Publicly accessible
URL: http://www.nzetc.org/collections.html
copyright 2006, by Victoria University of Wellington
All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
Some keywords in the header are a local Electronic Text Centre scheme to aid in establishing analytical groupings.
IN a glass dish on the little office table were some wheat ears which to me looked uninteresting and decrepit. Nevertheless he had to arise, go forth into the outer office, and have a ten minutes' heart to heart talk with their owner.
When he came back, “It's like that,” he said dejectedly, “all day long. Have a cigarette. You can roll your own, I suppose? Those things,” with a bitter glance at the wheat ears, “were raised from seed that came out of some Egyptian tomb or other, about 3,000 years ago. He's germinated them. Now he wants to know if it's any use growing them in New Zealand—you know, on a serious profit-making basis. No money, no fun. Yes, that's what it's like, and all day.”
It is like that all day, in New Zealand journalism. In most of the grimy little second, third or fourth storey newspaper offices (no decent journalist was ever yet in on the ground floor about anything), life becomes a matter of routine work and of suffering fools sadly.
You'd think that these little offices would at least be obscure. They are not. All the wrong people know them off by heart. They are frequented by religious maniacs, women who state that they have been drugged on respectable racecourses and want a lot of publicity about it, more women who know the inside facts of murder trials and the most unprintable vital statistics.
There are also people who want you to believe like grim death (and in capital letters), all about a new faith-healer, bookies who won't be content to tell the tale once and leave it at that. Returned soldiers come up and offer lady writers bootlaces— brown ones at that. There's usually a sale, because there was once a war. I have sat by, suppressing mirth even as the Dormouse was suppressed at the Alice in Wonderland tea-party, whilst a powerfully-built woman with a chin that wouldn't take “No” for an answer made a determined effort to sell my editor dainty articles of underwear. (If there is a door between editorial sanctum and aide-de-camp's dugout, it either won't shut or doesn't fit).
There is also the telephone, and about this I would write with some feeling. It hits the women writers hardest and oftenest, and is used mainly by Wrong Numbers or by women whose names have been spelled incorrectly in, or left out of, the social columns.
I think journalism was begotten in sin, anyhow. If not, to judge by modern New Zealand newspapers, there's not a thing in circumstantial evidence.
'Way back in the time when we were discussing 3,000 year old wheat ears, the patient farming journal editor was trying to explain that journalism in New Zealand is changing. Before our eyes…
First we had America, then we had the depression. We could have stood either, but not both. And the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, such of it as is not already broke, has taken to crooning “For ever to have and to hold” over its money. There is what I call an extremely vulgar interest now taken in figures—outside the fashion page.
There used to be song-and-dance men on the stage. If you didn't like them, you threw tomatoes or raspberries at them. Otherwise.… you rather loved them. I don't know if you remember, but
Auckland Sun out —— and some sunset! Down in Christchurch, the first N.Z. Sun newspaper, to my mind the most likeable daily in the Dominion, cuts down on its contributors, and gets busy paying for its promising little brother's funeral expenses.
Christchurch Weekly Press out. …. with it, personal and vain-glorious memory of my first short story cheerfully featured on the paper's billboards. Green poster, black lettering —— and they were man-sized letters, too.
Read “The Seagull and the Wren,” by
“They said,” explained another Christchurch editor to me, “that it was a damned shame to pay 30/- for that story. So they put it on the boards.”
I'd have spent an extra couple of guineas, in fact probably they'd have been spent long before the cheque ever arrived, but there you are: black letters on a green board, sempiternal.
Otago Daily Witness, where for so long a while old Paul dug his toes into the trenches, and put up a stout fight after leaving the Labour cause: Aussie, where the Diggers used to read bits about one another: and more. Not only in New Zealand, of course. Years ago, the light that was the Triad flickered and failed when
One may find the new journalistic breakfast foods, syndicated “tripe” features run cheap from America, a bit glutinous and pre-digested. But the song-and-dance men are gone from the stage, and the men who could simply write are gone, most of them, from journalism. Sic transit. Still, we shall speak a little of what was, for much of it deserves remembrance.
it was ages and ages ago, in war days, as a matter of fact. They were publishing in England gift books, a Queen Mary's one, her Majesty very sumptuous in coronation robes of sapphire velvet on the frontispiece, a King Albert one, because everybody loved the late King of the Belgians, and the Blinded Soldiers' and Sailors' one, which was mine. I remember sitting curled up in front of a fire whose small black soot-demons flew like gnats from a dark-gulleted chimney, reading a story about a little boy who was, oddly enough, called Booley. He kept wanting the most unlikely things: first some red currant jam, then a king's crown, then a beautiful smiling waxen lady in a glass case, a lady with very golden curls and the softest smile in the world. Someone, an officious guardian-angel sort of person, eventually turned up with a little package labelled “Keys for Booley.” When he opened the cupboard where the red currant jam was, it didn't taste at all well, as it had been locked up a few centuries too long. And the King's crown (he had the key to that also) was too heavy, and when he opened the case where the waxen lady was, she still lay there, but she had stopped smiling. Then the guardian-angel person relented and came back with a last little key, and this was labelled, “the key to the Garden Where You Are Merely In Life.” Booley opened the garden door, and there was everything,
It's a rather odd thing, but journalism — or writing, if as nine out of ten young New Zealanders do, you enter the newspaper world hoping more to make a name for yourself than simply to be a £10 a week peg in a £4 a week hole—is exactly like that.
The things you want most to do, the things that look like triumph from afar off, you are given keys to: and in retrospect, you are more or less disappointed with them all. Then you're given the last key, I daresay it's imagination alloyed with a sense of humour, and you find, in the least likely places, at least a glimpse of everything you ever wanted.
