor's life work. In 1905 he became Director of the Research Laboratories of the Federation, and until 1937 was closely engaged in chemical researches associated with the ceramic industry. An important extension of his work was originated by a conversation between Dr. Mellor and Lt.-Col. C. W. Thomas which was followed by a conference at the North Staffordshire Hotel on January 4th, 1909, of those interested in refractories. The Institution of Gas Engineers was the first to take advantage of the research facilities of the Pottery Federation, but co-operation gradually increased until on April 4th, 1920, the British Refractories Research Association was formally constituted. This Association was directed by four joint committees representing respectively the Pottery Manufacturers' Association, the Institution of Gas Engineers, and the Blast Furnace and Open Hearth sections of the British Iron and Steel Federation. The allied researches were conducted in the laboratories of the Pottery Federation for some years but on December 5th, 1934, the magnificent new laboratories were opened at Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent. Dr. Mellor was appointed the first Director being, as “The Engineer” observed, the “only man for the position,” and the laboratories were called the “Mellor Laboratories of the British Refractories Research Association,” “in grateful recognition by the Council of his long and distinguished service to the ceramic industry.” A far cry from the “tin-shed” in Kaikorai Valley with its primitive comforts and facilities! There Dr. Mellor continued in harness till 1937, when continued ill-health enforced his retirement, and he migrated to Highlands Heath, Portsmouth Road, London, where he died on May 24th, 1938.
During these years Dr. Mellor was a busy member of the Ceramic Society, for the most time being Secretary or President. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and on his retirement was granted a C.B.E., a somewhat barren honour for so great a man.
All this history would seem to stamp Mellor as only a dry, dusty chemist with relatively narrow interests, or at most as a purely academic creature. Nothing is further from the truth. He was instead a man of extraordinarily wide in
The Absent-Minded Beggar
Cartoon by Dr. Mellor (after Bateman). Mellor lights his pipe in a fashionable restaurant.A corner of Dr. Mellor's library in London, showing card indexes and pamphlets.
Although I still find that I have painted Mellor only as a dull dog, the very reverse is the truth. His early work on mathematics shows that the true bent of his genius was mathematical even more than chemical, and like all mathematicians he was a great lover of poetry and a master of whimsey and nonsense. It was curiously enough as Secretary of the Ceramic Society that he let himself go to the fullest extent, and although the seasons of his most carefree jollity were apparently those occasions when that Society held its conventions in foreign places, nevertheless even the ordinary routine printed proceedings of that extremely dull body are enlivened by sketches and jeux d'esprit from its irrepressible secretary. He was obviously the spoilt child among the grave and reverend seigniors, whose chief concern rested in the obscure chemistry of fusible and refractory clays, and in 1934 the Ceramic Society—yes, as a Society!—published an extraordinary volume of light and airy nothings entitled “Uncle Joe's Nonsense,” a volume of fun in prose, verse, and picture chosen by Mellor himself from his store of published nonsense and from letters to his nephews and nieces in Dunedin or to other friends. Such a tribute is probably unique, although I think something of the kind happened after the early death in the 'nineties of Holly, a similar spoilt child of a metallurgical society in the United States. The other comparisons evoked by the book are those of Mellor with two Professors of Mathematics, the Reverend Dodgshun (Lewis Carrol)
It is doubtless a jolt to readers when they are reminded that chemists agree that Mellor is in the very forefront of the ranks of the inorganic chemists, that there is, nor has been, no such outstanding figure among the organic chemists, that in his sixteen noble volumes Dr. Mellor virtually exhausted all that could be authoritatively said up-to-date on the theory and practice of Inorganic Chemistry—and that his researches on refractory materials and special steels comprised original work of great importance to Great Britain and the world.
Cartoon by Mellor on a domestic incident.
(Arnold Bennett tells us the “Five Towns” are “Hanbridge, which has the shape of a horse and its rider, Bursley of half a donkey, Knype of a pair of trousers, Longshaw of an octopus and little Turnhill of a beetle.”—Ed.)
An Appreciation.
From Messrs. Booth, Macdonald and Co., Ltd., Christchurch, to the Stationmaster, Christchurch.
We wish to express our appreciation again for the attention given to our parcels which, in some cases, have to be dealt with by your officers only a short time before departure of trains.
Never one complaint have we had regarding late arrivals. As an illustration, we consigned a parcel to Palmerston South at 8.30 a.m. this morning. This we understand caught the Express at 8.35 a.m.—pretty good work. Such excellent service enables us to keep faith with our customers. We get plenty of knocks ourselves, but we certainly must give credit where it is due.
We should also like to mention the Railway Through Booking Office whose efficient work is included in this acknowledgment.
ByO. N.
)
Gillespie
Three months ago I was sitting in a second-class smoker, and the young man sharing my seat was reading “Riders to the Sea.” He was a sun-tanned, strong-jawed, open-air type, and I found that he was going to take a part in this subtle and great play of J. M. Synge, the production being run by a Drama League group in a hamlet twenty miles from the nearest railway station.
Some quirk of memory caused my mind to slip back to thirty years ago, when three or four of us were discussing the chances of the return to New Zealand of a Grand Opera Company, and a very similar young man said—cheerily, “Well, you know, the best opera I ever seen was the Flying Jordans, at Gisborne.”
Those two sets of remarks, divided by the period of only about one generation, represented an astonishing change. I thought it might be interesting to see what happened in the old days about our evening entertainments, and just why such a contrast in outlook had come about.
In an area of our community life as wide as the recreational methods of our people, the only safe way is to dredge from the depths of one's own personal recollections. I recommend this exercise of memory to all readers for it is an astonishing experience.
I had the good fortune to be born near a country town, and to have lived a goodly portion of my life, up to thirty years of age, in small places.
The first two shows at actual theatres that I personally can recall were “Ali Baba” and “Djin-Djin.” I can remember the two songs in “Djin-Djin”—“Sammy, My Old Friend Sam,” and “I've Chucked up the Push for Me Donah,” as if they were yesterday.
We did not know in New Zealand that Bert Royle's genius in the writing of the words and lyrics of this first combination of spectacle and comic opera, had saved the great J. C. Williamson firm in the period of the Bank crashes in Melbourne. But it was a rich and colourful presentation. I had been at the Christ-church Show all day, had a pair of new shoes, and assembled a burning and blistered heel. I slipped the shoe off during the performance of “Djin-Djin” and poked it under the seat. In the tumultuous excitement of the general exit, I left it there, reaching the vestibule in a dot and carry run. I went back to get the shoe, the lights were out, “the glory had departed,” and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of sadness and disillusionment.
In the country town where I lived, those were the days of touring companies with musical glasses, the Lynch Family of Bell-ringers, the touring lecturer with the lantern slides, and visits from the Carl Hertz type of illusionist. There were also stock companies playing “The Worst Woman in London,” “The Secret Crime,” “The Forger's Wife,” “The Count's Revenge,” and “Loving Hearts.” There were comedy companies also. I can remember away back in 1894, Frank M. Clark's Alhambra Company with Harry Shine and Charles Fanning in “Muldoon's Picnic.”
But, as can be expected, New Zealand had its stern and strong dramatic shows from the very beginnings of the settlement. We reproduce here the first theatrical poster put out in Auckland, in 1844. The Fitzroy Theatre was the place and the drama was called “The Two Gregories.”
“Mr. Buckingham begs leave to announce to the public of Auckland that the First Theatrical Performance in this town will Take Place on Tuesday Evening Next.”
Other highlights were these: “To ensure the comfort of the Ladies, an Elegant and Commodious Dress Circle” was to be installed, and the admission prices were on sound lines: “Double ticket, 10/6; Dress Circle, Single, 7/6; Pit, 5/-”; but it must be recalled that
(
Leslie Hinge collection.)
Old-time show posters in Christchurch in the early 'seventies.
Those itinerant players of those early days were of the stuff of heroes, especially the women players. The leading lady had to be a village girl Monday night; countess, Tuesday; barmaid, Wednesday; and a down-trodden wife next day. Transport was troublesome, but somehow I seem to remember much excellent, sincere and capable miming among them. The whole of this cannot go down to the credit of the trailing pink clouds of past memories, either.
There is something else I would like to place on record here. New Zealanders of those far-off days would take an endless amount of trouble to see a famous show, or a well-known artist. Special trains were run, and in my part of the South I can remember the hundreds who bicycled twenty or thirty miles to see Grand Opera in Christ-church.
So that it becomes clear that the New Zealander of to-day round about fifty years of age, who was at all theatrically inclined has a brilliant diadem of memories of the world's greatest artists. In spite of all the difficulties of transport and the other forms of comparative hardship, the world's great ones came here. I can remember when Nellie Stewart, after a career of light and whimsical musical comedy parts and other light and airy roles, startled us over thirty years ago with an astonishing performance of “Camille.” It was recalled by Harcus Plimmer, I think, that in New Zealand we had already seen the great tragedy played by four world figures: Janet Achurch, Mrs. Brown Potter, Nance O'Neill, and Janet Waldorf.
It would be idle to attempt in the space of this article to enumerate the great ones of the earth who called in to play to New Zealand audiences. In my personal highlights I would certainly place Robert Brough and his beloved wife, and their high-class cast of polished London artists, “Beauty and the Barge” and “Pygmalion and Galatea” are jewels in every playgoer's memory.
It is more than thirty years ago that Anderson's Dramatic Company played the exciting “Ladder of Life,” George Marlowe was running what the Sydney “Bulletin” called “Marlowdrama,” and that titanic master of spectacle, Bland Holt, shook grown men and women to their emotional foundations with “White Heather” with its verisimilitude of a diver's fight under the sea; and “Sporting Life,” with its real race with real horses on the stage.
By the way, I saw every Bland Holt show per medium of a special train, crowded almost to the smoke-stack of the joyous engine.
Another integral portion of this background is Pollard's Lilliputian Opera Company. What a constellation that was, with benevolent old Tom Pollard as presiding genius, and the golden names of May and Maud Beatty, Marion Mitchell, the Carkeek girls, and a score of others. The night that Tom Pollard announced in Christchurch that
(Leslie Hinge Collection)
the old theatre royal in christchurch, showing als the palace hotel, the homo of may and maud beatty
Then from the Williamson's companies came all those gay musical comedies, especially the “Girls” (“Girls of Gotten-burg,” “The Shop Girl,” “The Circus Girl,” “The Dairymaids,” and so on, ad infinitum). I remember, as a very slight youngster, visiting Wellington in my school holidays, and seeing “The Geisha,” with Miss Perry in the lead and W. S. Percy as the incredibly funny Lung Hi. I can see, as if it were yesterday, Percy's innocent look of bland astonishment when the stolen alarum clock hidden in his flowing Chinese gown, gave the show away by striking.
Those, too, were the days of Fuller's Vaudeville with Will Watkins of “What Oh, She Bumps” fame, and Will Stevens, the “Sad-eyed Shriek.” Later we were to see dainty Irene Franklin, and the incredible “Ferry the Frog,” and a hundred other wonders. Healthy, happy and hearty days they were. The freedom of the pit was a real thing. Its occupants had the right of caustic comment on both players and the dress circle audience. “Going Over the Top” was a mild exercise of courage compared with the risk taken by a clerk if he appeared with a sweetheart in the circle when the rest of his fellow boarders were in the pit.
However, to sum up, the surprising and unique feature of this ramble at random down Memory Lane is the richness of the artistic treasures brought to us then. It is astonishing, when voyages were weeks long, that we should have
Ernest Fitts, the bass singer of “Djin Djin” and many other Williamson operas.
It is rather a jolt to remember that it is forty years since Alfred Hill took the country by storm with “Hinemoa.”
Here is an item that is arresting: Just at the time of the rage for “Hinemoa” there appears this note in an Auckland paper, “The cinematograph is being produced in various stages of perfection and imperfection. To those who have not seen the invention it may be described as similar to the camera obscura, but giving set scenes.”
I wonder what the writer of that terse paragraph would say if he saw the sixty or more cinema palaces that today adorn Auckland.
Before I finish with this roving account of the past I must point out again the outstanding distinctiveness of New Zealand in this arena of human activity. A citizen of such towns, for instance, as Timaru or Palmerston North, and many other much smaller places, in the view of many a visiting artist until the amazing box office figures came in—saw a continuous procession of world figures. In country town theatres, I have personally seen H. B. Irving, Nance O'Neill, Sybil Thorndike, Robert Brough, Dion Boucicault and many more of the world's great names; I have seen Pavlova and Genee dance; heard Paderewski, Mark Hambourg, Heifitz, Madame Carreno, Heerman and a dozen other virtuosi play; Trebelli, Chaliapin, Nordica, and a score of other great singers, heard Sousa's Band and the Besses of the Barn, and much of the best of comic opera done by large and expensive companies.
But enough of history.
In those past days, it was unusual to hear of any New Zealander becoming distinguished as an actor or actress. Tom Pollard's juveniles were crowned heads in miniature, but the first legend I remember about a stage success surrounded a young man from Dunedin. He was a handsome young blacksmith named Harry Jewett, who foresook the striking hammer for the footlights in the 'eighties. He eventually made his way to America, became a great star, and was rated in U.S.A. as the best “Spider” in that unbeatable melodrama, “The Silver King.” There are a few other “Harrys”—Harry Plimmer, of course, Harry Roberts, and Harry Diver. Then from Christchurch, a good-looking schoolmaster, Winter Hall, went away to become a firmly established character film actor in Hollywood.
But the growth of any general habit of taking part in plays, of actual mumming, was slow at first. Of course, every town had its amateur company, mostly confined to doing musical comedy, but now and again essaying “Box and Cox,” or the like.
New Zealand had already developed a selective taste which was rapidly diverging from the Australian. The success here of “Peter Pan” with the adorable Lizette Parkes, in 1909, was in sharp contrast to its failure in the Australian cities, and there were many other instances comforting to our native pride.
Here and there were little groups of people studying dramatic art seriously. Thirty years ago, for instance, there was a Shakespeare Society in Auckland which was courageously producing Bernard Shaw's plays. I went to see them in 1911 when they visited Wellington with a splendid performance. In Christ-church, too, at this time, there were strong and growing circles, vigorously alive.
The Great War intervened, making a cultural desert for more than five years. In the next decade, the great change took place. The Little Theatre or Repertory movement had blossomed into vivid life in England, and in the way which has always been so inevitable with us, this essentially English development soon found its counterpart here.
The first Repertory Society was formed in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch following, and soon the whole country was studded with societies having similar aims.
It is worth while getting our dates in perspective. It was in 1926 that the Wellington Society was formed. Auckland had then been in existence for three years and Christchurch was to follow much later. However, there were workers in the field in many parts of New Zealand. Of the many distinguished names who adorn the movement we can select Professor James Shelley, who had started a Little Theatre at Canterbury College and lectured in various parts of New Zealand under the auspices of the W.E.A. There was in every city a wealth of experience in actual playing and a reservoir of sound actors and actresses. It only needed such active producing personalities as Leo Du Chateau, the late H. J. Bentley, and others in those days to bring the chaos into working order. To-day we have the supremely fine performances of Arnold Goodwin in such striking experiments as Capek's “Insect Play” and “Lefty” to show us where we have arrived.
But the most spectacular development took place when the British Drama League made its appearance. As has been so often the case with cultural
(
S. P Andrew, photo.)
Professor James Shelley, the dynamic personality to whom Christchurch owes its Repertory Theatre movement.
(Continued on page 49.)
By)
James Cowan
(
J. C., Photo. at Ruatoki, 1921.)
Te Tupara, Chief of Ruatoki. (Died, 1926).
The peculiar satisfaction that a field-research worker derives from digging up the true stories of old adventure, the real thing from participants in the events narrated, is comparable to the feeling of a successful treasure hunter who finds that he has struck the right spot and the gold's there—the authentic chest with skull and cross-bones. My years of search and enquiry into the frontier history of New Zealand have brought me much treasure of that kind. Its transmutation into a means of livelihood, or part of the means, was another thing. The process of discovery usually cost more than the great game yielded. But the search was the thing, the pleasure of exploration in bush and hill fort, the talks with the grey old people who were the last survivors of the warrior glory of their people. The meagre and unsatifying and usually inaccurate published accounts of Maori war episodes often prompted long trips into remote places to learn the exact facts while yet there was time. More often there was no written record at all. Two things were necessary, indispensable. For one, the ability to speak Maori, and a solid groundwork of historical tribal and military knowledge. Next, a diplomatic approach in the Maori manner, for many rather awkward questions were necessary if one were to get to the bottom of some at first inexplicable happenings. It was always desirable, if possible, to hear the narratives of the past on the actual places where history was made, and from men who had helped to make that bit of history.
A procession of dark old faces passes, men who had followed Te Kooti or fought against him, men still older, deeply tattooed patriarchs whose memories went back to the cannibal age. Two of Hongi's aged warriors even; a number of Hone Heke's. They are all gone, long ago; those meetings in some dimly-lighted thatched whare, or out on the fern-covered mounds and crumbling parapets that were once fields of battle and siege, can never come again. Pakeha friends, too, old officers of the colonial forces, old Forest Rangers; tall, lean veterans of the scouting trails, neighbours on the old King Country frontier, old bushmen and camp-mates. Frontiersmen who had lived years on the edge of adventure. They, too, have gone, but what they knew has not been lost.
* * *
This story, gathered from old campaigners on each side, is an example of the historical episodes which were not chronicled by eyewitnesses or detailed in official despatches. But its chief value lies in the fact that the scenes of action can still be traced exactly. Rauporoa pa, on the green banks of the Whakatane River, three miles in from the harbour and the little town under the cliffs, is one of the very few places in our country where the battlefield and the fortification lines have been saved from ruin.
* * *
The well-preserved earthworks of the Rauporoa pa, the Ngati-Pukeko village and fort besieged by Te Kooti's force in March, 1869, stand on an alluvial plain thickly dotted with cabbage-trees (ti or whanake) of great size. The redoubt is surrounded by Maori and pakeha cultivations; the native villages of the Poroporo and Rewatu are a short distance away, and the Whakatane flows past its rear beneath masses of weeping willows. Within rifle shot
(
J.O., photo. at Ruatoki, 1921.)
Te Whiu, the old Urewera Scout.pa is a rectangular work consisting of an earth parapet and a surrounding trench; the height of the scarp above the bottom of the ditch is still seven to eight feet, and inside the work is four or five feet high; the ditch is four feet wide and about the same depth. The dimensions of the pa are about 120 yards in length (parallel with the course of the Whakatane River, immediately under its rear wall) and 55 yards in width. There are two large salients, which form flanking bastions against enfilading fire, one with 15 yards front on the western flank to the south of the main gateway; the other is an angle near the river. Another flanking work, a bastion eight yards on its longest alignment, is constructed at the opposite (or south) end of the eastern face, and there is a smaller salient near one of the gateways facing the river.
The palisade which once surrounded the enclosure has long disappeared. Timber stumps and butts visible in the high earth wall and on the edges of the ditch are the remains of a heavy growth of manuka timber, cleared away by the Maori owners of the pa reserve. The parapets, however, remained in an almost perfect condition when I searched out the place, and made the sketch here reproduced of an enormous old ti tree, sturdy veteran of many branches, growing in the main gateway, facing west. Te More Takuira, the head man of Raupo-roa told me, as we sat on the edge of the trench, it was originally one of the stakes of the fence, a young tree cut down, sharpened at the butt and driven into the ground. It took root and flourished to become the solitary remnant of the tall stockade in which it was planted seventy years ago.
The ground on the west face of the work is thickly covered with the depressions indicating kumara and potato pits, the food stores of the garrison. On the south, the narrow side, about thirty yards from the gateway, there is a shallow uneven trench, running across the face of the pa and nearing it as it approaches the river. This was where the Hauhaus dug themselves in after the failure of their first effort against the fort. In the rear wall there are two openings, gateways which gave access to the river. Within the walls the parapet is three to five feet above the general level of the ground of the ditch, so well preserved by its olden growth of manuka and fern, and now securely protected from cattle by a barbed-wire fence, is above four feet in width and of equal depth.
This was the tribal stronghold and gathering place of the Ngati-Pukeko, a tribe friendly to the Government, against which Te Kooti launched a column of three to four hundred warriors, East Coast men of various tribes—many of them escapees from exile in Chatham Island—reinforced by Urewera and Taupo parties. While one portion of the raiding force, a kokiri under Wirihana Koikoi, was detailed to storm the Poronu redoubt and the tribe's small flour-mill, the main body advanced against the south face of the pa. They came forward in a solid body of bare-legged men, treading the ground with a heavy resounding tramp, their rifles, carbines and double-barrel guns held at the ready. Their threatening march gave the obvious lie to a white flag, borne by one of their front rank men. Some of the people in the pa, however, were so credulous, or so anxious to avoid fighting—the pacifists of Ngati-Pukeko—that they tried to open the gates and admit the enemy, who, once within, would begin slaughtering the garrison. One of these who reposed faith in Te Kooti's flag was an old lay-reader of the church, Ihaia te Ahu. He cried out, “It is peace, peace—there's the white flag!” Another man deceived by the long streamer of white was Hori, one of the chiefs of the pa. He was actually pushing open the solid sliding door, fastened by wooden pegs, which formed the gate on the south side, and the advance files of the enemy were almost within the defences, their guns at the present, when another chief, Tamihana Te Tahawera, saved the situation. He ran to close the door, and was struggling with foolish old Hori, when a young Urewera man, Meihaka Toko-pounamu, fired at him at a range of a few paces. The bullet missed Tahawera and struck the unfortunate Hori, who fell dead just inside the gateway.
The door was made fast, and the baffled Hauhaus retired under fire to dig themselves in. Meihaka's shot was quickly returned by Hirini Manuao, in the pa trench. His bullet broke the staff from which the white flag was floating.
Now the angry Hauhaus found themselves under heavy fire from the whole south face of the pa and the flanking bastion on the west side. The terrain was level and devoid of cover; the plain was covered to the river bank with the Ngati-Pukeko cultivations of corn, potatoes, kumara and taro.
The Hauhaus scooped out a rifle trench behind a whare outside the pa, and secured a little head cover. They then extended the trench eastward towards the river bank, and working nearer the pa as they drove it toward the Whakatane.
(
J. C., sketch in 1921.)
The old ti tree at Rauporoa pa, Whakatane.
The attack now steadied down into a regular siege, but the Hauhaus curiously did not push their attack on any but the south face of the pa. Sheltered in their trench and shallow rifle pits, they maintained a heavy fire on the Ngati-Pukeko defenders, which those warriors as hotly returned. There were a number of women in the pa, but it was not strongly garrisoned, since most of the men were away on the coast sandhills, with Hori Kawakura, a capable leader, when the attack was delivered. When the alarm was raised in Whakatane by refugees from Rauporoa, Hori hurried up to the besieged pa, and entered it under fire, with his party of about twenty men. As ammunition was running short, he came out again at great risk, with a few men, and took back a supply of powder and bullets. This fine deed was performed under heavy fire.
Te Kooti's force possessed superiority not only in numbers but in arms. The Hauhaus had many good rifles and carbines, besides their shot-guns. The defenders of the pa had nothing but muzzle-loading single and double barrel guns, some of them old-fashioned flintlocks. They endeavoured to burn out those of the attackers who were posted behind the whare on the south by tying burning rags to stones and throwing them on to the thatched roof, but the Hauhaus extinguished the fire. Several dead of the attacking party lay between the stockade and this house.
The second Ngati-pukeko man killed was Heremaia Tautari. He was shot while standing on the parapet of the south-east angle, calling out across the river to his children, who were at that moment defending the redoubt at the Poronu flour-mill against the final rush, bidding them retreat to the pa.
Hori Kawakura's little band of fighting men, now formed the backbone of the defence; but stoutly as they and their fellow-tribesmen fought, their plight appeared hopeless. Their ammunition was failing. For two days and two nights the garrison had steadfastly resisted the overwhelming force of well-armed rebels. It was now the early morning of the third day, and although urgent messages had been sent for help there was no appearance of the reinforcements to avert defeat and massacre.
At this moment Lieutenant Gilbert Mair was coming up at his best speed with a column of 130 Ngati-Rangitihi from Matata. Was he too late? He had ridden through the night from Tauranga, desperately anxious for his Whakatane friends and the gallant Frenchman and his little Maori family at the mill. After crossing the Orini stream, Mair met the first of the whati, the fugitives from Raupo-roa. The pa had fallen, but whether there had been a terrible massacre or not was as yet uncertain.
The first Ngati-Pukeko refugee, Mair met was an old fellow running hard, in great distress. He cried out to Mair: “Kau tahuri te motu nei!” Kau tahuri te motu nei!” (“The island has been overturned!”) Mair's men opened their ranks to let the fugitives through. At a deep raupo swamp south of Te Poroporo settlement, the first of Te Kooti's men came in sight, pursuing the fleeing Ngati-Pukeko. There were about seventy Hauhaus, all mounted, many of them armed with Calisher and Terry carbines.
Mair extended his men, tired after their heavy forced march, and kept Te Kooti's horsemen in check, while the Ngati-Pukeko, the Raupo-roa fighters, turned and assisted the relief force. There was good cover along the edge of the flax and raupo swamp and among the manuka. Mair steadily advanced, skirmishing up the valley until the pa was reached. There it was discovered that there had been no heavy losses except on the side of the Hauhaus. The pa had been captured, but not until nearly all the defenders had made their escape down through the swamps and thickets north of the fort. Only four had been killed in the attack. But the mill-redoubt had been captured; Jean, the Frenchman, lay dead in the gateway.
No memorial marks the place where the brave miller defended his charge to the last. But the parapets of Rauporoa (“The Tall Swamp Reed”) still stand firm—or did when last I rode that way. The tribe proposed, as Te More told me, to restore some of the stockades and the gates, out of the abundance of drift totara timber lying about the Whakatane banks. Such an attempt to renew the defences of the old-time fighting-pa deserves pakeha encouragement.
* * *
It was not so easy to construct the connected account of Rauporoa's siege as the reader possibly would imagine. For the Hauhau side of the story, old warriors who followed Te Kooti were looked up at Ruatoki, Waimana, and Ohiwa, and in Ruatahuna Valley, Urewera country. In particular there were Te Tupara, of Ruatoki, a big soldierly stalwart, who fought for Te Kooti for three years; Netana Whakaari, tall and thin, a keen blade of a veteran, with a face so deeply and blackly tattooed that his glittering eyes looked out as through a dark carved mask. There was Te Whiu, too, the man who two years later ran down and captured Kereopa the Eye-eater, at daylight one morning near Ruatahuna. That was in 1871, when Netana and Te Whiu had both turned to the Government side, by way of variety. Many others had a shot at both sides. The pakeha officers found that an ex-Hauhau bushman made the best Government scout. He knew all the tricks.
byArthur L. Stead
Some of the most famous trains in the world are among those operating in the Anglo-Scottish services of the London, Midland & Scottish, and London & North Eastern Railways. Traffic between English and Scottish centres this year is exceptionally heavy, and the wonderful Empire Exhibition in Glasgow—where New Zealand has a magnificent show—is bringing rich business to the railways. Many important accelerations have been introduced in the Anglo-Scottish time-tables. The “Royal Scot” express of the L. M. & S., which leaves Euston Station, London, for Glasgow and Edinburgh at 10 a.m. each week day, has been accelerated by 45 minutes, covering the 299 miles from London to Carlisle non-stop at an average speed of 60 m.p.h. In the reverse direction a cut of 25 minutes has been effected in the Glasgow-Euston timings. On the L. & N. E. R., the “Flying Scotsman,” daily trains have been re-timed to complete the journey in each direction between King's Cross and Edinburgh in seven hours, with one intermediate stop at Newcastle. For the first time in its long history, the “Flying Scotsman” this year runs on Sundays as well as on week-days. Fastest of all Anglo-Scottish trains is the “Coronation” streamliner, which occupies only six hours on the King's Cross-Edinburgh journey.
Particular interest attaches to these Anglo-Scottish accelerations because this year we are celebrating the golden jubilee of the famous “Railway Race to Edinburgh,” one of the most thrilling events in transporation's story. This “railway race” had its beginnings in 1887, when third-class passengers were first allowed to travel by the “Flying Scotsman” between King's Cross and Edinburgh. The West Coast (London & North Western and Caledonion) Railways had for some years carried third-class travellers on their principal day train between Euston and Edinburgh, but the journey occupied 10 hours, as compared with the East Coast (King's Cross-Edinburgh) run of 9 hours. On June 1st, 1888, the Euston-Edinburgh timing was cut to 9 hours. The East Coast companies (Great Northern, North Eastern and North British) promptly responded by accelerating the “Flying Scotsman” to 8 ½ hours as from July 1st. Towards the end of that month the West Coast authorities announced that they also would run in 8 ½ hours, but very cleverly the East Coast people made arrangements to do the King's Cross-Edinburgh trip in 8 hours, commencing on the very day their competitors were proposing to perform the run from Euston in 8 ½ hours. Taken by surprise, the West Coast Railways announced a further reduction to 8 hours to commence on August 6th. Now the really thrilling part of the business commenced. On August 13th, the “Flying Scotsman” was re-scheduled to reach Edinburgh in 7 hours 45 minutes, but the West
Central Passenger Station, Milan, Italy.
Remarkable strides have been made in improving the amenities of railway
Billiards at the Southern Railway Servants' Orphanage.
Fifty-three years ago, seven railway-men, members of the staff of the former London & South Western Railway, founded a home in London to shelter ten fatherless girls. From this modest beginning there grew the Southern Railway Servants' Orphanage, one of the outstanding social efforts on the Home railways. In 1909 the orphanage was removed to delightful surroundings at Woking, in Surrey, while in 1935 accommodation for another 80 children was provided, so that to-day an ideal home is available for 250 fatherless railway children. The orphanage is run largely by the voluntary contributions of the railway staff themselves, and actually out of nearly 70,000 employees no fewer than 60,000 willingly contribute sums ranging from one penny per week through the paybills. Upwards of 1,200 children have passed through the home, and there are at present in residence 101 boys and 84 girls. Admission to the orphanage is promptly arranged. There is no irksome ballot or voting, and no case has ever been refused admission—a very fine thing to be able to say. Railwaymen as a whole are big-hearted fellows, and here we have a striking
Interior, York Station, on L.N.E.R. Main-line between London and Scotland.
A probable result of the fusion of the German and Austrian railways will be the early electrification of many routes at present steam-operated. At the moment Germany is busy on the electrification of the Nuremburg-Halle main-line and branches, a conversion involving some 220 route miles. In Austria, the Salzburg-Linz section of the main-line between Salzburg and Vienna is being electrified, and a big work likely to be put in hand is the conversion to electricity of the Semmering main-line southwards from Vienna. In neighbouring Switzerland, electrification of the few main-lines still steam-operated is proceeding apace, while further south, in Italy, the 260-mile stretch of track from Salerno to Reggio di Calabria has recently been electrified, giving electric service through from Bologna, a distance of 660 miles. In France, there has recently been witnessed the completion of the important Paris-Le Mans route, and work is proceeding rapidly on the Tours-Bordeaux electrification. Denmark's contribution to the electrification programme takes the form of the electrification of the Copenhagen suburban routes, now proceeding steadily. Holland plans to add another 200 miles to her electric railways this year, while Poland contemplates large extensions to the Warsaw suburban electrification. Altogether, electrification is much to the fore in Europe at the moment.
By)
Harry Gilmore
Donald Sutherland.
When, in 1880, Donald Sutherland, of Milford Sound, discovered the now well-known Falls which bear his name, he had with him as companion a man named McKay, after whom the McKay Falls, near Lake Ada, are named.
These two men, therefore, were the blazers of the first trail up the valley of the Arthur River to the foot of the great Falls. This track, through primeval bush and along the banks of the river, eventually became portion of what is now universally acknowledged to be “The World's Wonder Walk.”
Later, Sutherland had other companions at Milford, one of the earliest being the late Samuel H. Moreton, artist and explorer, and one of the first men to view the Falls after Sutherland and McKay.
Moreton spent several years at Milford Sound, and it is only reasonable to suppose that, during his wanderings, he also assisted in improving the original blazed trail up the valley of the Arthur. Incidentally the artist-explorer had, at one time, a kind of working partnership with Donald Sutherland in the twelve-roomed chalet which constituted the first hostel at Milford.
Moreton subsequently left the locality and Sutherland married a lady from Dunedin. Mrs. Sutherland eventually took up residence at the hostel and for many years presided over its destinies while attending to the wants of thousands of tourists and excursionists to the now famous resort. As is well known to all New Zealanders, Donald Sutherland and his faithful help-mate are buried together in a grave not far from where the modern Government hostel now stands.
It was not until approximately ten years after the discovery of the Falls and the blazing of the first track that the Government decided to construct a more serviceable one. The new track was needed for the expanding tourist traffic, not only up the valley of the Arthur, but over the recently discovered McKinnon Pass, and along the Clinton Valley from the head of glorious Lake Te Anau.
The first portion of the new track, namely that from Sandfly Point to the foot of Lake Ada, was constructed by prison labour. For several reasons, however, this did not prove to be an unqualified success, and the prison camp was dismantled.
Then, about the year 1892, it was decided to continue the construction work by employing experienced labourers, and men acquainted with the use of explosives, for it was realised that a good deal of rock blasting would be necessary.