Newspaper office — that should be like
Actually — you're high up, far above the grey streets and their mists and their little silver arrows of rain. Sometimes you haven't any window at all, because the favourite thing, in most newspaper offices, is to divide all spare floor-space up into rabbit hutches with compartments just a little sounder than cardboard. If you have a window, it's a tiny one. If you have a radiator, its cord is too short and you can only warm the most distant sectors of your limbs. If you have a telephone, somebody downstairs, usually a printer or a manager, is cursing fluently on the wire whenever you most wish to use it.
In the file room, where papers of the early days
In one such office, the walls are covered with the photographs, mostly very faded, of hundreds and hundreds of "oldtimers." They wear beards and whiskers, have been read for anything up to fifty years' time—and how they watch you, from the walls! Perched on a high cupboard is a skull. It was the extremely personal belonging of a Bohemian artist sort of fellow, whose death and subsequent bestowal were apparently a bit irregular.
Somebody says "Come along out and have a cup of tea." In Wellington there's one little all-night restaurant, Clewer's, where tea and toast seemed to have become a sort of journalistic habit. Auckland has a "literary corner" in a small teashop, too. Almost impossible to describe — the warmth and friendliness and the talking of "shop," none but the dull avoid the talking of "shop"—which goes on at such corners. More than anything, it's like the sudden lighting up of a darkened stage in a pantomime. All the little harlequin figures begin to move in a light that is warmth as well just illumination.
Your "beautiful wax lady": perhaps, if you're both feminine and unsophisticated (even since the war I have met some very young New Zealanders
And yet: there's an old house of wood, white-painted, shaded rather darkly with trees. Floppy-eared cocker spaniels, most sociable and wise and funny of all dogdom, accept their place in the sun here as a matter of course.… In a tree by a little dark pool sits a morepork, blinking at you out of cynical amber eyes. There are real cedars of Lebanon, sad-coloured, low-growing trees, and there's a tiny fountain. That is all—except such a charm and such a grace that it's like an indwelling spirit in this old house.
Another old house, a country one this time. Through the cool glades of its grounds you catch glimpses of arum lilies, cream-petalled, and the light makes great golden shafts among the pine trees. Yellow banksia roses tumble over the shabby white-painted walls, which could quite well do with another coat of paint (only they're much nicer as they are.) The banksia roses curtain into darkness the low verandah where people are chatting together. Suddenly there's a vividness in the air, and round the corner into clear sunshine comes the horses and their riders, the girls astride mostly, tweed-habited, a bright glimpse of hunting pink as the huntsman passes, a laughing confusion, the note of a horn, youth that is somehow very beautiful.
How slight they are, the notes of music, colour-tones of youth and deeper, softer tones of hospitality and grace. And how odd it is that not so much the frost-blackened nights and sullen grey mornings of
That is the garden where you are merely in Life.
Everything delicately lovely surrounded her. There was a tiny Venetian flower-boat in porcelain, an etching of a boy with his impish face puckered up into a whistle.
“There was too much poetry written in that Form,” said she firmly; “I believe, my dear, they used to read ‘Poems of To-day,’ go out and contemplate for a bit—and lo, forthwith another poem.”
It used to be her Form, as far as literature, alleged literature and literary attempts were concerned. And it was at Wellington Girls' College, where we all liked her—and I think that on this especial point she was wrong.
What is it gets into the blood and dreams of youth, singles one out here and there, shoves obvious incompatibles into a group, says, “Create, or be damned?” Of course, you probably are, anyhow, in the long run, but you don't know that for the time being, and perhaps you, or somebody else, may create something worth while. I suppose that usually, with women, it's best done via matrimony. But there were some, a group of malcontents if you like, who couldn't be content to leave well alone the scornful crystal moons, the bluegums straight as masts on the Wellington hills. They wanted to write. A similar group might have been found among our predecessors, the girls whose feet had hollowed out the College stairway, a wooden one, into little grooves, as the stone stairs in the caves of Kor were hollowed out by the tiny passing feet of Rider Haggard's “She.”
In Auckland, there's the same restless ill-worded wish among the 1934 youngsters. Well, anyhow, if it does little else, it provides the Funny Men who criticise the works of “budding writers” with a jolly good Aunt Sally. … . and one impotent when it comes to hitting back.
Free Lance office, Panama Street, Wellington. There reigned old Mr. Geddis. Probably there'll be a long line after him, but none will ever have more impressive editorial eyebrows. First poem printed, something about Poppy Day. But it was the dickens of a while since Poppy Day, no cheque had arrived. Beard the lion in his den, then……
There was something majestic about that editorial retort (quite kindly though; editors always are quite kindly to kids with pigtails down their backs, who come in and want to know why they haven't been paid for their work).
“But that was for a patriotic object. We didn't think you'd want money for that.”
I went out feeling like an interesting zoological sort of cross between Judas Iscariot and a worm. On request, would have executed a fleshy wriggle on the office floor. I never thought of asking him whether he gave away Free Lances, really dinkum free, or advertising space, when a patriotic object was in view.
About that time I read
There was much fun, though, in just trying to write. There is for everyone. Over in Australia, the Bulletin and the Triad shone stately, like Aldebaran and Neptune in our sky. (The literary sky's eyes must twinkle, rather, to watch the immense earnestness of beginners.) The Bulletin said “Promising,” twice it did. The Triad said “Shows signs of unusual promise,” which is, I suppose, the sort of thing you might say about a new kind of tomato, but I cut it out and kept it.
On second thoughts, the Triad certainly did best to lock it in the old oak chest. Meanwhile a contributor to the Dominion, I think it was
I heard a story about him that I liked very well. It happened (men say) when he was on one New Zealand paper, the editor of which everybody hated in the extreme. After listening to much blackguarding of this gentleman's ways and works, “I say, look here,” said the then youthful Mr. Baume thoughtfully, “this man is an editor, isn't he?”
It was agreed that such was the hideous state of affairs. “Then,” said Mr. Baume, with the air of one who doesn't let trifles stop him, “if he wanted me to kiss his foot, I'd do it.”