The first party of workmen was composed chiefly of miners from the Kumara gold field, and they were in charge of a well-known and highly respected overseer by the name of Edwin Price.
For those of us who had never previously visited Fiordland, the experience was somewhat eerie as we stood on the deck of the s.s. Hinemoa, and watched out for the entrance to Milford Sound.
The sun was just setting as we entered the narrow opening with the mountains rising sheer out of the water on either side. Steadily and almost silently we glided through, then on past Stirling Falls, past the great “Lion,” past Mitre Peak, past Harrison's cove—then with Sinbad Gully on our right and magnificent Bowen Falls on our left, the old steamer was eventually brought to her anchorage, and made fast for the night.
A few small lights twinkled from a building on the shore. The lights were from the windows of the home of Donald Sutherland, the famous explorer and guide, and we held our breath and blinked our eyes. Could it possibly be that we were at Milford Sound—the place of our dreams?
The task of conveying our goods and chattels, together with camp gear, working tools, provisions and explosives from the ship to Sandfly Point, our first camping place, occupied about two days. The good ship Hinemoa then sailed away, and we had an opportunity of surveying our new surroundings. And what a wealth of majesty and glory lay around us: mountains, rivers, lakes and sea, in rich profusion, and in their grandest and most sublime settings.
We, however, were a working party, not a party of tourists or even mild excursionists, and while we could admire our surroundings at will, our supply of food for the next six months must be safely stored, and a permanent camp set up as quickly as possible.
This latter was erected a couple of miles up the river from the head of Lake Ada. Here an advance party in charge of “the boss” had cleared and levelled a site, on which was erected a large cook house with a huge fireplace and chimney at one end and a long table down the centre. A fine storehouse was also built for the reception of our provisions.
The packing of the stores and camp gear was a strenuous and back-breaking business, especially along that first two miles of track. Each man was expected to carry loads of at least fifty pounds and to make at least five trips a day. Most of us, however, were young and
That was a wonderful summer—the days bright and clear, and the nights and mornings delightfully cool.
Occasionally a party of tourists came over the pass, and down the valley, and twice an intercolonial vessel with a large party of excursionists aboard called in at the Sound, but visitors of this kind were, at that time, few and far between.
Our only regular visitor was the guide and postman, big Donald Ross, and his visits were always eagerly looked forward to, for it was he who brought us news of the outside world. Sometimes Donald would stay the night at our camp, and then all hands would gather in the cook-house to hear the news from, perhaps, a week old newspaper, or listen to some tale the guide had to tell of his experiences since his last visit.
Early in the month of June, the Hinemoa, with the late Captain Fair-child in command again called at Milford Sound, but this time it was to take us back to our homes. Apparently it was not considered a payable proposition to keep a large party of men in that remote region during the winter months.
At the same time it was with deep regret we eventually bade “good bye” to Donald Sutherland and his good wife, for they had befriended us on many occasions during our sojourn at Milford Sound. We knew also that they would in all probability be the sole denizens of the place until the return of the party the following year.
Thus passed the spring, summer and autumn of 1892 and 1893. During that time the construction of “The Track” proceeded apace and without serious accident or important incident, but still a good portion of the formation remained uncompleted.
In the month of October, 1894, a much larger party of workmen was sent to Milford Sound with the object of pushing on with the formation work more rapidly.
On this occasion the overseer was a man named Butler, and the writer, probably because he was the youngest member of the party and possessed a very slight knowledge of survey work was attached to the overseer's “staff.”
In order to permit the workmen to get on to the job as speedily as possible, the work of transporting the camp supplies was entrusted to the guide, Donald Sutherland, and an old prospector named Jack Smith, who intended to do some prospecting round the Sound.
The new camp was situated less than five miles from the famous Falls, and on the following Christmas Day, which, by the way, was the only holiday save Sunday we kept, all the time we were engaged on the work, all hands set out to spend the day in that locality. There with the thunder of the falling waters in our ears and the spray playing on our faces we ate our Christmas lunch.
Early in the New Year, however, a sad occurrence marred the happiness of every man in the camp. One of the most popular of the workmen sickened and eventually died after he had been removed by means of a rough stretcher from his tent in the valley to the hostel at the head of the Sound. It was a laborious journey, but the greater portion of the track was now in fairly good order, and a larger boat had been placed upon Lake Ada.
A week later, on his return from a trip to the Sound, Donald Ross reported that another man was on the sick list, and the Sutherlands were hoping a steamer might call in so that the sick man could be sent away.
Two days later—on a Sunday afternoon—I well remember, Sutherland himself arrived at the camp and informed us that the man had died early that morning, and, as Mrs. Sutherland was alone in the house, he would be glad if a few of the men would hasten to her assistance.
Following the receipt of the sad news, a brief discussion took place as to what was best to be done in the circumstances. The guide and postman had gone back to Te Anau two days previously, but there was just a possibility that he may have been detained
Sutherland's Accommodation House at Milford Sound in the 'nineties.
It was between four and five o'clock in the afternoon when we set out. Each carried a blanket, a knapsack containing a small amount of food and a packet of candles, for it would be dark when we got to the Pass. Two clear glass bottles with their bottoms cut off served as home-made lanterns, and thus equipped we expected to make good time from the camp to the lake.
Neither of us had been over this portion of “The Track” previously, and were consequently at a disadvantage when we reached the summit of the pass. It was now quite dark, and there was nothing to guide us.
After one of us had almost met with disaster in searching for the downward track, we decided to try a new plan. During our wanderings in the dark, we had now and then come upon snow poles—some standing erect, while others lay at an angle or flat on the ground, probably the result of a late snow-fall.
When next we came upon one of these poles, one of us stayed beside it, while the other went ahead until he discovered another guide post alongside which he would remain, until another had been located, and so on until eventually the posts led us down to the bush line and safety.
Four o'clock next morning found us again on our way. In the dim light, keas cawed at us and here and there a few rabbits scuttled out of our way, but these were the only signs of life in the whole valley that morning.
About noon, or a little later, we knew by the easier going and the gentler flow of the river that we must be reaching the end of our journey. A few more minutes, and on coming out of the bush into a small clearing another hut came into view, and—Yes—smoke was coming out of the chimney.
We shouted. A friendly voice replied. It was not the voice of Donald Ross, but that of a man engaged on some work at the head of the lake. He could, however, tell us where Donald was, and if we hurried we might just catch him. He was down at the landing getting his boat ready for the trip down the lake.
We raced for the landing, shouting as we ran. Donald Ross heard us.
A few minutes served to explain the necessity for our hasty errand, and it took but a few more minutes to get the little vessel in trim for the long row down the lake. Then with a brief “So long lads,” the guide was off bearing the boss's letter, while my mate and I returned to the hut for a rest and sleep.
We took our time on the return journey.
Looking back over the way we had come, the Clinton Valley resembled a mighty canon with towering walls on either side, while as far as the eye could see, lofty mountain peaks and ranges rose tier on tier as though jostling each other for room.
In front and below us stretched the more kindly but heavily bush-clad valley of the Arthur, with here and there a glittering snow-fed glacier intervening between sharp-pointed peaks and razor-backed ridges.
“I reckon you're what we call ‘brand tired’,” said the tobacconist to an old customer who had complained that he was losing his relish for his pipe and that for two pins he'd “chuck smoking for keeps.” “Brand tired?” queried the customer, “Do other smokers get to feel like that?” “Oh yes, often happens when you've been smoking same old brand for years as I know you have. Why not give something else a go?” “Don't think it would make much difference,” mused the customer, “what d'you recommend anyhow?” “Well, seeing you're an old smoker, I reckon you can't beat Cut Plug No. 10 (Bulls-head) full strength. Sweet as a nut and full of comfort. There's two other fine pipe blends—Cavendish and Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog). Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold are for the cigarette smoker. The five blends are being asked for all the time. No nicotine to mention in any of them. They're toasted d'you see?” The “brand tired” smoker now enjoys his pipe more than ever. No smoker ever tires of toasted!*
Yet while all this rugged grandeur lay around and above us, at our feet, basking and blushing in the noon-day sun lay such a wealth of native flora as we had never dreamed of.
* * *
The work of shifting camp, and the necessary speed and bustle attached thereto served to divert the minds of the men from the loss they had sustained. Soon the bush resounded with song and laughter once more, while all the time the track formation was approaching nearer and nearer to its ultimate completion.
This glorious pathway has long been opened, and many thousands of trampers have passed over it since those long ago days, which the writer has attempted to recall.
By)
William Vance
Thanks to a central location, a mild climate, and its claim to possess “the safest bathing-beach in New Zealand,” Timaru holds especial favour with holiday-makers. In between their tennis and their bathing, most visitors find time to stroll to the summit of the Benvenue Cliffs. These once rugged cliff heights, now thoroughly tamed by trim lawns and elegant shrubberies, command a superb view of the spires and the towers of Timaru, and look down upon the long, lazy rollers that trail a fringe of lacey foam on the white sands of Caroline Bay.
But there is another view from the top of these cliffs which is missed by most people. Just peer over the edge and look down on to the rocks below. See how the rocks are stained a rusty red: see how the waves are lapping a tangled mass of old iron which looks like the ribs of a ship—they are the ribs of a ship. That chaos of seaworn iron tells more eloquently than any book why a harbour was built at Timaru; why the safe beach of Caroline Bay came into being; why these cliffs received the name “Benvenue.” For fifty long years and more, those iron beams have withstood sea-erosion, rock-pressure and sand-encroachment—stolidly resisting the forces of obliteration as though determined to abide there as the stark memento of a far-off, fateful day in May. I pointed out this debris to a distinguished Cambridge historian once, at the same time telling him the story. He replied, “I have been all over New Zealand, and I have been charmed with the scenery, but this is the first time that I have had anything like an historic thrill in your land.”
May 13th, 1882. It is a beautiful sunny Saturday with a light haze drifting over the horizon, while above the distant hills a sapphire-blue arch etches itself in the western sky—a day of nor' west sunshine that only Canterbury knows. Riding at anchor in the open roadstead are three stately ships. Golden grain from the newly broken-in farms is being loaded into their holds from lighters towed out from the shore. On the morrow these vessels will be leaving Timaru. Not even the famous China Clippers hold better speed records than these wheat-wool greyhounds that soon will billow their sails to favouring trade winds and race to Mother England. As the day draws to its close, the ships finish loading.
At the sunset of that day a slight swell began to make itself felt, and as the evening drew on the sea became perceptibly rougher. Towards midnight the sea increased rapidly in force, but still there was little wind. The tide was now at its maximum, and those who knew the weather signs prophesied that at ebb tide the sea would increase in violence—a prophecy only too true, for with the dawn a heavy swell was running and the roaring of the surf could be heard for miles inland. All through the night Captain Mills, the Harbourmaster, kept constant watch on the ships riding in the roadstead. Daylight revealed these ships riding heavily, so he deemed it prudent to fire the signal gun, summoning the rocket brigade.
Straight away the brigade assembled. In the fiery splendour of the rising sun,
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Christchurch—Invercargill Express passing: through Caroline Bay, Timaru, South Island, New Zealand.Benvenue had two anchors out and the City of Perth three; but even with these extra holdings, the ships could not continuously withstand the terrific poundings those seas were thundering aboard the vessels—something would have to go. Eight-thirty in the morning—snap—a cable on the Benvenue parted. The sundering of this cable sent the ship listing dangerously to starboard. The tilting of the ship continued at an alarming rate, and it looked terrifyingly evident that the vessel might capsize.
But look! a signal of distress comes from the ship.
Just at that moment, when things were looking blackest, gusts of nor' west wind began to blow from the land. Responding immediately to the wind, the Benvenue swung round and glided out of danger. The Harbourmaster then ran up signals from shore to instruct the ship to trim its cargo of coal and to prepare to put to sea. Answer came from the ship that the rudder was out of order, and repairs would have to be effected before it could depart.
Taking advantage of the breeze from the nor' west, the City of Perth loosened topsails and made ready to put to sea. Seeing what the City of Perth was about to do, the Benvenue decided to follow its example, and ran up the signal “sailing.” To the signal from shore, “Is there anything wrong?”, the City of Perth replied “All right,” and
It was now eleven o'clock in the morning and many of the spectators who had been there for some hours were making for home. Suddenly the Benvenue, to the astonishment of all concerned, ran up the signal, “Drifting.”
The Rocket Brigade asked, “Do you want an anchor?”
Quick came the Benvenue's reply, “Yes.”
The Harbourmaster, fearing that no boat could live in those angry waters, was against the launching of the lifeboat. What with bells, warnings and signals that had been going on all the morning, the whole town was by this time in a ferment, and the waterfront was crowded with Timaru's almost entire population.
The light nor' west wind that had sprung up earlier in the morning continued to blow until mid-day, then suddenly it dropped and the air became still and sultry. In spite of the drop in the wind, the ships seemed comparatively safe. At one o'clock, the Benvenue started to drift. At the same time a boat was lowered from the ship, the crew clambered into the boat and made for the City of Perth. Those on shore, not knowing what was happening on the ships, were mystified by these proceedings, and, as a measure of precaution, the rocket brigade hastened to the cliffs at Dashing Rocks, in order to make ready to rescue the crew of the Benvenue with the aid of lifelines.
Very steadily and very quietly the ill-fated ship drifted to the rocks—had it been guided into dock by an expert steersman it could not have sailed a straighter course. Nearer and nearer she drifted to the cliffs—one hundred—seventy—fifty yards from the shore—then she grounded, turned broadside on to the sea and was soon hurtled on to the rocks and left there, high and dry, with all spars standing. And all this time, from the clifftops above, throngs of people looked down in helpless consternation at this noble ship glistening in the brilliant sunshine as she drifted, inch by inch, to her doom.
What had been happening on board the ship all this time? The captain of the Benvenue stated that towards one o'clock on Sunday morning, the sea became very heavy and the vessel, which was lying stern to it, began rolling and lurching heavily. Numbers of blind rollers came aboard, breaking-in the stern windows and sweeping the poop. All hands were called. Soon afterwards a heavy sea struck her, and it was thought the ship had struck the ground, but an examination revealed that her rudder had been broken and the remainder of her stern ports staved-in. Continuing their fearsome attack, the seas then swept a boat off the skids. A second anchor was let go, and the ship then fell into a trough of the sea; the cargo of coal in the hold, although held by shifting boards, was thrown over to starboard, resulting in a dangerous list.
Daylight was anxiously awaited, the boats meantime being made ready for lowering. At 9 a.m. the starboard cable parted from the ship. A third anchor was got up and a steel wire hawser bent on. At the same time efforts were made to trim the coals, but no sooner had the crew shovelled one way, than the rolling of the vessel lurched the coals back again. By 12.30 p.m., the third anchor was ready, but the pitching of the vessel made the task of getting it over the side difficult and dangerous. By one o'clock in the afternoon, the second anchor parted, and it was soon seen that the vessel was drifting and gradually heeling over. The crew were ordered to the boats, the ship was abandoned, and the crew made for the City of Perth.
Hardly had the Benvenue struck the rocks than the City of Perth started drifting, at the same time flying her ensign down and the signal for “medical assistance.” Four boats then left the City of Perth and made for the breakwater. It was then learned that the medical assistance was required for the first officer of the City of Perth who had broken a leg while trying to clear the cables, which had become
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A concert in progress in the Sound Shell, at Caroline Bay, TimaruCity of Perth hung to her last anchor for about half-an-hour, then drifted towards the rocks, stern foremost.
In those days there was no harbour in Timaru. Cargo for the ships was taken to the landing service station, loaded on to lighters or open boats and then towed to the awaiting ships that would be standing some distance from the shore. It was from this landing service station that a landing service whaleboat and another boat were launched and set out for the City of Perth. These two boats, which together contained a crew of fifteen men arrived at the derelict vessel in safety.
From this point began a series of catastrophies unparalleled in the history of Canterbury. The crew of the vessel had brought the report to shore that the ship was hanging to a stout hawser only, her cables having parted. This hawser was plainly visible from the shore, the rope standing out at times taut and rigid as an iron rod. It was only a matter of time before this, too, would snap, leaving the vessel to founder on the rocks.
It was only a matter of time—and time was against them. About three o'clock the cry went up, “She's gone!” Three boats could be seen coming away from the ship. The tide was between half and quarter ebb, and the shoaling of the water made the sea much more dangerous. Waiting their opportunity, the boats pushed bravely through the surf, while the hearts of those on shore beat high with anxiety. Taking advantage of every opportunity, the boats battled on. Soon they would be out of
(Continued on page 34.)
Written and Illustrated by)
Gordon F. Hunt
Ketetahi Valley and Mt. Tongariro from the track, North Island, New Zealand.