In the 1922 days stuff you remembered was going into Triad pages, some haunting poems, prose that had an edge like a scimitar. A man called Baeyertz was running the show. He was rather excitingly rude to almost everyone. You'll remember that the Triad described the singing voice of a gentleman of the Fuller clan as a “pig's whistle.” Said gentleman, possibly acting on the principle, “I don't care what you may say about me so long as you mention my name,” sang scales in court to prove Baeyertz a liar, but lost his libel action.
The mana of the Bulletin was great, and had its awkward moments for its many imitators over here in New Zealand. For example, I know of one New Zealand periodical which does its honest best, in the sweat of its photographers' brows, to cut something of a social dash. The Bulletin boasted —still boasts — social columns of the racy ilk. “Copy that style,” was the edict passed around among the New Zealand periodical's city social contributors. Down in Christchurch was a little lady who could write herself, anyhow, and who didn't much like being invited to copy the style of some other person. She's the only person I know of who ever definitely out-Bulletined “Bulletinese.” She sent one bride to the altar “neatly parcelled in white
The Bulletin was the first journal that ever paid me a cheque; I mean a cheque one could flourish, a cheque for a guinea, for a poem. May its substance never grow less. The poem was called “Pierrette,” which, of course, in those days nearly all first poems submitted to the Bulletin were christened. Now-adays I understand it's the fashion to call your efforts “Pink-Fronted Omnibus,” or something like that, but it's the same thing under a new if dingier label.
There's a lovable touch in some of the magazines put forth… . . and at what trouble, only the editors and staunch contributors know… . . by Colleges and Universities in New Zealand. Once on a day, some old wartime copies of the Canterbury College magazine came into my hands. It's sometimes asked if that lost generation, the wheatfield scythed so swiftly and strangely, was really the knightly thing that it has become in the minds of old men who limp along in Anzac Day processions.
Your answer's in magazines like that. There was such a bravery and generosity as only youth triumphant could show. Some of the contributions were odd little scraps of verse, or rather humourous letters. The stuff didn't get into anthologies or imagist collections, I suppose even such of the writers as survived have more or less forgotten it now. But it was touched with gold.
Wellington is a place that everyone passing through or staying in for a couple of days hates like henbane. It's so wind-tossed. And if you stay much longer, you get to love it. It's so wind-tossed.
Fitzherbert Terrace, the one street where huge dark pines used to grow in an untidy, fatherly-looking row, was the street associated with
Among New Zealand writers themselves, there is too often a ridiculous prejudice against the solitary voyager—and, curiously enough, man rather than woman is the chief offender, damning, or, to be more accurate, attempting to damn with faint praise, tepid civilities, depreciation. Though there is a certain drawing-room politeness preserved towards the dead, it does not go very far.
There's no need to write everything about those who want to write in a past tense. They still do. Among the Auckland University College students, two lads in the sweat of their brow and with their own printing-press, brought out The Phoenix, a quarterly now defunct; and brought it out pretty well, even if, in its first issue, Mr. D'Arcy Cresswell, author of “Poet's Progress,” did choose to sound so infernally ladylike about what New Zealand “culture” (Gott mitt uns) should be. It was a magazine of good printing—and how that counts!— some good prose, politics which certainly made you feel that wisdom doesn't always come out of the
Canterbury College, with its crimson-covered and hastily-suppressed little Oriflamme, printed in 1933 by a very small student conclave who later learned a bit about iron hands and velvet gloves, also provided some entertainment. I had one of the original copies. There was nothing whatever sensational in it, unless you count an advocacy of Free Love and extenuation of sexual diversions by one student. I thought his article was a little old-fashioned.
Just “wanting to write” usually ends, if your parents are well-to-do, in a head-and-shoulders photograph of you in the Free Lance, with a caption underneath like this:
“Miss Barbara Wuffles, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. T. Wuffles, ‘The Kennels,’ Dogsdale, who has gone to England to further her studies in music, for which she has a decided talent.”
I mean, by the time you're twenty or there-abouts, you become so ashamed of your heretofore literary aspirations that you'd as soon as not have a nervous breakdown should they be mentioned, so your parents vamp up another talent for you and pack you off Home.
If you're poor, you probably marry someone or get a job in a shop.
But there is a lady named Luck, a most capricious wench. So there was also a job, when I was sixteen years old, in the Dominion newspaper office, not the astonishing new building, the old disreputable one off Lambton Quay……
For a while, when the “minnie golf course” was all the rage and you couldn't step into a public building without treading on a “minnie,” there was one in the top floor of this old building. (This, of course, after its newspaper days were done.) It was tall and narrow, and the editorial staff roosted like corbies on the second floor. For a while I had what
But soon I was transferred to the “morgue.” The “morgue” sounds worse, but if you're at all sentimental and frequent newspaper offices you love it. It is very cold, usually fireproof and with a heavy safe door like a bank vault's, no windows of any kind whatsoever, and all around you, on shelves, are the huge leather-bound volumes of old newspaper files. The Dominion had an imposing morgue. Files, not only of its own publications, but of overseas papers with the queerest and quaintest old gaillard advertisements, went right back into the past, into days of gallantry and esprit. Just such advertisements must my beloved and erratic
Which reminds me: the most interesting of all Dominion files were those dating back to the days when “Bill” Massey was in Opposition. Being in Opposition may be bad for the little white soul and for the pocket, but it does wonders for the literary style…… a truth which never seemed to get home during the Dominion's later, larger-building days. Already the old “fighting files” were changing from black and white to the ivory colour that speaks of a page past and done with.
I liked the 'wayback articles signed “C.J.M.” every bit as much as the most highly-paid overseas “whimsicalities”: in fact, more, they were more human, not self-satisfied or standardised.