Ngatoro-I-Rangi was an ariki and revered priest of the Arawa canoe. His first task on arrival at our fair islands was to undertake a tour of exploration. In the course of his wanderings he came to the foot of a range of mountains, in the heart of the North Island, and like the modern surveyor, this ancient pathfinder decided to ascend to the summit to spy out the land. While on the summit a snowstorm swept the heights and he was like to die from the freezing cold. In his extremity he prayed in a loud voice for the fire of the gods: “Ka riro au i te tonga. Haria mai he ahi moku,” he intoned. And straightway the fire-gods sent the saving fire, by way of White Island and Rotorua. The heat reached the perishing ariki, there on the mountain top, and his freezing body gained fresh life. From the words “riro” (carried away), and “tonga” (south wind) came the name Tongariro, which name formerly included all three peaks, Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu.” (Abridged from Cowan's “Folk Tales of the Maori.”)
Thus the native mind accounts for the volcanic and hydro-thermal activities of the Tongariro National Park. Of the vents through which the God of Volcanoes, Ruaimoko, broke to the succour of the stricken explorer, none is so popular, famous, or consistently active as Ketetahi Valley, or Blowholes, on the slopes of Tongariro. To the traveller on the National Park—Taupo highway Ketetahi is a familiar sight. A gulch in the northern buttress of the mountain, from whose mysterious depths ascend vast columns of steam, in vivid relief against black alpine face and deep blue sky, this Rotorua in miniature is fast gaining the popularity it deserves.
Ketetahi! The Lourdes of the Maori. What tales they tell of weary and wounded warriors, faint from mighty battle, gaining life anew in its healing waters; the cripple made straight and the diseased made whole. From Poneke in the south, to Akarana in the north, they came, the wounded, the halt and the sickly for healing in this antipodean Pool of Soloam. Is it little wonder that the valley, to-day, is venerated by the natives of South Taupo, descendants of Ngatoro-i-rangi himself, who gave this gift to his people so many generations ago. Is it any wonder that, in 1887, when Te Heuheu, with magnificent gesture gifted the Tongariro mountains to the nation, this valley was not included in the deed, but is constituted, some 20 acres, a native reserve.
The Springs are contained in a valley some 600 yards long and 200 yards wide. Boiling springs, spouting gevsers, steaming cauldrons, eerie, bubbling mud pools, steam vents acknowledged the most powerful in the land, intense clouds of clammy steam, nerve racking noises, and smells, which, to say the least, are overpowering—such is Ketetahi. Care must be taken in inspecting the activities, as the sulphur crust twixt us and the inferno beneath is but an eggshell. On every hand rocks plastered with pure yellow sulphur gleam and scintillate like rare gems. The roar is deafening, and it needed but the gentleman of the cloven hoof to loom through the flying mists to complete the picture; a vision that Dante must have dreamed when he wrote his masterpiece.
We work our way up the valley, gingerly, past spitting mud pools and hissing cauldrons to the centre of the gulch. Here are situated the main vents, the most powerful of which is quite capable of emitting a column of steam to a height of 3,000 ft. During a minor eruption, many years ago, this vent had a flat rock deposited over it in such a way as to form a perfect steam whistle, a piercing, ear-splitting whistle that could be heard all over the
Main Vent Ketetahi Valley.
Mud pools at Ketetahi.
From the valley issues a muddy, boiling stream, rushing its tortuous way to the blue waters of Lake Roto-a-ira, glistening below us. The creek waters, Manga-a-te-tipua, The Creek of the Demon, are highly medicinal and might be aptly termed the finished product from the factory ceaselessly working above. Many a pakeha I have seen seeking relief from sciatica, rheumatism and kindred ills by bathing in its magic waters. But here is no stately Blue Bath, no luxurious Sanatorium; seekers after health must excavate for themselves a bath from out the rocky bed; not the most comfortable, I assure you, while the dressing accommodation needs remedying! As witness an acquaintance of mine who lost his clothes in a fog and had many anxious moments ere he discovered the missing garments, especially as he was expecting a party of ladies at any moment.
Away back in 1902 there was an eruption in Ketetahi; huge boulders, spewed from her subterranean depths lie in and along the sides of the stream, mute but eloquent witness to the rage of the unleashed forces of Ruaimoko. The sides of the stream are stripped of their vegetation for a height of 50 feet, and old settlers inform me that rocks and debris, carried down after the eruption, blocked the main road near Lake Roto-a-ira.
Way of approach to the valley is over a track, branching from the main highway at Ketetahi Mill, and sweeping up through the beautiful Okahukuru Bush, and over tussock slopes for a distance of four miles. The walk is delightfully easy and in summer the pampas slopes are a mass of alpine flora, dainty gentian, golden-eyed cel-mesia and yellow ranunculi. A hut has been constructed a mile below the gulch, and though containing little facilities has proved a boon to alpinists. The management at the Chateau conduct regular visits to the Valley and a trip to the Park without visiting Ketetahi is like viewing a picture with one eye closed.
Some day Ketetahi will be famous. A sanatorium will stand on these heights, a road will wind up from the plains below, and the powers of healing will be made available to all who seek.
Panorama of Ketetahi Valley.
We leave the valley of awefulness, of unrestrained forces, of a world in the making; silent, subdued, and with a keener appreciation of nature's method of evolving a new from an old, and of providing a safety valve for the titanic powers that rage in her turbulent bosom, ever striving for release to carry on a work of annihilation.
Tennyson, the poet laureate, was a great lover of the “weed.” He invariably smoked a “churchwarden”—otherwise “a yard of clay,” and never used the same pipe twice. As soon as he had smoked a pipe out he would snap it in two and throw the pieces into a box kept for the purpose. Then, if he wished to smoke again, he would select another clean pipe, and repeat the performance. The clay, once so popular, is out of date, but the pipe, after all, is of little consequence. It's the baccy that counts! So long as that's pure and good nothing else matters much. And in that respect Maori-landers are fortunate, for New Zealand produces some of the world's finest tobacco. There are only five brands—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Cavendish, Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), River-head Gold and Desert Gold, not only famous for their purity, flavour and aroma, but, thanks to toasting—by the manufacturers' secret process — and consequently freed to a large extent from nicotine, they are comparatively harmless. There are no other toasted tobaccos.*
(continued from page 31)
danger. Two of the boats had almost gained the shelter of the breakwater when the third, the ships' lifeboat, suddenly capsized.
The coxwains, seeing what had happened, immediately turned their boats round to hasten to rescue the unfortunate men struggling in the water. Courageously, yet cautiously, the two boats made their way through a maelstrom of tremendous, white-headed seas. Now hurled into the air, now in the trough of a wave, they made slow progress. At last they were at the scene of the disaster and were able to stretch forth grasping hands to the men they sought to save. Suddenly a great mass of seething foam reared itself up, entirely swamping a second boat. In the swirling mass of white sea that followed, it was feared that no man could live. By degrees it was revealed that the boats were floating gunwale under, some men standing up in them, while others struggled in the water to regain the boats. All the while, bright sunshine gleamed down on the boats, lighting up the occupants who were fevishly divesting themselves of their sodden clothing in order to be better able to assist those who had failed to regain the boats.
On shore, the excitement had reached a panic intensity, it being all the greater in the knowledge of their absolute impotency to aid those fifteen men battling for their lives against tempest
Speedily the boat was launched and anxious eyes were glued to that lifeboat, as, breasting green mountains of water; now hidden from view, now bow high in the air, it pushed steadily out to sea. Capably handled and kept well to the sea, she slowly worked down to the helpless men. At long last she gained her objective and one by one those who were left were grasped with a grip that meant the dragging of them from death, and they were hauled aboard. All saved … for the instant.
As if in wrath at being baulked of its prey, the white-headed seas roared in again. Up one of these great combers the lifeboat rushed, firmly held by the steersmen, till lost to view in the water's boiling crest. Onward, relentlessly onward, the wave swirled, disclosing to horror-stricken watchers on shore the drama of an upturned boat tossed about in the midst of a disorder of heads and upthrown arms. By some miracle the boat was righted and her half-drowned occupants scrambled on board. Quickly taking their positions in the boat, they prepared once more to fight for their lives. No sooner were they ready when another wave catapulted them into the seething foam. Yet again the boat was righted—yet again the men got to their oars—yet again they were tossed into the sea. Those on shore with nerve enough to watch this awesome rhythm of catastrophe following catastrophe, sickened in the watching.
Bravely the crew fought a seemingly hopeless fight. Each time they were hurtled into the water they righted their boat and set about to pick up those of their comrades who could be found. Doggedly they stuck to their task till they could see no more men. Then began a slow and anxious return to the shore. Time and again they were in imminent peril, but luck and good oarsmanship finally brought them to safety.
When they reached the shelter of the breakwater, cheers broke forth from the crowds massed on the shore—such cheers as Timaru has never before heard. As the boat drew near the jetty, it could be seen that of that forlorn remnant of a crew, some were lying prostrate in the bottom of the boat; some naked; some barely alive. Others, dazed and bleeding, sat as men who had been as dead and had, by some superhuman agency, been grappled back to life. Willing hands were waiting to give all possible aid.
The first flush of the joy of their return passed … then was the apprehensive question whispered on everyone's lips—“Who's missing?”
May 14th. Each year, on the morning of that day, wreaths adorn the base of the Benvenue Monument. Fifty-six years have glided past, yet Timaru still remembers the most tragic day in her history. They are not forgotten—those nine brave men who willingly went to death to save their fellows.
“Greater love hath no man than this—that a man lay down his life for a friend.”
New Zealand Verse
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These lines were written following a visit to the Maori Pa at Whakare-warewa. In common with most places visited by tourists, it has suffered from the people who love to scribble their names. In places the carvings and scrolls are covered with them.
lookedlike men
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By)
Joyce West
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Rly. Publicity photo.)
Railway sightseeing 'buses at Rotorua, North Island, New Zealand.
In the sunshine Lake Rotorua is yours for your pleasure … those clear sparkling waters ringed by their blue bush-clad hills, with the bold friendly battlements of Ngongotaha looking down on the red-roofed town, and the steam-clouds of Ohinemutu swaying like white feathers against the blue. But when the mists lie upon the breast of the waters, and the swirling storm clouds reach down to enwrap the brooding summit of Ngongotaha, then‥ the Maoris say … you may hear the thin sweet music of the fairy flutes, the putorino, drifting down from the mountainside. Then, it may be, that the fairies are abroad, and Unuaho the Wizard walks his ways again, that you may hear … if you listen at the hour of nightfall … the singing tree of Tona whispering across the misty water.
Crown of the waters of Rotorua is the Sacred Island of Tinirau, which we pakehas, following the modern Maori fashion, call Mokoia. It is the dwelling-place of the ancient gods, the high altar of the Arawa people … a low crested peak rising above white beach ledges and dark pohutukawa groves, above the lovely bay where steam plumes rise, and the milk-warm waters of Hinemoa's Bath overflow into the cold tides of the Lake. The caves and rock clefts of the peak hide the strange stone images, good and evil, that are the tribal gods; locked away with them are the amazing tales of sorcery and magic, the dark secrets of the necromancer Unuaho, greatest of all the Arawa tohunga, who once ruled the sacred isle of Mokoia as a monarch rules his kingdom.
Even the very soil of Mokoia … sandy, warm, and volcanic … is a talisman against the evil of blights and pestilences; in his little shrine beneath the totara tree, Te-Matua-tonga, the god of the kumara plantations, sits snugly as he has sat since the beginning of Maori time. From the mainland, in the old days, when the whistling notes of the pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, warned the people that the planting time was come, each of the tribes made pilgrimage to Mokoia. With them they carried a few tubers of the seed-kumara that they might touch the sacred image of Te-Matua-Tonga, and be assured of good sweet harvest for the year to come.
By the kumara fields of Mokoia, to this day, stands a deep and dark grove of trees crowned by a staunch old tawa. It is a thrice-tapu spot; no Maori will approach its cool dim shade. They call the tawa tree … “Te Pare-a-Hatupatu,” the Head-Wreath of Hatupatu. Hatupatu of the Arawa was a great hunter and fighting man who lived five centuries ago. From a chap
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A geyser in action at Whakarewarewa, Rotorua.
For all Hatupatu's courage and great strength, he was not proof against the wiles of the frightful Bird-Woman, Kura-of-the-Claws, whose lair was in a gloomy cavern upon the cliffs of the Waikato River. She saw Hatupatu spearing pigeons in the forest, and greatly desired him, but the hunter turned from her in horror. (She was half-bird, half-woman, and if you want to see her likeness, you will find it carved upon the doorway of a meeting-house in Rotorua, with long curved talons which curdle your blood with their cruelty.) But Kura-of-the-Claws was not to be denied, and she pounced upon Hatupatu unawares, and carried him to her den. There he remained an unwilling captive, watched over by the witch's pet birds. One day, when she went hunting, he fled. He might have got safely away if it had not been for the little grey warbler, the riroriro, who flew through the forest crying—“O Kura! O Kura! Hatupatu is gone!” Swiftly the frightful Kura was upon the hunter's trail, with all the vengeful fury of a woman scorned. So fast could she travel that she was like a storm-cloud coming over the hills, and her eyes, keen as a hawk's, roved on ahead to see Hatupatu fleeing through the bush miles away. By the great rock at
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Twin Geysers at Wairakei, North Island, New Zealand.
Kura-of-the-Claws would not abandon her prey. She lay in wait until thirst drove Hatupatu forth, and then she pursued him north toward Rotorua, by way of Rotokakahi, which we call the Green Lake. At the steaming valley of Whakarewarewa she was so close to him that he thought he could feel her terrible talons. As a last desperate resort he turned aside to the steam clouds that veiled the great mud-boiling spring of Whanga-pipiro. Hatupatu sprang, and by his great strength he cleared the boiling mud, but the Bird-Woman, following closely behind, could not stop. She stumbled, and fell forward into the great steam cloud, and the frightful cauldron of Whangapipiro received Kura-of-the-Claws for ever.
By the shore of Rotorua, the hunter rested, and plucked himself a crown of pohutukawa leaves, and then plunged, rejoicing, into the cold waters of the lake.
Halfway to Mokoia, he paused upon an underwater rock and rested. The Maoris of to-day call the spot “The Startled Soul of Hatupatu.” They believe it is a magic rock, and to look upon it is a portent of approaching death, and they will resolutely turn their eyes away, when they cross the lake, for fear that they may catch a glimpse of its enchanted white shape gleaming through the clear water. Where Hatupatu landed upon Mokoia, he threw down his wreath of leaves, and they took root, and became the great pohutukawa trees which to-day fringe the island beaches.
It was upon the magic soil of Mokoia that one of the strangest duels in all the world took place. It was the meeting of the old necromancer Unuaho and the great and wise Bishop Selwyn.
When Selwyn landed, unostentatiously, from a little boat, Unuaho rose from the flax mat where he spent the long sun-soaked days in meditation, and received his guest with a great and amazing courtesy.
“I greatly love that strong chief the Bishop,” the old sorcerer said of the meeting, long afterwards, “There is a difference between him and me, but so long as there is a man-child in my family there will be a Selwyn in memory of the great and wise Bishop.”
“Turn to the only God!” cried Selwyn the uncompromising, “Leave your ways of darkness and turn to the Light!”
But the old pagan gazed steadfastly out upon the green slopes of his island kingdom and the shining levels of the lake, and it seemed to Selwyn that already the sunshine was leaving the water, and the wind that blew through Hatupatu's Head-Wreath was grey and chill.
“Why should I turn to your God?” asked Unuaho, gravely courteous, “Am I not a god myself? And are not the things of the earth subject to me? Now, friend Herewini, let there be a test between you and me. Look upon the green ti that grows here before my door, and call upon it to die and wither, and when it dies, O Bishop, I will turn and worship your God!”
The Bishop looked at the tall ti, which we call the cabbage palm, and shook his head gravely.
“Mine is a God of Light and not of sorcery.”
“Then, O Herewini …” said Unuaho, with a great and deadly courtesy, “Watch the ti.”
He stretched forth a hand, lean and withered and claw-like, and the day, which had been warm, became cold. The long grey ripples moved across the lake, and while the old pagan cried his incantations, the wind rustled the leaves of the sacred tawa grove.
Before the eyes of the good and wise Bishop, the sword leaves of the cabbage palm drooped and withered and died. The shade upon the grass dwindled. The wind had ceased to rustle in the leaves of the blasted palm.
“See O unbeliever!” cried Unuaho, “Now, will you bring it to life again for me?”
Gravely the Bishop shook his head, gravely and with dignity, he bade the old necromancer good-bye, and went down the hill to his boat, never to set foot again upon the enchanted soil of the Holy-Isle-of-Tinirau, last stronghold of pagan magic and sorcery.
But he is not forgotten there, for if you travel the ways of Lakeland today, you will find scarcely a village where there is no man to answer to the name of Herewini in memory of the great and wise Bishop.
All these old tales of enchantment are, indeed, half-forgotten, but there is a love story of Mokoia immortal as the Greek tale of Hero and Leander. Upon Mokoia lived Tutanekai, who loved the beautiful Hinemoa of Rotorua. He was the base-born son of the wife of the chief of the Island, and it was considered a dreadful thing that such a man should dare even to lift his eyes to the lovely and immaculate Hinemoa, a chief's daughter. Tutanekai was forbidden to set foot upon the mainland, but the ways of women are strange, and Hinemoa was already deeply in
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Rly. Publicity photo.)
Another Wairakei phenomenon—the Dragon's Mouth Geyser.
As Hinemoa, night by night, sat by the lake edge listening to the plaintive notes drifting across the water, the
It was dark, and the waters were very cold; she had no guide but the plaintive-sounding strains of the flute. Had Tutanekai stopped playing, she would most assuredly have been lost. But he played on, sending out the messages of his most-disconsolate love, and by the sound Hinemoa's flagging strokes bore her to the shallows of the Island. Not now to Tutanekai she went, but to crouch from sight in the pool of the warm lakeside spring which still bears her name. Here Tutanekai found her when he went down to the shore to drink, and—falling at her feet stricken by her loveliness and shame, and the great revelation of her love for him—he drew her up from the water and took her to his house. As the two stepped over the threshold together, they were made—according to the Maori fashion—man and wife.
You may not believe in fairies, but you will have to believe in the Patupaiarehe—the red-haired fairy people of the Maoris—if you hear their thin strange voices singing in the mist, and the sound of the putorino, their flutes—the sweetest music in all the world, the Maoris say—drifting down from the mountainside. The fire-stick and the axe of the white man have driven most of them away from their ancestral home on Ngongotaha mountain, but even yet the Maoris will not go up pighunting when the fog lies close, and when the young men are eel-spearing of a night in the clear-running streams between the mountain and the lake, they are careful to keep their torches burning, for, as everyone knows, the Patu-paierehe are very afraid of fire.
Ngongotaha means “to drink from a calabash,” and was so called by the explorer Ihenga, a man of the Arawa, many, many years ago, when a woman of the fairies gave him to drink from her calabash. Ihenga drank, for he was very thirsty from his climb up the mountain-side, but a great fear fell upon him that he had drunk enchantment with the sparkling draught, and he turned and fled, with all the fairy people giving chase. Close upon his heels ran the woman who had given him the water, and Ihenga resorted to guile. As he ran, he groped in the small pouch of ochre and shark-oil which hung at his belt, and smeared the oil upon his naked, sweating body, and the odour drifted back to the Patu-paierehe woman, so disgusting her that she abandoned the chase.
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Rly. Publicity photo.)
A boiling pool at Whakarewarewa, Rotorua.
Ngongotaha is a strange place, a mountain of magic, and spells, and enchantment, for it is from its ferny base that the Wai-oro-toki rises, that sacred stream from whose waters no man may drink and live. The shoulder of Ngongotaha, Te Kauwae, leaning toward the lake, is the Lightning Mountain of the Arawa people. When three bright flashes are seen in quick succession above the bold thrust of Te Kauwae, it is a sign that a chief will shortly die.
Before the coming of the white man, the fishing-grounds of Rotorua were jealously guarded. The boundaries were defined by long rows of stakes to which the nets were fastened, and by carved corner posts that were known by name. To the fishing-grounds belong the strange story of Tona of Ohinemutu and the singing tree. Some few hundred yards out into the lake waters stood a totara tree-trunk, driven down into the pumice bed. The Maoris called it Te Purewa. One night the woman Tona dreamed as she slept, and she dreamed that she heard Te Purewa singing to her, in a strange, mournful wailing voice.
“Alas, my grief for Mokoia's Isle, Standing desolate yonder In the sea of Rotorua! Alas!”
“It is an omen of death,” said the people when she told her dream in the morning, “Disaster will shortly fall upon us.”
It was even as the singing tree had foretold, for at that very time Hongi Hika was setting forth from the North with his terrible fleet of war-canoes which were to sweep the waters of Lakeland, and capture the ancient stronghold of sacred Mokoia.
Happy Hours in the Station Play-room.
By)
Bernice Shackleton
Is not the thought infinitely tender that behind the lines of traffic and the waiting ranks of rolling stock, above the restless travelling public and on top of that great fixed community of industry which centres in the Wellington Railway Station, there are babies playing with their toes. This is not something separate from the whole system, but a delicate part of it, like that intimate pulse in one's own wrist which is forgotten until one needs again to feel its small steady assurance.
The executive heart of our major transport system beats with the pace of modern efficiency, swiftly, steadily, and its ordered confidence is reflected in the happiness of children up there, near the sky, in their little heaven of nursery land—kiddies pushing bright trains about the floor, and babies hushed in sleep. Are their deep lashed dreams about Jumbo and Hippo and all the touching fantasies we tell them?
Somehow their presence is unexpected, a whimsical afterthought, kin to the poet's hint of God's laughter when he made small comical ducks and turned them upon a serious world. Indeed, the nursery was an afterthought. For the building was first planned with only the usual rest rooms and lounges, a mothers' feeding room, and the accepted and customary attentions to women travellers, all well done, it is true, in russet and cream panelled walls and deep arm chairs, luxurious and correct.
But it seems that someone looking up suddenly from the plans heard a child's voice, and then crowned this building with youngsters' happiness.
And just as the voice of a child sets the last fine note to family life, it here illumines and lifts up the cadences of industry, until one is aware gradually, if one is a stranger, of a sort of family essence in the large fraternity of railway men and women.
The Wellington Railway Station is one year old now, but the building holds a spirit that is mellowed with experience and continually expanding through all the new environmental facilities into a more satisfying pleasure in work.
Because I am a woman and not mechanically-minded I shall not try to give you the machinery of this great and constant endeavour, this co-ordination and co-operation between a thousand people of all degrees of qualification and culture; the mechanic and the cheerful waitress, the technicist, draftsman, the college man and the graduate of the old universities of other lands. But I shall attempt to pass on to you some—only a small part—of the subtle spirit of this place as it rose up to the mind of a woman in an hour's exploration.
And it is not alone by my own natural inclination that my thought begins at the nursery floor. My guide was a man, presumably less given to sentimentality. He began there.
It is hardly possible to show the preciousness of this little heaven. Watch this lad, pushing his tricycle among the castles of his fancy.
Little Camel, when you left your coat in the other room you forgot your name. They pinned on to you the sign of a camel (or was it an elephant, or a bear?) and now you are known as a little animal in this happy interlude. Perhaps you forget that you are anything at all, or you are a wizard manipulating trucks and trains from the shelves of toys, bright as all the colours in this room.
You are a king, to-day, with servants or starched bodyguard—that nurse and
In a little kitchen of cream and green enamel someone is getting ready prune pulp for you—Plunket feeding, even in heaven. But there are also baked apples, and pumpkin, cabbage, potatoes, and fish in the oven. It's a jolly world.
The tiny kiddies and the babies sleep in their small cots in rooms as restful as green fields. Their little bodies are still bundles under coverlets fresh as the busy windmill patterns mothers love for babies' cots. Their bunny friends and the chickens, Donald Duck and an owl or two, a funny long-legged beetle and a white mouse are having a picnic in a low freize on the wall just on the level of the babies' eyes. The simple, kindly friends of bed-time stories will greet them again in the bliss of awakening.
It is all so warm and snug and safe here. No wonder children leave it very reluctantly. Yet as they go away they drop down in the lift past other little worlds, and these are worlds of toil and sociability like those they may themselves be heir to.
If these children were in their teens, and fairy tales were grown to ambitions, and if a genii could take them unseen, lest they be awed by the lustre of executive office appointments, into the General Manager's office they might find there an urgent vision or hear a message as pressing as Dick Whittington's.
More than one glass door of simple but fine panelling would swing silently behind them as they went through the noiseless passage to this room. Its suggestion of expert workmanship touched with beauty would give them thoughts of industry where usefulness might be the handmaid of loveliness and good taste serve utility.
The windows overlook the intricate system and mechanism of acres of railway yards where there is constant synchronized movement. A new line is thrown out to Johnsonville and traffic is continuously, daily and nightly, drawn from old lanes of traffic. The whistle of trains and their smoke do not come very near except as a symbol of thought and progress. For the thought, the conferences and the planning go deeply through a thousand details behind the whistles and the smoke.
The room, when it is empty, is like a well styled reception room; carpet of soft green on a compressed inlaid cork floor, furniture of mottled kauri with green leather easy chairs, walls panelled
Before the General Manager went to the Conference of Australian and New Zealand Railway Commissioners in Sydney, in July, he studied the plans of the new Christchurch Railway Station at the desk in this room. He took a photostat copy of the plans away with him, and on the day the photostat was being developed I watched the lines of it come up on the paper in the developer.
The department where this work is done is very fascinating, even to an unmechanically - minded woman, but when I try to catch again the feeling of the place I know myself to be a mere impressionist among the blueprints. The courteous and technical explanations fall on my mind as music does on the untrained ear, as sounds in which there is a meaning, but from which one gathers a spirit more than a set of facts.
Here are machines which photograph a tracing from one paper to another in any of a choice of colours without the necessity of a negative.
In a little room where a light filter is used—all the red is taken out of the light—one becomes aware that one has assumed the colours of a Frankenstein because the hands of the operator are also a weird green, pitted with purple.
The lines on the prints come up in the baths of solution while men talk, and one bends again over tracings of minutest detail which have taken many months to draw.
Patience, a satisfaction in work and modern processes, and a respect for the diligent and painstaking co-operation
And I look again out of a window, across to a small building apart. It is the staff social hall fitted with a library, a stage, and showers. And I think of the other halls in the main building, which are cafeteria for the staff in the day time and in the evening places for an occasional dance or a lecture. This is a club with both occupational and social ties. There is a binding and uniting fraternity in these things, and the few that I speak of are only facets of the community life that springs up, almost complete in itself, within the great structure of modern transport industry.
One more glance. The kitchen.
It requires a descriptive succulence and a mouth-watering toothsomeness in words to convey the sense of the raising of a domestic art, here into the realm of high industry. Magnify the home dining-room until it serves 1,200 meals a day, in holiday time up to 2,100 meals a day, and throw in a few extra 1,600 served in the cafeteria. Then imagine the kitchen organization, not as something impersonal as large figures suggest, but a place that will make you smile at the sight of good food in the necessarily large quantities. Moreover, you will chuckle in contact with enthusiasm bubbling over a stock pot, as the manager shows you all the devices of his electrically equipped kitchen.
Thinking of his eager and vital delight in it all I felt that somewhere I had met him before, perhaps not the man, but at least his spirit. It is linked with a mental picture of a slightly built, quick Bavarian engineering student in Cologne. He was showing a bevy of British colonial women students the cathedrals of the city. At every corner he counted his flock, talking eagerly at the same time of architecture, and taking this place and that almost at a run, until having exhausted religious art, and his audience also, he led the women to the original eau de Cologne shop and doused them with scent. Then he cupped his own hands and, with a supreme gesture of satisfaction, washed his face in the cooling liquid.
The same self-abandonment in a cause was here. But this spirit and enthusiasm, instead of being expended on the culture of Gothic, or Romanesque appreciation, reached up to something that touched a more urgent craving in every man, and something that every woman aspires to on a smaller scale to satisfy that three times daily recurring craving.
It is no descent into the mundane to stand by a tier of electric ovens, or a long bench of gas automatic fish friers, to watch a cutter that will chop up anything from beans to breadcrumbs, and even grate cheese, and to marvel at the simplicity of electric potato peelers which take the drudgery out of culinary art. Art, indeed, now. Everything reduced to a fine art.
It is heart-warming — when the stomach is full the heart glows—to see the soup urns, the pie urns in the steam-heated serving table, the carving of the brown joints, which, when disposed among the vegetables, would make a picture for one of those full-bellied old masters who spread their rich pigments over the scene of Dutch domestic life.
Ah! That is who should paint the picture of the Wellington Railway Station. A Dutch master doing lofty interiors, but one sufficiently modern to joy in the light of many windows.
“Lynn put his arm around her waist and lifted her across his saddle and then covered her face with kisses.”
ByA. J. G. .)
Schmitt
PartIV.
“Well, Mr. Kingswell, found out anything?” asked Jasper.
“Only that I'm convinced they are the two ‘wanteds’. Next Thursday night, I expect some developments. Those two are anxious to get away. If they give notice next Wednesday—well, we can look out for something. Now don't be surprised at what I am going to ask you. What is your opinion of Wynder?”
“I can't make him out, Mr. Kings-well. He has rarely come out of his office during the last few days. I have been naturally interested since you told me about the revolver. I had a look in his office when he went to lunch, and I don't think he has touched a thing for weeks,” said Jasper.
“Um! Try and have a look at the journal and cash book to-morrow. I am honestly afraid this man is more to be feared than both our whiskered friends. Just go on the same, Jasper. I am counting on you if anything happens.”
“I am with you, Mr. Kingswell.”
“It's an awkward position altogether.
The names of people in this story are wholly imaginary, though the incidents referring to some of the employees as being refugees from the Law are true. In the early days the remoteness of some of the mills made it quite possible for “wanteds” to hide in seclusion for many months.
One does not want to jump to conclusions about Wynder. There's just something. His behaviour at the house is like a gentleman's though I have noticed a lack of sincerity. He is often absent-minded. Yet women are supposed to be better judges of characters than men, and Miss Cushla apparently likes him.”
“So do I, in a way, but there's just that something, as you say,” replied Jasper.
“Well, let us go in. Perhaps Miss Cushla will take a hand in a game of bridge.”
“Come on, Mr. Kay,” said Jasper.
“You and I against Cushla and Mr. Lynn.”
A little later Wynder came in.
“Been for your usual constitutional, Mr. Wynder?”
“What is the promise of the weather for cricket to-morrow?” asked Cushla.
“It looks all right, Miss Cushla,” said Wynder.
“The stars like little orbs of light,
Pierce through the darkness of the night.
They tell the morrow will be fine
And sunshine bring to thee and thine.”
“Good for you, Mr. Wynder,” said Jasper. “But look here, listening to you I nearly revoked.”
Everyone hustled through their work on Saturday morning, so the afternoon would be unbroken for cricket.
* * *
It was astonishing what Jasper had moulded out of the material he had to hand. He captained one team, and Hawkins the other. Mr. Kay had provided a large marquee where afternoon tea was dispensed by Miss Cushla.
An outsider dropping in on the scene would have been amazed to see, in this
Mr. Kay said that the good feeling which existed among the men was mostly due to cricket, and the good influence of Mr. Jasper. Lynn assisted Cushla with the afternon tea, Jasper also lending a hand.
“By Jove! this does you credit, Jasper. Some of your old friends here play quite a good game, and for a fairly rough ground they field well.”
“It seems that all hands turn up to watch the game,” remarked Lynn.
“Yes, but I notice three who are absent,” replied Jasper.
“You mean Higgins, Holt and Wynder?”
“Yes. It seems funny. Wynder always turns up. The other two, only sometimes.”
Wynder, at that moment, unseen by anyone, was taking a circuitous way to the road, carrying a hand-bag which contained a change of clothing, a considerable amount of cash, a spare revolver, and a fair quantity of ammunition. He reached the gate, and followed the road about five chains along, then disappeared into the tea-tree. Ten yards from the road he placed the bag on the ground, and
“With deft hands, not disarranging anything, he searched the whole outfit.”
Little did Wynder think that this letter had been written with an idea that he, Wynder, might see it. There was nothing in it, or in the saddle-bags to connect Lynn with being a spy or with any ulterior motive. If Wynder had found the letter in a conspicuous place he might have thought it was a subterfuge.
Wynder communicated the information to Higgins that same evening and they felt more at ease. He told Higgins where he thought would be the best place for a hold-up—near a small bridge about five miles from the gate. Both approaches had sunk to such a degree that a car had to slow right down to negotiate it. As the car eased down, Holt was to approach and point his revolver while Wynder and Higgins were to spring out simultaneously on either side, demanding “hands up.” If Martin showed fight, well, he had himself to blame.
Martin was to be bound, if not killed or wounded, the car turned round, and a get-away made with as little delay as possible. The telephone wires were to be cut. Wynder calculated on upwards of four hours' start.
“Have your tea as usual,” he told Higgins. “Immediately afterwards, make for the road, under cover, until you reach the gate, then continue to the bridge and wait for me. You and Holt better take what belongings you want, and plant them on the road somewhere, so that you can pick them up. If you can get away with some food, all the better. Meet me here next Wednesday evening. That will be all just now. Good-night Higgins!” “Good-night, Colonel.”