C.J.M. — otherwise
The Dominion ran a little rural journal, the Farmers' Advocate. I was its “Aunt Mary” and christened chickens, cows, children, on a page for the young idea. May God and the said chickens, cows and children forgive me, sooner or later. Doing that and doing more things, mostly scissors and paste, for the Dominion, meant the weekly payment of 30/- a week, which looked princely. The hours of the Dominion were long, as they always are on a morning paper, whose great presses are throbbing away, like a heart that won't stop, at about 3 a.m. Then your papers are passed put, under chilly sky and moon, to the lorries. But in these early days, I certainly wasn't “requisite and necessary” at any such hour. Later on, there were all-night sittings in the women's press gallery… but that's later on.
There was a daily column for upwards of 20 years under the initials “T.D.H.” Tom, Dick and Harry, that stood for. As a matter of fact, the writer, a quiet sort with eyebrows which refused to lie down and a stoutly-built person, was the Mr. Field who wrote “The Truth About the Slump.” Depending on which side you take, you agree that this is the worst or the best explanation of the depression yet supplied by New Zealand letters. Mr. Field has taken the depression very seriously, and the extraordinary thing is that somebody doesn't rope him in for Parliament. But in those days, I remember him as a man whose funnyisms (his column was supposed to be “light”) were practically always funny, and the wee scraps of verse with which he concluded his day's toil were never wrong. God wot, his erstwhile column is not so to-day.
Prime Minister “Bill” Massey, his last election successfully carried, lay a-dying. I was too busy christening chickens to know the difference between Reform and Liberal — or even the astonishing latterday corollary, that there's no difference at all, both are in the soup together.
Truth published a cartoon of Massey's face, I remember, a fat morning-sun face, all beaming. “The Survival of the Fattest.”
It was printed somewhere or other that he was asked “Whom do you think will be Prime Minister?” And he whispered, “That fellow in the next room there.” The fellow in the next room was, of course, Mr. Coates. But perhaps the tale was only put around slightly to reduce the frightful and unfair handicap under which he started…… the fact that the public had got it into their heads
All the world saw Massey borne past through
I remember the election night when Coates went out of power. In front of the Dominion buildings, where the failure of something that had been the paper's very life and reason for living was placarded, item by inexorable item, the crowd roared. It wasn't a sporting crowd. It gave no audience to men defeated. All its own speech was the ancient “Vae Victis.”
A member of the Dominion staff: “Well, we thought everyone was listening to the Thunderer. 'Pears nobody was.” After which some of us went out and had a party, or would you call it a wake?
To the last day of his active editorship,
It is a pity they ever had a minnie golf course in the old—and not half so impressive—Dominion building.
When you're in Wellington, and darkness and the mists have settled down comfortably for another evening, it is quite possible that you will be fascinated by the lights. Auckland glares more… hard red and blue of Neon, a bit like Hell… Christchurch is properly dim and religious, Dunedin is gloomy, but in Wellington the lights in the harbour water whisper “Venice” to you, and you just hold your breath. It's the only place where I ever saw a 'bus completely surrounded by thousands of floating bubbles of opal. Mist effect, seen through a frosted window. Round Oriental Bay, water lapping up black by the Parade, seagulls screaming like untamed shrews among the little half-seen boats rocking at anchor, the lights, fat mellow golden ones, are arranged in threesomes. They remind me of Alfred Noyes' bacchanal fruits… “Grapes like melons—nay, clustering suns.…”
Mast-high beneath the deep-cleft shadow of the Tinakori Hills, and above
It tells you a lot of things. If relief works, unemployment, folly of laws, have crept like an ague into your bones, you probably curse the three lights, going by. If you're a fat person in a fatter motor car, you wonder how much longer they'll be able to stick it out. New Zealand politics seem, at the moment, to be acting on different types either as an
But the House itself, dating back to old days, when either muddles weren't so bad or we, being completely without education instead of half-educated, thought more of our chances of getting past them, has an interest deeper than the animosities of the moment. In some ways, it's as old as Magna Carta. Looked at from a strictly Colonial viewpoint, its history begins with the days when Auckland papers contemptuously wanted to know why the Capital and seat of Parliament should be placed in “a contemptible little fishing-village.”
Once Government House occupied part of the large and sprawling territory now covered by the Parliamentary Buildings. There is one great bare-looking room which was once on a day lustrous with the light of chandeliers, and crinolines spread there petal-wise, as the debutantes danced with the handsomely-uniformed blades of two generations ago.
You can see the sharp transition in period as you pass from one part to another of the House. Left (underneath the reared mast that displays the three little lights of Session) are such rambling obscure territories as the Law Drafting Department; sly little stairways lead you up to official rooms. There's a shadow of the old-time gay hospitality there still, the all-white reception room, in which Ministers' wives hold their official tea-drinking Marathons. There too is Bellamy's, which was forbidden territory to every petticoat whatsoever until Mrs.
However, Elizabeth being elected, they took the “No Women Permitted” notice down. History made all over again.…
The centre of the Parliamentary Buildings is where all the talk and all the legislative fun goes on. It is a rather fine structure—white marble, simple and stately in construction, as beheld from without, within beautifully polished, the grey streaks and markings of New Zealand marble showing like clouds and seas in the fitted blocks. Granite columns, gilt-topped, for the “Lords”: polished wooden shields, engraved with the names of the engagements in which New Zealand forces took part during the war, looking down on the red-carpeted floor of the Lower House.
The right wing is old, stair-wayed, lined with the many faded, scowling, bewhiskered portraits of Members long dead and gone. Upstairs the library: a little hall in which captured flags, torn and fading, show their black eagles against once blood-red fabric: the little glass case and Massey's Treaty of Versailles pen: the section of the library which is for M's.P. only, and through the mazes of which you proceed by the queerest little curling staircases of galvanised iron… down, down down.
There's another such curling iron ladder to the roof of the Parliamentary Buildings. Members go up to “take a breather” and watch the stars from a properly respectful distance. Their friends aren't supposed to, but do. They are summoned back to
“The doors are locked.”
All so solemn, but you get to like it. There has been more than one suicide from the roof of the Parliamentary Buildings, by the way. Also more than one little fire in the maze of old corridors below… . . rather timid little fires, but incendiarism dimly suspected during the past tempestuous three years.