* * *
Lynn had taken a great fancy to Cushla, and it was not surprising when he suggested they should go for a ride down to the beach. She readily consented. It was a lovely evening, and the two chatted away about the cricket, the lovely bush, and the life at the mill. A two-mile ride brought them to the beach. There was always a swell, but on a calm night the rollers came in only about three or four feet high and, as they broke, they sent a line of snow-white foam, as far as the eye could see, along the beach.
“What a glorious night, Cushla. I don't think it is possible to find a place elsewhere where there are so many attractions,” said Lynn.
“No, Dad chose well. There's years and years of timber without breaking in on the beauty spots, and he has promised to leave quite a number of acres here and there.”
“Ah, but you see you've got an exceptional Dad, Cushla. What about a canter down the beach and then for home? They will be thinking all sorts of things if I keep you out too late.”
“All right! Let's go,” agreed Cushla. When they returned to the road and up the slope to the bush road Cushla said: “Are you going again with Martin on Thursday?”
“Yes, Cushla. But, as before, I don't want anyone to know.”
“You would not go unless you thought there was some danger to Martin.”
“Perhaps not, Cushla.”
“Then to please me, don't go. I'm afraid for you. I know you would stop at nothing, and if Martin were stuck up, you would take all the risk.”
“No,” replied Kingswell. “Martin is a brave, honest fellow, and would run more risk than I.”
“Then just this once more, Lynn.”
“I'm sorry, but so long as I think there is any danger to Martin, and a loss to your father possible, my duty is to go where my services are required. You would not think much of me if I shirked, Cushla, and I value your good opinion.”
“I think you know you have it.”
“And I intend to keep it, if possible, Cushla.”
“Then why not trust me and tell me your reasons for thinking there is trouble brewing.”
“Because I have only suspicions. You know from what I have told you that Higgins and Holt are a pair of pretty tough customers, but neither of them is plucky enough to carry off anything
“And have they got one?”
“That's just what I'm trying to find out, but never mind this business. We came out to enjoy ourselves, not to discuss the possibility of trouble. Anyhow, to change the subject, to one very near my heart. Cushla it's no use beating about the bush—I love you, and have loved you from the first day I met you on the road.”
“You're very sudden, Lynn. Do you townspeople always declare your love on such short acquaintance?”
“Just you say that you think there is hope for me and I'll never want to go back to the city to find out.”
“Well, supposing I said that there was, what would you do?”
“I would make old Scotty carry two people instead of one.”
“Well, suppose you try, Lynn.”
There was a sudden movement and then Lynn leaned over, put his arm around her waist and lifted her over across his saddle, and then covered her face with kisses.
“Well, that's that,” said Lynn, as he lifted her back on to her saddle. “Now, young lady, there is just one condition before we become properly engaged. I am going to ask your father to send you away for a month or six weeks. I can't spare you any longer, and give you a sporting chance of falling in love with somebody you may fancy better than me.”
“You old silly, Lynn. There is nothing going to change me. I am sure and I'm sure also there will be no trouble with Dad. He is fond of you, and he said the other night that with you and Mr. Jasper cruising around there was nothing left for him to worry about.”
* * *
“Here, young man, this is more than two hours you have been out,” said Mr. Kay as the pair entered the room.
“We stopped to look at some beautiful glow-worms,” said Cushla, blushing.
“So I would think by the colour of your cheeks.”
“Well, it's this way,” said Lynn. “I asked Cushla if she would ever care enough for me to be my wife, and notwithstanding my poor prospects she was kind enough to say that she had leanings that way already, so, of course, you being the head of affairs, we have come to ask you what you think of the matter.”
Mr. Kay chuckled: “I would gladly give my consent, but Lynn, I think Cushla should have a chance to find out if her feeling for you is lasting. She ought to go away for a time to the gay city—go to dances, evenings, and so on.”
“Exactly what I suggested,” said Lynn. “If she could stand a month or so with that sister of mine and come back the same there should be no misgivings for the future.”
“Anybody would think I did not know my own mind, but I shouldn't object to city life for a short while, especially if I could take Lynn with me,” said Cushla.
“That would upset the whole contract,” replied Lynn, “because I would never let you out of my sight.”
“Now you toddle off to bed, young lady. I want to talk to Lynn. I'm not too sure if he is in a fit state of mind to discuss serious things, but you toddle—prompt.”
Cushla threw her arms around her father's neck and kissed him. “You are the dearest, sweetest Dad there ever was.” She then turned to Lynn, kissed him, and rushed out of the room.
“Now, Lynn, come right down to earth and tell me what you discovered during your stewardship.”
“Not very much, but I think it would be wise to get rid of Higgins and Holt,” Lynn said.
“Are they not safer where one can keep an eye on them? If they are what you surmise, they might amble about and make a night raid.”
“You could transport them either by car or the scow to a safe distance,” Lynn replied.
“Yes, that is so, but you have not told me who the third one is.”
“I could not do that. But meetings are being held, and whether there is a third party I'm going to try and find out to-morrow night.”
There were other things that Lynn could have told Mr. Kay, but they were, after all, only surmise, and he was sure that any untoward action on the part of himself would not only put the suspects on their guard, but possibly provoke such hostile acts as might lead to gun play. Three men, well armed, could do great harm before being overpowered. Lynn was perfectly sure that no attempt would be made in the immediate vicinity, but if they were planning robbery, Martin was the one who was going to bear the brunt. Wynder was not fool enough to think that his untouched work would remain unnoticed for any long period, and he reckoned that any time a show-up might eventuate.
The following day Lynn questioned Jasper as to Wynder's movements.
“Only an increasing amount of work, and on Friday he will have to produce the usual monthly balance sheet to Mr. Kay. If that is not forthcoming reasons will have to be given.”
“This news is important, and tonight, I'll know fairly well what to expect when Martin returns. At 9 o'clock the car generally arrives back. If it is not up to time, ride out to meet it, and go armed. Remember, if anything happens there are three fairly desperate men to contend with, and your advent may be extremely opportune.”
“You're running a bit of a risk, are you not, Mr. Kingswell?”
“Not more than Martin, and I have put him on his guard.”
(To be continued.)
—(Continued from page 16).
fine co-ordination principle became firmly established as a working force in the community.
The study and production of drama was no longer the privilege of the large centres of population. The figures are most impressive. There are nine schools of drama, two-day or longer, with approximately 300 students. The Women's Institutes' special drama groups number no less than 160. The Farmers' Union Women's Division have 30 special drama groups. Of the League proper, there are groups comprising societies, drama groups, play reading societies numbering no less than 460. The aggregate membership must be more than 12,000. For a population of a million and a-half this is a fine record.
The list of place-names is a romance in itself: Appleby, near Nelson; Para-paraumu, Omihi and Ohoka in North Canterbury, Pio Pio and Taupiri in the Auckland Province, Stokes Valley, are just a few. Here are busy committees of folk engaged in the splendid task of cultural endeavour comprised in drama study.
It must be remembered that this can
(S.P Andrew, photo.)
mr leo du chateau, the moving spirit in the foundation of the wellington repertory society.
There are all the useful and entertaining jobs of dress designing, contriving and setting up scenery, the selection and arrangement of properties, and a host of collateral activities. These are all stimulating and instructive as well. But there is an increasing purpose which is higher and more valuable still. There is no fellowship so golden in result as the fellowship of people who are engaged in the mutual pursuit of some intellectual end. It is a sweetening and wholesome task, doing good in the widest possible fashion and in a measure no other activity can rival.
The special triumph of the British Drama League is its success in bringing this magical instrument of happiness and enlightenment into the remote corners of our country.
The League has a library of no less than 350 plays. It employs a tutor who travels all over New Zealand and has proved of matchless worth.
It is true that we can claim Marie Ney, Shayle Gardner, and one or two other outstanding London figures in drama.
But this triumphant advance of this form of culture among the masses of our fellow countrymen and women is of far more importance.
It is one further shining sign that, culturally, New Zealand is growing to full nationhood.
Perpetrated and Illustrated by)
Ken Alexander .Tune in For-Tune!
Everyone harbours a dream of what he would do if Fortune suddenly lifted the lid and offered him the works. There are some who crave to be so rich that they could afford to own three motor cars and still ride a bicycle. There are others who dream of having so much money that they could habitually wear clothes that look awful but feel comfortable. Of course this is aiming at the moon. Only millionaires can afford to look like a case of delerium trimmings, or Rumbold the rat-catcher. Even then it requires a heap of courage to defy your wife's relatives and spend your days happily bringing up drum-head cabbages in the way they should grow in a suit which looks as patchy as the map of Europe.
Still, if you're rich enough you may get away with it. People will say as you flutter and flap past, “That's old McBoodle; decent old stick, but a bit eccentric.”
But if you're known to be so poor that you pay cash for everything, they will whisper: “Old So-and-So is on the rocks; has to do a bit of market-gardening on the side.”
The greatest advantage of a lot of money is that it enables you to slip back to where you were before you had any. Biography is rich in millionaires to whom the sweetest reward of super-oodledom is the privilege of sitting in their own private kitchen, with their feet on the stove, smoking a short pipe and defying the tyranny of Fortune and Flunkeydom. This is the way of Ambition. It goes up with a bang and all that comes down is the stick.
For myself, if I had sufficient money to make me dissatisfied with myself, I would like to own a racehorse—a real racehorse with a tartan blanket, canary legs, and red nostrils like scooped-out tomatoes. I wouldn't worry about his teeth, to which some people attach so much importance. After all, a racehorse is not a wrestler. If he can run hard enough there is no need for him to bite the horse in front, and if he can't he won't get close enough to use his teeth anyway. I think a nice pair of red nostrils is a very important part of a racehorse; it is an indication that he is a “snorter” and is able to scoop up his fair share of galloping-fuel without getting hiccoughs and giving his jockey the jumps.
I can think of nothing more conducive to a feeling of Power than to be on snorting terms with an animal who is so regal that his subjects whisper in his presence and take the oat of allegiance to his rule.
I have always envied the Aga Khan—not for his wealth of elephant tusks and tigers' tails, not for his teeming millions, his Indian ink wells and his
“The greatest advantage of a lot of money is that it enables you to slip back to where you were before you had any.”
These are a few of the reasons why I would like to own a real racehorse in a real stable with a horse-shoe over the door, where I could call on his horseship every morning and fondle his fetlocks or pat his pasterns. No, I don't think I could be as familiar as that. I might do it if the horse were not looking. Have you ever seen the look in a racehorse's eye? One gave me that kind of look in the saddling paddock once. Well, I've been looked at by sales ladies in the haberdashery department; high-class tailors have regarded me with the glazed eye of a boiled cod; I have been looked at by bridge partners and dancing partners;
It must feel good to be owned by a racehorse; to be venerated by the punting public as the repository of strange secrets; to see disciples of the “divvy” go into a mystery huddle when you pass. To be approached respectfully by gleaners of knowledge and students of form for the low-down on his horseship's uptake. It must be pleasant to have it reported that you were seen to smack your jockey on the back at Riccarton, to smack him behind the ear at Trentham, to smile at Avondale, to kick the stable-boy on the shins at Ellerslie. Such acts, translated to the language of yeas and neighs, mean much to the mystery men of Mokedom. The owner's face is the mirror of his horse's aspirations, respirations and complications. A spot of spavin, a bout of gout, a hint of glanders or broncoitis, reduces the owner's face to such a sorry state that if you saw him and the horse together you'd scarcely know them apart—if the horse wore a hat, too. On the other hoof, if the horse neighs merrily in his bath, tosses his nosebag like an Italian expert undergoing a meal of spaghetti, and behaves
“ Scoop up his fair share of galloping-fuel without getting hiccoughs and giving his jockey the jumps.”
Nevertheless I crave to own a racehorse, to travel round the country with him, sharing his hopes and joys during the day, and his blanket during the night; to feel him snuggling up against my back. There's a kick in that. To lie in the straw with him and amuse him by picking up his hoofs and saying: “This little horsey went to Newmarket, this little horsey stayed in bed, this little horsey had a roast oat, and this little horsey won by a head.”
And when things were slack I'd scratch him. I've always wanted to do it. I've stroked cats and boats, I've patted dogs and little boys' heads, but I've never scratched a racehorse. It must soothe the horse; in fact, it seems completely to take a horse's mind off his work. I've noticed that a well-scratched racehorse never races except in cases where he starts from scratch. This no doubt applies to ticklish horses only. Yes, sir, I'll certainly get a step-ladder and a rake and scratch my horse thoroughly when I get him.
And when I get him I hope he won't be one of those horses who read better than they run—paper-chase horses. And, above all, I hope he will be a friendly horse who won't look at me as though I were something nauseous he had found in his oats.
If he were a pony I'd call him Laryngitis, because he'd be a little hoarse.
They're Off!!!
By “)
Shibli Bagarag
A recognised literary rendezvous in Auckland, the Unicorn Press in Kitchener Street, has changed its name and its ownership. In future it will be known as the Griffin Press with Ronald Holloway in charge. Because of the change it will not lose any of its literary interest, for the rather ascetical looking, yet extremely youthful owner is popular with the poets, artists, and printers of Auckland. He is known as the most artistic young printer in this country, the chaste simplicity of his typography attracting attention even overseas. Holloway's artistic mind has been behind many unusual booklets and pamphlets published over the past few years in this little shop in Kitchen Street. In the same premises one meets from time to time several of those sometimes quaint and certainly clever writers of which Auckland is proud—D'Arcy Cresswell, R. A. K. Mason, “Robin Hyde,” A. R. D. Fairburn and others. And, of course, Miss Jane Mander sometimes calls there, and very often lean, hungry looking poets, and 'varsity students hover around, looking as though they have been trying out a frugal diet of printers' ink and newsprint. In spite of its Bohemian atmosphere the work at the Unicorn—or as we must call it now—the Griffin Press, proceeds steadily. These young printers of Kitchener Street are reliable as well as artistic.
* * *
It is good to see “The New Triad” growing in size and interest. The latest number is one of 32 pages, and contains a small camera study supplement. In addition to literary matters the bi-monthly deals with music and the stage. It is a modest 4d. per copy from N. F. Hoggard, Hand Craft Press, Times Buildings, Wellington. It is a coincidence that “The New Triad” should be published in a building so redolent with memories of Frank Morton of the original “Triad,” which, of course, was a robust publication in comparison with its modest little successor.
I think it was John Barr (author of “Men and Other Sins”) who once said that verbiage is the carcase of journalism and brevity the soul, but the breviteer has to be much more than an axeman. This came to my mind when I read a newspaper report of a tragedy: “John Dixon struck a match to see if there was any petrol in his tank. There was. Aged 56.”
* * *
The other night we were quoting examples of crushing replies received by writers through the reject columns of various journals. The best was from the harassed editor of a certain literary magazine whose reply to an alleged poet who had submitted to him some verse entitled “Why Do I Live?” was “Because you sent it by post instead of coming around with it.”
* * *
Due for publication this month is J. H. E. Schroder's “Remembering Things.” In a preliminary announcement the publishers (Dent's) state:—“This is a book of true essays—not
The bookplate prepared for Mr. F. W. Reed, Whangarei, for use with the Garnett collection of the works of Dumas, which will be presented ultimately to the Auckland Public Library.
* * *
Reviews.
“Promenade,” by G. B. Lancaster—the New Zealand novel we in this country have anticipated for years, has at last been published. When, a year or two ago it was mentioned that G. B. Lancaster was working on a big New Zealand novel, we who knew the capabilities of the writer, had definite hopes that the long awaited New Zealand saga was in course of construction. Now after long arduous labours, for the historical side had to be checked up from many diaries, records and letters, the book has been completed and after having run its serial length in “The Bulletin,” it has been published in book form by Angus & Robertson of Sydney. It is a grand full-blooded book spreading its many coloured pages over the greater part of the twentieth century.
The story opens in January, 1839, in England where the Lovels, an old British family, are discussing their prospective departure for New Zealand.
That this book has been written by one, who, though not born in New Zealand received her training and inspiration here as a writer, is a fact that must be recorded with satisfaction.
“Promenade” was published recently in America where it received glowing tributes from the critics. The first edition in Australia was sold almost before it reached the bookshops. In this country of course the book should set up a new sales record. Best of all it must live for all time as one of the outstanding books written about New Zealand. The novel has its minor faults; historical accuracy, or shall we say sympathy, may at times be questioned; the higher strata of earlier colonial life is emphasised rather than the working pioneer section. Even so it will take a writer of great power and art to improve on G. B. Lancaster's Promenade.”