An elderly Government Whip, returning from Australia, where he had been part of a British Empire delegation, once said to me that he was sorry for the Members who grew old and were thrown out. Inevitable, of course… . but their lives got so utterly bound up in caucus, in a ringing of division bells, in absurd solemnities.
“I dreamed that I dwelt in marble halls,” he quoted, and laughed rather sadly.
He was thrown out himself next election, with the general Coates debacle. Nor has he returned to his marble halls. He used to look very solemn and portentous, though, leading the Government flock over the red sea of carpet to the lobby, where the “Noes” — being in overwhelming majority — so invariably “had it.”
The press gallery proper is rather comfortable, equipped with swing chairs, special telephones, a decent view of the House. The women's press gallery (so-called) is a damnably uncomfortable and narrow little bench in front of a public gallery to which all women are admitted—overflow from the main ladies' galler—and in which a consistent hiss of chatter is kept up as you strive to get the sense (if any) of what is being said down in the chamber below. If you want to know for certain that you belong to an inferior, yes, a most inferior sex, spend an all-night sitting cramped in the women's press
Members of Parliament are the most awful liars. That is well known, but they are even more awful liars than you would expect. I was eighteen when I went to the women's press gallery first. Only the circumspection of a ware and wily sub-editor saved the Dominion from a plain statement in its next morning's columns that prior to the Opening of the House, a thorough search was made in the cellars, this custom having been brought out with the sailing-ships, a relic of Parliamentary procedure since the Gunpowder Plot.
Well, it was so convincingly told. There's a living for any M.P. who survives two elections as a confidence man, should the third election catch him napping. However, few actually do take to this. They still go on in optimism about “come-backs,” like boxers.
All the same, politics and their interpreters become of almost dramatic interest, like white mice in a schoolboy's locker, where would the fun of life be without them?
And there's a lot of kindliness in the House. I remember, there was one reporter in the women's press gallery who walked on crutches. One night, after the House had risen and the little group of Members was beginning to drift away, a voice hailed her from below: “Miss Novitia; Miss Novitia.”
She waited, and presently a message was sent around to say that on occasions when she had to stay late at the House, a car and chauffeur were at her service.
The voice belonged to the then Prime Minister,
There's a little tearoom in the left wing. It's distinguished mainly by the fact that its waitresses seem to have been there always, are invariably smiling and courteous. A notice says it's intended strictly for the wives and families of M's.P.—if such is the case in actual fact, it's odd to think how many bigamists we've elected to Parliament, and how astonishingly prolific they have all proved.
That's where you are taken to tea.
Early days in the little cramped gallery, I remember a very pleasant woman who leaned over from a gallery alongside. (By the way, segregation of the sexes is rigorously carried out in all galleries, even the Lords, poor old dears, sit alone in masculine solemnity in their own little niche. For interjecting from a gallery you are merely thrown out. A second offence disqualifies you for good.)
“Come along to tea,” said the very pleasant lady. Right willingly I followed her: but was alarmed when she sought to enter the door of the above-mentioned little tearoom. I warned her that only the elite and elected might take their womenfolk there. She laughed.
“That's all right,” she said. And the waitress called her “Lady Parr.” She is dead now, after so long and so quietly-borne an illness. I don't think I have ever heard that she was unkindly to anyone.
Sir James Parr, who hates his own first name (“Christopher”) likes to think that the great New Zealand public think of him as “Jimmie,” which they don't (he is too intelligent to be popular), was Minister of Education then. He has replaced “Tommy” Wilford as High Commissioner,
I saw him last in the lavender-carpeted offices allotted to the Leader of the Upper House. He tried to stress the importance of the “Lords,” but so many a time in old days, just for a rest, I'd gone round to the gallery of their granite-columned abode and watched ancient gentlemen with beards, incredibly aged gentlemen who even displayed the remains of whiskers, asleep in their high, red-plush armchairs. Sir James was one of the few New Zealand parliamentarians to go in, well and truly, for radio talking. He had brought back with him, after his first reign as High Commissioner in England, a very great deal that he wanted to say. He wasn't encouraged to say it. Everyone knows, of course, that round about Auckland, a by-election cropping up rather opportunely, he was urged by many optimists to stand in the interests of a new party.…
The years put a period to enthusiasm about mushrooms.
The Upper House has its one great day, of course: the Opening of Parliament. Black Rod, blue-lapelled ushers, clank of swords, the flamingo-coloured plumes of military headgear, the Governor-General entering in state, Her Excellency smiling and be-flowered, in company with the little knot of distinguished guests “on the floor of the House,” as it's rather quaintly expressed. The red carpets laid down in the House cost £7,000.
It's nicer to watch, up in the gallery, the strange resurrection of old bonnets, old ostrich plumes, old lace, which existed long, long before the deluge of modernity. Just for the one afternoon of long-winded speeches and rather childish picturesquerie it comes back.
They called Sir Joseph Ward “our only statesman.” He was a shadow when he came back after
Of the shadow, some say “Dulce et decorum est.” Others, that Caesar was ambitious—without having the qualities of a Caesar. However, “the oysters were eaten and put down in the bill.”
Sir Joseph made a rather good speech in the House once after his dramatic “come-back”: earnest, clearly-worded, and he looked better as a shadow than as the heavy-jowled person of old Dominion cartoons: more like the last of the Liberals, and that used to be such a good word. It was associated with the story, I believe a perfectly true one, about “Dick” Seddon and his knee-breeches. The Seddon hatred of dress clothes, still more of “fancy dress,” was notorious. Consequence, he put his most princely garb on so seldom that nobody had ascertained, until immediately before his audience with the Pope in the Vatican, that he had grown considerably too stout for said knee-breeches. He managed to get them on… but his retreat had to be carefully guarded, after the gallant obeisance required of him, the “breeks” having split with a sound of thunder. It was also told, with an air of conviction, that on one occasion, forgetting the stockings necessary for his “fancy dress,” he borrowed a pair from his wife. Both stories are probably fairytales, but rather amusing.