* * *
Railway engines have always exercised their full pull on the interest of man—from boyhood to old age. The popular appeal of the locomotive springs from something stronger than the fact that it is always a “free show”; there is romance, power and vitality in a railway engine. Two locomotive booklets recently issued by the Locomotive Publishing Co., will therefore attract interest. “Modern Locomotives of the L.M.S.,” by D. S. Barrie, covers the development of many types of locomotives, including the stream-lined Coronation engine. The second book “L.N.E.R. Locomotives, 1938,” deals with the modern speed monsters of the L.N.E.R. Both booklets are nicely printed and illustrated, and sell at a modest one shilling apiece.
N.Z. Centennial 1940
Literary Competition
Entries are invited for a series of Literary Competitions commemorating the Centennial in 1940. Competitions will be held for a Novel, a Short Story, a Full length Play, a Long Essay, and Poems. Rules and Conditions of the Competition may be obtained on application to the Secretary, National Historical Committee, Department of Internal Affairs, Box 7, Government Buildings, Wellington.
* * *
“Shibli” Listens In.
Will Lawson, whose “Harpoons Ahoy” was published recently, is now busy on a book on Ben Boyd.
* * *
The date of New Zealand Authors' Week this year is still in doubt. The promoters plan to make it coincide with the hoped for visit to New Zealand of Mr. H. G. Wells.
Inches off his Waistline
26 Pounds of Fat Gone Too
Reducing at 80 Years of Age
Apparently one is never too old to reduce. Here writes a man of 80 who has just rid himself of 1 st. 12 lbs. of unwanted fat:—
“You may be interested to hear that after taking Kruschen Salts daily, and following, but only to a certain extent, advice about suitable food, I have reduced my weight from 14 st. 3 lbs. to 12 st. 5 lbs., and my waist from 44 inches to 37 inches. Not only that, but I have the very satisfactory feeling of being well and fit, which at my age (80 years) is something to be thankful and grateful for. You are at liberty to publish this, but only if you put my initials.”—G.B.H.
Overweight arises frequently because the system is loaded with unexpelled waste, like a furnace choked with ashes and soot. Allowed to accumulate, this waste matter is turned into layer after layer of fat.
The six salts in Kruschen assist the internal organs to throw off each day the wastage and poisons that encumber the system. Then, little by little, that ugly fat goes—slowly, yes—but surely.
Kruschen does not aim to reduce by rushing food through the body; its action is not confined to a single part of the system. It has a tonic influence upon every organ of elimination, every gland, every nerve, every vein. Gently, but surely, it rids the system of all fatforming food refuse, of all poisons and harmful acids which give rise to rheumatism, digestive disorders and many other ills.
Kruschen Salts is obtainable at all Chemists and Stores at 273d. per bottle.*
By)
Nellie E. Donovan
Michael gripped his sister's arm, “Don't be frightened, Barbara,” he said, “I will look after you.”
The goblins stopped before them in line. There must have been fully a dozen of them.
Tiny Toes found his voice, “What do you want?” he asked shakily.
A goblin with a long, white beard reaching almost to the ground, stepped forward. “We saw you coming along the track. You have no permission to come to this island, so the Most Highest One, our King, told us to take you prisoners and bring you before him,” he said.
“But—but,” put in Barbara, “We'll go away if you'll only give us Peter back.”
“Peter? Who is he?” asked the goblin.
“You know—our friend—the little boy you took prisoner,” answered Barbara.
“We know nothing about a little boy,” said the goblin.
Barbara turned to Tiny Toes. “Oh, Tiny Toes, did you hear what he said? They know nothing about Peter!”
“Don't you believe him,” said Tiny Toes, “We know for certain that Peter is on this island.”
“Come on,” said the goblin, “We can't waste time. “Take their arms, brother goblins.”
But before the goblins could make a move, Michael shouted, “Run for it!” and, pulling Barbara, he made a dart through the line of goblins. He knocked two goblins over. But he did not get far. Barbara and he were gripped tightly by strong arms and jerked back. Tiny Toes and Dimples were also securely held.
“March!” said the goblin, with the long, white beard.
They marched forward along the track, until they came to a large green field. Goblins of all sizes and shapes were standing in line at the far end, like a contingent of soldiers waiting inspection. Sitting on a chair made of branches and rushes was a great, ugly fat goblin with a laurel crown on his head. The children were pushed roughly forward until they were standing in front of him.
The goblin with the white beard stepped forward, quickly. But in his haste he quite forgot that when he walked, he had to use caution with a long beard, and the consequence was that it became tangled round his short legs and he tumbled to the ground in a very undignified position.
He really was a funny sight trying to untangle the beard from his legs that Barbara giggled aloud. A goblin who was standing by the King goblin's chair and holding a long pointed stick, gave Barbara a poke with it, while Michael nudged her. “Better be quiet, Barbara,” he whispered.
By this time the goblin had untangled his beard and had struggled to his feet. He glared angrily at Barbara, then bowed low to the King goblin.
“Your most Gracious Majesty, I humbly beg you to overlook that terrible mistake of mine in falling in your
“Sitting on a chair made of branches and rushes was a great ugly fat goblin.”
“The only way to see that it does not happen again,” said the King goblin in a deep voice, “is to cut that beard off. Chief Cutter step forward.” Out of the ranks of the goblins stepped a goblin holding an outsize in clippers. He advanced over to the now trembling goblin.
“Your Majesty cannot mean it!” he cried, “My beautiful beard! I'll do anything else your Majesty wants, but let me have my beard!”
“Cut it off!” commanded the King.
Snip! Snip! went the clippers, and the beautiful white beard lay on the grass in small pieces.
Tears rolled down the goblin's cheeks, “I'll never be able to grow another like it!” he sobbed, “It'll take years and years!”
The King goblin was becoming angry. “Enough of this nonsense!” he thundered, “I give orders that no beards are to be worn longer than six inches in length and any goblin seen with a longer beard will be banished from the Kingdom. Spread that message through the island. And now proceed.”
The goblin who had lost his beard, at the King's angry words, wiped the tears from his eyes and said, “Yes, your Majesty. We have done as your Majesty ordered and brought before you the mortal children and two of our hateful enemeis, the elves.”
“Ah!” The King leant forward in his chair and his ugly face with its small beady eyes, peered down at Barbara and Michael. “You are very small for a mortal boy and girl, aren't you?”
“Yes,” answered Barbara, “That's so we would fit in the Fair—”
“Shs!” said Michael in a whisper, “Don't say a word about the boat. You see, King Goblin,” Michael said loudly, “Tiny Toes and Dimples thought it would be ever so much better if we were small like them so that we could talk together more easily.”
(Continued on page 60.)
ByHelen
It keeps that fetching angle with the aid of a bandeau. The colourful crown of flowers matches the gay print you will wear under a dark coat.
The curve of this brim suits most people. Note the brightly coloured scarf which becomes a veil at the back.
You can't have too much of them. Even with a tailleur, place a flower in your hat and drape some veiling round the brim.
To show all your curls. Buy one in any shade of suede or petersham and wear it casually on the back of your head.
All sorts of things happen to the beret. Very smart is the upward and forward line. One spring model in tabac brown is carried out in felt and grosgrain ribbon.
Chin straps can be smart, but examine your chin and neckline carefully before venturing.
The smartest hat I've seen was worn by an English tourist. It had an abbreviated “topper” crown, and was of black with a fuchsia lining to the brim. With it were worn an inconspicuous suit in tiny black and white checks and a plain straight fuchsia scarf.
A hat that I can imagine the Duchess of Kent wearing with distinction is a black Edwardian bowler with very curled brim. The fairly high crown is almost entirely composed of a plume of black feathers.
Feathers vie with flowers as trimmings. Two wings adorning the front of a hat give a Viking effect. White mounts on navy, or navy on white, are specially smart.
Hat trimmings may be placed at either front or back. Veils are looped to the back. A slate-blue felt bowler is tied with a veil, and also has a bunch of cornflowers at the back.
* * *
Old Washing Frocks.
To Discard or —?
Hopefully you turn out, from the back of a wardrobe or the bottom of a box, those prints and linens and voiles which were so fresh and dainty last summer, or the summer before, or even the summer before that. Perhaps two or three of the more recent will
But the rest? Ginghams, linens, piqué voiles, won't wear out. If only one could manage to tear them or spill ink on them at the end of a season, and thus have an excuse for discarding them! Sighing, you'll probably use them for house-frocks, coveting meanwhile the dainty new styles in house-coats, tub frocks and play suits.
With the cost of cottons so low (by the yard or made up) don't be a martyr to old frocks. Salve your conscience by turning them into aprons. Buy a paper pattern which will include several styles in one packet, get out the sewing machine and enjoy your
Now the linens—the old green dress and the brown suit. How about turning them into gardening overalls with large, handy pockets? Trim them with each other, with several bright colours of bias binding, or with rickrack. If any pieces are left over, use them for bands for trimming print aprons. Use several bands, e.g., green (2 inches), brown (3 inches), green (4 inches).
A friend of mine turned a printed linen dress into curtains for a small landing window, and a red dress into garden cushion covers!
You've always refused to wear “dust caps” in the house, but on washing days you wear an old hat as you deal with pegs and clothes props in the sunny garden. Wear a head-kerchief instead—just a hemmed square cut from a discarded print or linen. It will protect your wave against steam and the caprices of the wind, and, incidentally, will look attractive when a friend pops in, or your husband arrives home for lunch.
You'll probably overcome your prejudice against dust-caps, and wear your head-kerchief during household cleaning operations.
The things that set the tone of the kitchen are the curtains and the cook. A delightful new idea is to have your kitchen smock made of the same material as the curtaining. Think of it when you're planning new curtains, and buy a few extra yards for yourself.
* * *
Merry England.
London Squares and Play Streets.
The England of the folk-dance is not as dead as we thought. Though “Rufty-Tufty” and “The Black Nag” survive only among a few enthusiasts, the “Lambeth Walk” is being danced by the people in London squares and on a London common. The young folks of Finsbury and Wimbledon, encouraged by their local councils, and the provision of bands and amplifiers, assemble on warm summer evenings to practise their “routines” on the grass.
It's all very jolly. No charge is made and there is no red tape, except that in the Finsbury squares the children, who would swamp proceedings, have to stay outside the railings with the crowd of spectators. Residents of the square have a fine “gallery” view from windows and balconies.
The Wimbledon Corporation is interspersing ten minutes' physical jerks, organised by the borough instructor, but this shouldn't prove a pill in the jam. It all adds to the “get-together” spirit and the fresh-air feeling of well-being.
The hoi polloi are not the only ones to respond to the open air. The Georgian Society recently held a dance in Mecklenburg Square. This wasn't part of the “keep fit” movement, but was planned to draw attention to the beauty of this square of Georgian houses. The dancers spent some of the time at coconut shies and other diversions run by costers in their “pearlie” suits. For a sitting-out place, one could choose a barouche or some such old-fashioned vehicle, charmingly sequestered among the trees.
How about it? I suggest Albert, Newtown and Hagley Parks for trial spins. The corporations would surely be willing to supply bands once a week.
* * *
So that London children may have somewhere to play when they are turned out of school, the Minister of Transport is trying the experiment, successful in Salford, of closing certain streets entirely to through traffic. Where Salford has nearly two hundred closed streets, London is starting with four. It is hoped that this scheme will go a little way towards solving the big problem of lack of play areas.
Some recent letters to the press advocate the opening of London's squares, which are little used, to the public, but well-to-do residents of quiet squares naturally resent the suggestion.
* * *
For Curls.
The latest gadget from America is a different type of hair curler. It winds the curl, and is then removed, leaving the hair held in place with a bobby-pin. The great advantages are that one curler will make as many curls as you want, that there is no discomfort and unsightly ironmongery during the setting process, and that the damp curls, being free of impedimenta (save a few bobby pins) will dry in half the usual time.
The curler works this way. A bobby pin is inserted in the end of the curler. A button, pressed at the other end raises a clamp. The hair is inserted between the clamp and the curler. The strand of hair, held firmly at its end, is now wound by means of a knob at the button end, the lower part of the curler remaining stationary. Now the curl is gently pushed along the curler on to the waiting prong of the bobby pin. With practice, a dozen curls can be made in a few minutes.
* * *
Health Notes.
As the busy season approaches, bringing in its train spring cleaning, jam making, preparing for holidays, etc., women who appreciate their health and appearance are well advised to learn the value of relaxation. Job after job a tired woman finds to do, which left undone would not materially affect the well-being of the home. What does affect the well-being of a home, however, is a woman with that “tired feeling,” for whom one can do nothing. She will persist in the idea that she has absolutely no time for even thirty minutes' complete rest and relaxation during the day. Of course an hour's rest would be preferable, but even 30 minutes' complete
Freshness in a woman is one of her principal assets. When anyone says “How tired you look,” the impression is immediately formed that the sympathy extended means “How plain you look.” What is the use of purchasing a new Spring hat if everyone sees it in conjunction with a tired-looking face.
Rest and relaxation! At least thirty minutes of rest and pleasurable thinking. There is not the same benefit if we rest and allow our thoughts to ponder over all the pinpricks of the day. Surely there is enough enjoyment in life to allow of thirty minutes' contemplation daily of some past, present or future pleasure! Of course “forty winks” would be a great idea, but some of us cannot say “sleep” and we sleep.
There are the people who can say to themselves: “To-morrow morning I will arise at 6.47, and they say they arise at 6.47. I often wonder if their clocks or watches are fast or slow, what happens then. Do they arise by the Town Clock or by their own clock? These people, no doubt, could say, “I will sleep from 2 o'clock until 2.30,” and hey presto, they would arise duly refreshed for their afternoon's activities.
Scientific treatment to-day tends to be concerned more and more with the prevention of disease. What chance is there, however, for the woman who wilfully neglects nature's warning—“that tired feeling”—and consistently ignores the value of rest. Scientific treatment comes in later to patch her up, when the inevitable breakdown occurs, but how much happier she would have been had she only benefited by the warning—and not only herself but the other members of the family.
Modern industry has accepted the fact that provision should be made for rest periods during the day's work. It is a recognised principle in the best conducted high-pressure businesses that these “rest periods” are absolutely necessary for all concerned. They probably represent of the employers' time about half an hour daily, but the renewed energy which they give to the employees amply repays the loss of time.
Neglect of one's health is now being looked upon as a selfish trait, instead of the old-time selflessness.
Great care should be taken of the children who have recovered from the measles, and if it is at all possible they should be sent away for a change of air—from the interior to the sea, and vice versa from the sea to the interior. Their future health often depends upon their complete recovery from the measles.
The Scrapbook.
If the kitchen happens to be on the “wrong” side of the house, then an electric fan for creating a current of air is a good investment.
When blowflies are troublesome, draw the blinds in the room and place small tins half filled with kerosene on the window-ledges. The flies are attracted by the light and fall into the tins and die immediately.
A teaspoon of sugar swallowed will often cure an attack of hiccoughs.
If fat is spilt on top of the oven or stove, sprinkle salt on it, and the smoke and odour will be minimised. In bad cases two or three applications may be necessary.
When rhubarb has been prepared for cooking, pour boiling water over it, leave it for a few seconds, then strain off and cook the rhubarb as usual. It will be more palatable, and people who usually cannot digest it will find it beneficial instead of injurious.
Recipes.
A really nice salad can be made with cold beef left over from the joint of the day before.
Cut the meat into neat slices, removing fat. Arrange on a dish and season with salt and pepper. Dissolve half a packet of aspic jelly in 1 ½ gills of hot water and add ½ gill of tomato ketchup. Pour over beef and let it set. Shred and wash two lettuces and slice two or three tomatoes. Mix with the salad cream and place the jellied beef on top.
Hard-boil the eggs, cut in lengthways, scoop out the yolk and fill each half white with one dessertspooon cold cooked green peas which have been mixed with a little mayonnaise dressing. Arrange the halved eggs on individual plates, allowing about three halves to each person, and surround with a border of lettuce leaves sprinkled with dressing, and sprinkle the salad with sieved egg yolk.
Crayfish salad is perhaps the greatest of all possible fish salads.
Divide the flesh of a fair-sized crayfish into dice shapes and mix about a gill of mayonnaise dressing with it. Put some of the inner leaves of two well-washed and dried lettuces into a salad bowl. On top spread a layer of crayfish, cover with more mayonnaise and then with lettuce. Repeat these layers and this time shred the lettuce finely for the top. Garnish with parsley.
—Cont. from page 56
“So that's it,” said the King. “And why have you come to this island of mine?”
“We don't mean to do any harm,” said Michael, “All we want is to find Peter. Tiny Toes and Dimples are just helping us.”
“Yes, if you'll give us Peter back, we'll go away and never bother you again,” Barbara said.
“Peter!” exclaimed the King. “Why should I let you have him back. He hurt one of my people and he's being very useful here.”