The first time you hear Sir
The most dramatic incident in re Wilford that I can recall as having witnessed in the House was the historic moment when he practically offered the ghastly remains of the old Liberal party, “Lock, stock and barrel,” to Coates triumphans. A very sick man was Wilford at the time, it was said, but Coates declined to coalesce then.
At the Dominion, a little man with twinkling eyes recalled a somewhat similar incident during “Tommy's” Mayoralty.
“Every time,” said he, rather vulgarly, “that things get really stiff, Thomas does a wilt.”
In the women's press gallery, such as it was, what surprised me was the quite extraordinary interest in the number of illegitimate children one Member was supposed to possess. (“Eight, my dear, not counting those among the Maoris!”) If true, he would cut something of a dash in Soviet Russia, in that if in no other respect.
All-night sitting… . supper adjournment at 10 o'clock, Ministerial benches usually almost empty, Labour benches usually putting up at least a decent show. It's Labour members, of course, who talk at least nine-tenths of the session's shining hours away. The Government emulates Brer Rabbit—lies low and says nuffin'. I have heard the most impassioned oratorial efforts delivered whilst the Minister whose department they directly concerned was out of the House—probably asleep, somewhere. Sometimes, as the hours and the speeches wore on, the comatose didn't bother to leave the House. The late Sir
By the way, though the Labour Party provided at least 90 per cent. of the speeches and almost all the dramatic incidents of the long night watches, one wasn't, in writing flippancies about the House, supposed to mention them, no matter how unkindly. They were to be ignored. I was finally requested, point-blank, to omit all mention of the Labour Party from my daily column. Replied that one might as well ask for a snappy scenario about Adam and Eve leaving out any reference to the Serpent.
The Labour Party, some of it, wasn't so bigoted. I remember one evening of a racking headache, sort of headache that makes you keenly anxious for instant death, headache that makes it utterly impossible to listen to a Parliamentary debate, leave alone writing funnyisms or even truisms about it.… . There was a cup of tea that did cheer a bit, yes. What cheered still more was the fact that, on that night alone in the entire history of the excellent Reform journal for which I worked, every word of the next morning's column was written by a member of the Labour Party. A fair amount of it was a savage onslaught on himself, beginning with mannerisms and ending with mentality. I had to type it out later, but I still think it was one of the best columns that the paper in question has ever displayed.
The House used to be rather happy about its bathrooms, in which, as the night hours grew darker
There are some stately rooms here and there, lost in the maze of corridors. (Yes, and you can get lost there, though in the dear old doggy days, a Cabinet Minister could usually be tracked by sleuths by the little blue trail of cigar smoke that floated after him.) The Native Affairs Room is one of the best… executed in the dark woods and pawa shell glinting of Maori tradition, beautifully carved as a Maori meeting-house of that nation's great days might have been. Maori members make either hopeless or magnificent speakers. The late “Pom” had his flashes of wit (wasn't one of the few House “incidents,” other than those obligingly provided by the Labour Party, started when he christened the present Prime Minister, then just Mr. Forbes, “snivelling George”?) Sir Aripana Ngata I have heard speak like an orator over the death of a brother M.P.: “The canoe of Death, hollowed from the tree of Sorrow, must visit every house.” On the other hand, watching the stoutish Member for So-and-So ease himself sideways on through a door, one wonders how long the people of New Zealand will continue to prefer such infernally bad circuses to bread.
The House has arisen… Mr. Speaker, who has sat calm as a painting in his tall carven, blue-upholstered chair, and with something of a good painting's ever-watchful look, has swished from the
“Vox populi, vox dei.” You won't hear it at the Talking Shop, though.
Titbits in Wellington started off so pure that one might almost have called it the clean sheet. Its spiritual father, so to speak, was a man on the Dominion, Temple yclept—a long, lean, rather sallow and sorrowful-looking man. For some reason known alone to himself and his Maker, he thought it would be a good idea to try a new weekly. He gave me some work and even some money (I was then in very early Dominion days) amassing recipes for assumed women readers; writing articles about the ideal home, of which I knew considerably less than nothing, having at the time a one-room pied-a-terre whose chief adornments were a ghastly-looking galvanized iron double bed and a curious branching candlestick, also of iron, bursting out into lotus blossoms. However, living there and on boiled eggs (since the hen is at least a reasonably pure-minded beast, but you never can tell with sausages), was evidently a good and sufficient qualification for my very brief free-lance association with Titbits.
From its period of chaste mediocrity it emerged bloody but sufficiently unbowed to pass from Mr. Temple's hands into those of a more enterprising editor. It became sensational. I think its highest flight in sensationalism was reached during the visit to Wellington of the American naval squadron. The hospitality with which those unfortunate visitors were received was nothing less than a scandal, and the worst feature of it was that the nautical equivalent of the “pore blimey infantry” were the
Undeniably, Australia's gutter press had worked up animosity against the squadron on—of all things —moral grounds. To be quite fair, I don't think that the dour lack of any general welcome displayed in Wellington was as much the fault of the women, as of those sterling protectors, the menfolk. To be seen in company with one of the city's guests was almost a stigma—in the first day or two at least— on any girl's character.
Titbits was the paper which went far, and, I am glad to say, fared very badly indeed, in its abuse of the moral character of the American fleet. Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce consider the feeblest of cheers, when an article in this impassioned and disinterested weekly stated, “These Boys Aren't Boys, They're Beasts,” and went on to describe with some gusto an alleged incident at a Wellington bay, when a local girl had (once more, allegedly) had her garments somewhat damaged by an American sailor.
That article did more to give the fleet a belated welcome in Wellington than any amount of white-washing could have done. Journalistic indignation was roused to a point where it had quite a genuine ring: wild rumours flew about the city that the writer of the article had been (a) beaten by a justly indignant deputation from the alleged U.S.A. Tarzans, (b) that he had been even more soundly horse-whipped by members of the local Journalists' Association. At all events, there was a published retraction and apology—but the writer thereof showed a resourceful brain. Reprinting an article of much milder, even civil criticism, he stated that “he hoped it was not considered too strong.” The article that caused the real sensation was thus never really retracted nor, except in implication, apologized for.