“But he didn't mean to hurt that goblin,” said Barbara, “And you can't keep him there forever. His mother and Father are awfully worried and are looking for him everywhere.”
“He will stay here as long as I like to keep him. Understand? And you as well!” He sat back in his chair and laughed. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho! This is a great joke on you mortals!”
“Whatever are we going to do?” whispered Barbara to Michael.
“Shs!” whispered Michael, “We'll get out of it, somehow!”
“Bring the elves here,” commanded the King. Tiny Toes and Dimples were pushed roughly before him.
“So you came to spy on me, ch? Well, you will never leave this island again,” said the King with a sneer.
“We did not come to spy on you,” answered Tiny Toes indignantly. “We came to find Peter. And if you do not let us go and release Peter, the whole of our country will wage war upon you.”
“Idle chatter,” said the King, “Your people would never reach the island. We have made a new fiery spear that bursts into flame when it strikes an object. We have only to send those into the air at your frail ships and not one of you would reach your country alive.”
“You boast well, King,” answered Tiny Toes, “But you forget that in our country we have also made things of which you know nothing. We have more than fairy ships to fight with, now.”
“Bah!” said the King, “Your empty-headed talk annoys me. You are going to work and wait on me like the rest of your people I have here. And any talking that is to be done will be done by me. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ho! Ho!” he laughed.
“Isn't he horrible,” whispered Barbara.
“Shs!” said Michael.
“And you,” the King turned to Barbara and Michael, “will be imprisoned in a cottage until the rise of the sun on the morrow. Then you will be taken across to my Palace and every day you will teach me arithmetic and geography and other things of your mortal land. Peter has already taught me the twice times table. Twice one are two, twice two are three—”
“Excuse me, King,” said Barbara, “but twice two are four.”
“How dare you say I'm wrong,” thundered the King. “Twice two are three! Two and three make five, take away two and you get three. Twice two are three!”
“Very well, your Majesty,” said Barbara, “But you are wrong, you know.”
“Be quiet!” thundered the King. “I will send some of my men over to mortal land to get books and you will learn from those and then you will teach me. Take them away.”
With a wave of his hand, the King dismissed them. As Tiny Toes and Dimples were led away, they waved good-bye to Barbara and Michael.
Two sturdy goblins took hold of the children and led them across the field, through hedges and down tracks, until they came to a gloomy forest. The sun had disappeared now and the forest looked more gloomy than ever. There in the centre of the forest stood a small hut with no windows and only a tiny door. Creeper climbed up the walls and grass grew right up to the door. Barbara and Michael were led up to it. A goblin opened the door with a key which he took from a little bag hanging from his side. The children were pushed inside. “We will bring you food and water at the rise of the sun on the morrow,” said the goblin. He shut the door and the key turned in the lock. The children were securely locked in for the night.
For a minute they did not say a word. Suddenly Barbara gripped Michael
“Of course, we will, don't be silly;” said Michael, though inwardly his heart was quaking. “We will have to find a way out of this hut.”
He stared round him in the gloom. At first he could not see a thing, but as his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness, he could see that on the floor was straw for them to lie on. He went round the walls and thumped on them and pulled the door. But there didn't seem anyway they could get out.
“There's no way out, Barbara,” he said as he came back to her. “Let's go to sleep on the floor and wait till tomorrow when we will very likely see Tiny Toes and Dimples at the Palace.”
“I suppose that's the only thing to do,” said Barbara. They lay down on the straw. Michael put his arm protectingly round Barbara's shoulders and they dozed off. They had not been asleep long, when Michael sat up suddenly and listened intently. Faintly, he could hear a scraping sound from the far wall. Louder and louder came the sound, and from the bottom of the wall, a little dust began to rise. Michael nudged Barbara. “Wake up, Barbara,” he whispered, “I think someone's trying to get into the hut.”
Barbara sat up sleepy-eyed. She listened to the scratching. “I'll go over to the wall and see if I can see anything,” said Michael. He crept over to the wall on his hands and knees.
“Who's there?” he whispered. There was no answer. “Who's there?” he said again. He could see a small hole appearing between the wall and the ground. The scratching sound stopped. For a second there was silence. Then a greyish green head with two sharp eyes looked through the hole and then came a body with four legs and a scaly tail.
“Why!” exclaimed Barbara, “It's a lizard!”
(To be continued.)
He was very hungry, so he pushed open the swing doors of the restaurant and entered. It was a rough, ill-smelling place, but he thought he would try a cup of coffee and something to eat.
The waitress brought coffee in a thick, heavy cup.
“Where's the saucer?” inquired our fastidious friend.
“We don't give no saucers here,” replied the girl. “If we did, some illbred ignoramus would come blowing in, and drink out of his saucer, and we'd lose a lot of our swellist customers.”
* * *
“Well, son, how did you like that nice fizzy drink?”
“Not too bad, dad, but it felt as if my foot had gone to sleep in my nose.”
* * *
George and Mary had been “walking out” together for ten years.
As George did not seem in a hurry to come to the point, Mary thought she would help him. So next time they were out she said:
“George, don't you think it's time you and me got married.”
George looked at her for a minute. “Aye lass,” he said, “but who do you think will have us?”
* * *
Two Scotsmen were watching a football match. One had a bottle, the other only a thirst. The bottle-man was talking very loudly about his knowledge of the game and what a fine player he was himself.
During the conversation he helped himself liberally to the contents of the bottle, whereupon the thirsty one said: “Weel, I notice ye're a fine dribbler; but ye're nae guid at passing.”
Sally: “Isn't Nora Newrich very ignorant?”
“Gerty: “Her ignorance is simply appalling. Why, when the waiter at the restaurant asked her which dessert she liked the best she replied, ‘The Sahara’.”
Gentleman: “Would you mind not talking, madam. I cannot hear a a word.
Lady: “Well educated people do not need to hear. They know ‘Rigoletto’ by heart.”
(
Courtesy, “Railway Gazette.”)
From Hippo to Huet.
Sam Simpson worked hard. All day long he carried heavy iron baulks and girders. Toward evening he said to the foreman, who was a notorious slave-driver:
“Boss, you am suah got me down on dat pay-roll, yeh?”
The foreman glanced at his list.
“Yes,” he said, “here you are, Sam Simpson. That's right, isn't it?”
“Yaas, boss, but Ah thought mebbe yuh had got me down here as Samson.”
Some tourists at an hotel in a small Italian town were looking through the menu when a polite waiter came to their assistance.
“The ham is not, and the chicken never was,” he explained, “so will you have your eggs tight or loose?”
* * *
An American visitor was standing on the platform when the Royal Scot rushed through.
“Do you call that an express?” he drawled to the porter.
“Bless you, no, sir!” replied the porter. “That's Bill doin' a bit o' shuntin'. He'll be back in a minute.”
* * *
Lady Pupil (after smash up): “Do I need much more before I am able to drive?”
Dejected Instructor: “About a dozen more.”
Lady Pupil: “Lessons?”
Dejected Instructor: “No, cars.”
* * *
Professor: “John, name a collective noun.”
John: “A vacuum cleaner.”
* * *
There is always a tie between a father and son, says a Rotarian speaker, and if there is, you can wager the son is wearing it.
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Judge: “How did you beat the witness in this frightful manner?”
Accused: “Come outside and I will show you!”
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“Yes, I know fish is brain food, but I don't care so much for fish. Isn't there some other brain food?”
“Well, there's noodle soup.”
Specially Written for “N.Z. Railways Magazine,” byW. F. .)
Ingram
Bronco Nagurski, world champion wrestler, is to wrestle in Australia this season and, at the time of writing, the Dominion of New Zealand Wrestling Union had almost completed arrangements to secure the presence of the champion to defend his title in New Zealand. Not since wrestling has graduated to a major sport has New Zealand had the opportunity of staging a world championship bout. The last occasion when a heavyweight wrestling championship was decided in New Zealand was when Ike Robin wrestled Stanislaus Zybszko at Auckland, the bout being interrupted by the clock. It had gone on for many weary hours and when midnight Saturday chimed and Sunday commenced the match had to cease.
Under the rounds' system of wrestling the match will not exceed 90 minutes in duration and the go-slow tactics are avoided. If plans mature Nagurski will have one match, with the title at stake, and the Wrestling Union has decided that his opponent shall be chosen from among the men at present wrestling in New Zealand — the wrestler with the best competitive record from August 10th to be given the match against the champion.
The venue of the proposed match has not yet been decided, but indications are that the big contest will be staged at Auckland and the Railways Department will be asked to provide special trains to cater for the influx of visitors.
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Although New Zealanders have every reason to be proud of the performances of the All Black Rugby team in Australia, we should not overlook the fact that many of the stars on the tour were playing against South Africa last season and did not scintillate when opposed by strong opposition; that
Nothing succeeds like success, and now that New Zealand Rugby is definitely in public favour once more after slumping when the South Africans taught us how to play the fundamentals of Rugby, it is to be hoped that selectors, throughout New Zealand, will give youth its chances in coming representative matches and so build up a team which will fittingly represent New Zealand in South Africa. The time to start team-building is now—not next season.
Of special importance in the tour of Australia is the fine play of the half-back, Saxton, who has assimilated the dive-pass introduced into New Zealand by Danie Craven. Although many competent critics in the Dominion do not agree with this method of play, the leading critics in England have become converted. They argue that the number of times a half-back is able to rejoin in a passing movement is so small that the added advantage to be gained by dive-passing is worth more to the side than the remote possibility of the half-back coming in to take a further part in passing movements.
It is also of more than passing interest to note that once again a member of the famous 1905 All Black team has been responsible for moulding the touring team into a formidable combination. On two previous occasions Billy Wallace went to Australia with New Zealand representative teams, and, from raw material, produced team-players of high class. On this occasion Alec McDonald, a forward in the 1905 team, was appointed co-manager, and players and Press alike join in giving the veteran player credit for his improvement in the standard of play. When the team is selected to tour South Africa the New Zealand Rugby Union might remember the success attained by Messrs. Wallace and McDonald, and include another 1905 All Black as co-manager of the team!
No longer is the parlour game called “ping pong”! Table-tennis has arrived! Due in a large measure to the classy exhibitions given by the Hungarian table-tennis stars, Kelen and Szabados, in New Zealand last year, New Zealanders were prepared for brilliant exhibitions of the indoor game by Barna and Bellak this season. However, they did not reckon on seeing two of the world's best players at their best. In all of the matches in New Zealand Barna, five times world champion, and Bellak, American champion, played before large crowds, and simply amazed the spectators by the ball control and foot-work shown.
Barna, on being asked why Hungarians lead the world in table-tennis, stated that it was merely a passing phase, that other countries were now producing top-flight players and Hungary's supremacy was fading. He also expressed the view that H. Boniface, the young Wellington player, would climb to world class if given the opportunity of regular play against star men. Playing in New Zealand, he declared, would not elevate any player to the best class, but should Boniface be given the opportunity of travelling he thought the Wellington boy would soon be holding his own in world championships.
Vincent Lopez, the Mexican wrestler, who is recognised as one of the keenest big game hunters in the world,
The decision of the Japanese Olympic Committee to relinquish the XIIth Olympic Games has materially altered the plans of New Zealand sporting organisations. With the Games scheduled for Tokyo, it was hoped that New Zealand would be represented in hockey as well as other branches of sport, but the added expense of sending teams to Finland will mean the abandonment of these plans. However, New Zealand will be represented, although the team is likely to be a small one unless some sensational performances are returned during the next summer season.
Track and field sport will soon be commencing and Mr. A. L. Fitch, the American athletics coach under engage
In referring to track and field sport, I would take this opportunity of drawing attention to an athletic book recently written by Captain F. A. M. Webster, the world-renowned athletics coach. This book, “Coaching and Care of Athletes,” is the latest and most comprehensive track and field publication. In its 448 pages it covers all the technique of the various events, diet, coaching education, coaching organisation and routine, training schedules, and a treatise on the English School of Athletics. At this school schoolboys have been taught to high jump over 6ft., to broad jump to 23ft, and to excel in other events. Although this book is not yet procurable in New Zealand, I feel sure that it is of value to clubs as well as individuals, and I would be pleased to give interested persons more complete particulars on receipt of inquiries.
Although the New Zealand Boxing Council has recently been compelled to take disciplinary action against certain boxers, the glove sport is continuing to flourish in the Dominion, and more matches are now being held weekly than formerly were staged monthly. So far there has been no outstanding New Zealand boxer emerge from the revival, but the number of novo-professionals indicate that the class is of a universally good standard. The Wellington Boxing Association, it is understood, is considering the idea of staging open-air bouts during the summer months.
Earl McCready, the popular Canadian wrestler, who put up an amazing record in New Zealand, is doing well in his mission of introducing scientific wrestling in England. Lord Brentford, son of Sir Joynton Hicks, formerly prominent in British political circles, is likely to be chairman of the British Board of Wrestling Control, which is being formed as the result of McCready's visit. Formerly, wrestling in England has been of a burlesque type and the sport had been brought into disfavour, but McCready, with his undoubted ability and sterling sportsmanship, has convinced the English people that real wrestling is a sport to be encouraged. McCready has the support of the English Amateur Wrestling Association as well as other leading sports organisations, and although he has expressed a desire to return to his friends in New Zealand, it is anticipated that he will have a long and prosperous sojourn in the Old Land.
The following interesting comments upon Mr. W. F. Ingram's article, entitled Ski-ing in New Zealand, which appeared in our August issue, are made by Mr. A. Singleton in a recent letter to the Editor:—
“Mr. Ingram mentions: ‘Incidentally it is not generally known that skis were first used in New Zealand in 1893—and then for the first time in the world.’
“As I represent here Sportarticles Ltd., Finland, official athletic goods suppliers to the Olympic Games since 1920, I was very interested but surprised that the Alpine Ski should have originated in New Zealand and immediately made investigations. Although the ski was in Finland an object of reverence, and proficiency in ski-ing a condition of existence, strangely enough real mountainous cross-country ski-ing was developed only after the Olympic Games—yet the actual idea of ski-ing was invented by the Finns. Most people do not know that the ski is a development of the Siberian and North American snowshoe. It does really seem that New Zealand invented the first alpine-ski, that is the cross-country ski.
“The first ski-ing contests were organised as recently as 1886 only after hundreds of years of usage of skis. Yet within three years an annual competition was arranged and this has continued ever since.
“At the end of last century the Finns and Swedes were busy entertaining each other at International Sports and the Finns were unbeatable—only when the contests were held over flat terrain. Things have changed considerably since then, for this year at the World's International Contests, Finland won its share of prizes.
“I think it would interest your readers if I mentioned the following point as showing with what care the Finns prepare for their contests and how far
“The Finns believe that in a few years with a planned indoor athletic campaign they will soon be in the forefront in competitions such as swimming, boxing, etc., this indoor branch has been neglected, due to the lack of stadiums.
“I hope that the above will be of sufficient interest to publish, and I also hope that the page ‘Panorama of the Playground’ will continue for many years.”
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It has recently been our experience to observe, from a comfortable seat in a fast train, the interminable procession of small cars, winding like a mechanical caterpillar slowly along a main road towards the metropolis, and it was borne upon us that the possession of a car in these times of traffic congestion is surely a doubtful advantage, at least, where there are rail or bus facilities. The car owner enjoys, it is true, besides the pride of possession, a greater choice of time, of route, and of destination, but the sphere of his boasted liberty of movement becomes more limited nowadays as his responsibilities increase. Naturally, we are prejudiced in favour of travel by rail, but from any point of view it seems to us that the pleasures and advantages of the small car are more than outweighed by the cares and responsibilities of ownership and the difficulties and discomfort of driving on our roads as they are at present. It may be that the car owner tends to become a slave to his hobby, but if owning a car means taking one's place in a procession, in an atmosphere of exhaust gases, with a deadening concentration on the road ahead and an ever-present sense of strain and responsibility, we can only say again that we prefer the train.—From the “Railway Gazette,” July, 1938.
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The following are some additional “howlers” collected by a member of the Department's technical staff concerned with the marking of apprentice examination papers.
“The safe edge of a file means the lines run both ways.”
“An articulated locomotive is one that has an element in the boiler to superheat the steam.”
“An articulated locomotive has two cylinders in the cab and drives itself along and also drives a winch for pile driving.”
“The oil fired furnace is perhaps the best of all as it requires no stroking.”
“Make sure the cab is clear of all the mountains on the face plate of the boiler.”
“Latent heat is the heat required to keep the water boiling without evapouring it.”
“The vernier is a instrument much more accurate than a microscope.”
“Saturated steam is just ordinary steam driving straight to the piston and the superheated steam is compressed and used when needed.”
“Saturated steam is steam immediately above the water and is very ready to condense to water again and is therefore no good for cooking purposes.”