The Wellington Journalists' Association decided
Sequel to this. The Journalists' Association found themselves out of pocket for a trifle over £40 expended on entertaining their missing American confreres. Well, in those high and far-off times, there used to be some money to spend. A member of the said woe-begone Association drafted out the most touching little plea as to how all had been informed—through Government error, probably— that many a good pressman and true was to arrive with the Wellington detachment of the fleet, that it was up to the Association to stand by and order the tea-party equivalent of a rum ration. Hospitality is sacred, and so on.
I took this up to the House, and told the sad story to one M.P., himself at one time a first-rate journalist.
There is many a kind heart beats underneath an M.P's. waistcoat. In no time, he had the full tale in the ear of the Minister of Internal Affairs, now regrettably deceased, but a most kindly old gentleman. I received a wire a little later—a congratulatory one. The £40 odd had been passed through the Department's estimates. Long live Parliament —that is, if only it would revert to type and spend money again.
It is quite true that a question was asked in the House subsequently by a Member of the Labour Party as to what should be done with the number of “illegitimate” children who arrived in due season
Sometimes as fixed stars in journalism, sometimes as ships in the night, one meets with those who have had quaint adventures. Should they be dead, the evil they are assumed to have done lives after them. I think it would be better if we thought more of the funny side… . since, of course, we can't take mere aspirations seriously.
Faces just passing by in a crowd, dead faces some of them, others grown old. And of many of them, one knows nothing good, except that they saw visions and dreamed dreams. Perhaps that is not a little, but everything.
When old
A young Enzedder, free-lance journalist, rather a good one, in between times theatre commissionaire or just any old thing that turned up, went to a show one night with three fair young maidens. At the
Later she found out that her second companion in crime had done just that down the street—and the third, at the top of the theatre steps. The youth must have fancied himself mistaken for a gigolo, but he bore up all right, and, besides, he was really quite a good journalist.
Relief works have occupied the energies of more than one New Zealand writer who, by using brain instead of pick, shovel or what-have-you, may end by bringing some very real credit to his native land.
But, of course, whilst articles, poems and such like can be accepted, staff jobs seldom if ever come the way of writers. The Newspaper Proprietors' Association has no money—sings that in its bath every morning. Also writers are supposed to be erratic. There was an historic occasion when
Very occasionally luck may smile even on a journalist. Ted Guy, sporting writer on N.Z. Truth, once won £1,000 in a sweep. He got so many letters from sick friends urgently needing fivers that he laid in a stock of halfpenny postcards
The “Count” used to conduct a milk-round down South in New Zealand. At first the Polish title of “Count,” which practically every literary paper in New Zealand has ascertained from his very expressive letters that he has discovered and doesn't mean to be done out of, didn't seem to content him: for once in London, there was quite a hefty scheme afoot, by which he and other shining spirits should become possessed of an island off Greece, Geoffrey to reign its King. Or is this story, which makes “The Count” sound a little like the spiritual fruit of an of course equally spiritual union between dear Edith Sitwell and the late (too late) Lord Byron, merely one of
Some New Zealanders, whilst yet writers, do contrive to do things in style. There is
When H.R.H. toured New Zealand, it was
Seriously though, I think perhaps New Zealand writers who have carried conviction “over there” do a great deal, merely in prestige, to help the odd sticks. Swedish drill became the fashion, didn't it?
And some of the odd sticks, I'd swear to it, are more than worth helping—out of this morass of slights and discouragements, little or no payment, recognition so far away. “Genius always makes good,” say the portly and complacent, omitting to mention how often the genius has been well and truly dead, probably in a quite harrowing fashion, long before the “making good” has started. London, where Dick Whittington does maybe get his one chance in a million, is afar, the fare, just so much, and these writers, the real ones, never seem to fluke a business head at the same time. All around, pressure of time, pressure of fools, pressure of indifference.
Another picture.… .
D'Arcy Cresswell's book, “Poet's Progress,” was first printed in the Christchurch Press columns, dead against the weight of mass opinion. Only now that it has succeeded everywhere, even New Zealanders have been heard to say that it's a good book. It's in the Defoe manner, and tells of the author's
All New Zealand journalists, including several members of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association, are suspect of vague socialistic yearnings, though I honestly believe quite a number could bear up under the plain facts about the other side.
In a way, journalism and politics seem made for one another, like cooks and policemen. Where would the one be without the other, and why? Young journalists are invariably interested in politics, for one of two good reasons… either they want to “make” the Press Gallery at the House, which is a job of some importance and a good deal of fun, or else they are earnestly trying to find out just why the leader-writers of their respective organs—quite good fellows in themselves, many of them—should turn in such appalling “tripe.”
Erstwhile Reform or erstwhile Liberal papers (now confused, under the Coalition Government, to such an extent that the leader-writer is aware of very little beyond a desire to be as nasty to as many people as is possible) have by no means a monopoly of the cramped political style. I once met an editor of the Labour organ—nee The Maoriland Worker, and peppy enough in the old days. The editor's name was
In the outer darkness, beyond the twinkle of Parliament's three little lights, there is probably more fun for the roving journalist than in more orderly confines.
Election-time crowds… numbers being shot up again and again, on the huge billboards outside newspaper offices, as some hot favourite's majority slides to glory.
Speech by an earnest-minded little M.P., whose aitches had gone a-missing like Bo-Peep's sheep. Loud howl from the back of the multitude: “Hey— give 'im a haspirin or a h'aspirate.”
The 1913 strike, one of the most sensational episodes in the political history of the Dominion, had its brighter moments, apparently, though I was too young to imbibe that potent draught. But it is on record that
An extract from an account given by
“I recovered my good favour through the heights of the big 1913 strike, when I was fortunate enough to be the only pressman present at the most sensational moment of the business. I found myself mixed up with a violent mob intent on doing harm to the ‘specials’, at their quarters in Buckle Street. I took cover behind a fence in the storm centre. Shortly, stones, bottles and palings were hurtling in the direction of the barracks. The specials stood the onslaught for a moment, and then they charged the mob. The sinister note of a revolver was heard, and through the darkness firearms flashed. It was
Well, shall we? Yes, little ones: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.”
The New Zealand Herald, up in Auckland, had one of its rare moments of song concerning the 1913 riots. I think its outburst too young, too beautiful, to die, so reprinted in part herewith it stands:
Politics—so-called—introduced me to Mrs.
Mr. Fraser always vigorously disclaimed any hankering after the “unofficial” supporters who backed him up so staunchly (and so noisily) at the election when
I'm certain, if Mr. Fraser didn't actually perform this feat, that he could if he wanted to.
Mrs. Young, whose husband was “Tom” Young,
The quaint part of it was that her injured lord and master either detested or pretended to detest the whole situation. Not for worlds would he have opposed the overlords — still less carried out his wife's never-realised threat, and produced documentary evidence of their much less urbane politics during the old days of the 1913 strike. Interviewing Mrs. Young on behalf of a Wellington paper, I was informed by her that since she had announced her decision of standing her husband would not speak to her.
Mrs. Devanny would, though: so also several other “hecklers,” who bade fair to break up a meeting intended to be composed only of Mrs. Young's prospective election committee, and of the Press. It was held in the Oriental Bay Tea Kiosk. Interruptions were so frequent and so embittered that I couldn't refrain from starting something of a cross-fire. No referee being present, there's no saying who won.
Mrs. Young's first campaign meeting was at a little hall in Kent Terrace, and was dated, appropriately enough, for Guy Fawkes' night. She couldn't complain of having no audience. The hall was so crowded, so much more than crowded, that a way for her had to be forced through the mass to a side entrance. I don't remember how I got in (all
An overflow of the audience waited sullenly outside on the pavement. Some more overflow was perched in window niches, and, if I remember rightly, more than one window gave the mob best. Mrs. Young (it must be true that courage goes with red hair) made an attempt to speak. They threw crackers and other things… “Remember, remember, the 5th of November.”
It wasn't Mrs. Young's politics, which were apparently non-existent (she was far too mysterious and tentative about her “documentary evidence” for any rational person to take that seriously), but the sheer bad manners of the crowd which lured the youngest scribe present into doing something no person seated at a press table is ever justified in contemplating… . to wit, making a rapid ascent of the stage, beginning a speech. Moreover, for quite ten minutes it was allowed to proceed on its way untouched; I think owing to a certain amount of nervous prostration among those present, because no other young woman from nowhere had ever yet addressed them passionately as “Men, women and puppies of New Zealand.”
As for the speech, I believe it was otherwise so exemplary in tone that Miss Ellen Melville might have made it. All about the right of women to sit in Parliament, and damned be he who first cries, “Hold, enough.” Let nobody say that the wolf-pack doesn't sport a sense of humour. I was discoursing with some fluency on “our homes—our babies—”
Loud voice from the pit: “Thought yer weren't married, Miss.”
Second loud voice (encouragingly): “I don't mind marrying yer, Miss.”
Protest from a drunken gentleman, whom I tried to fix with a basilisk glare: “Shay, Missh, you trying to hypnotishe me?”
My impromptu speech got into the dailies, but somehow or other I wasn't sacked from my own paper, as would have been but justice.
There was a Town Hall meeting next… Mrs. Young, wise in her generation, took the absolutely unprecedented course of charging for seats at an election meeting. I am certain that this has never been done before or since. She did it, she said, to keep the wild ones out — but they paid up their shillings like little ladies and gentlemen. It was a more orderly meeting, though Mrs. Young forgot her lines—if she had many.
Like his late leader, Mr. Holland, Mr. Fraser is a lover of poetry. Mr. Holland, of course, wrote his own little book of poems, “Red Roses on Life's Highway.” I hope that unlike every other book of New Zealand verse I have ever heard about that one sold, because somehow one couldn't withhold respect from the leader who suffered so greatly in his youthful Australian days, who fought so bitterly here, who was deep-learned in history and in books old and new, who was never to see the cause he upheld come into its own. I can remember him, crippled and shabby, limping along Lambton Quay in the small hours, whilst Cabinet cars slid grandiloquently past.
Probably the most sensational incident in the outer darkness of politics—most sensational, that is, since the 1913 strike, when “the cockies came to town” to break the biggest strike New Zealand remembers—was the street rioting in Auckland, 1932. It is safe to prophesy, however, that more history will be added during the next two years.
“Jim” Edwards, hero of the principal riot, the Thursday night affair of smashed windows and stolen goods, broke into the news first as a fiery speaker at meetings far redder in quality than the official Labour Party—prescribed pale pink pills by all its best quacks — would be likely to stomach.
I first heard him speak at the little London Theatre—Auckland's one and only sixpenny picture house.
“Jim,” still quite young though the father of eight, dark-haired, apparently with the constitution of an ox, a good speaker of the fiery style, owes Mr. Upton Sinclair a lot more than he would probably be prepared to acknowledge.
The first real clash, too (though of course everyone had been doing his or her British best to bring the thing on by anticipating it, and Auckland was simply over-run with hopeful specials-to-be, mostly recruits from the Colleges), took place outside the G.P.O. at noon one day with brickbats so plentifully provided by the Government at the old Railway Station site immediately back of the Post Office. Followed a Wednesday afternoon clash outside Bycroft's, in Shortland Street. A small detachment of police was mobbed there, and it is very generally admitted that had not Edwards made an attempt to control the crowds (who were slowly jamming “the defence” against a lorry), some of the police might have fared worse and gone a very long way farther, in a direction not likely to be popular with them.
There was a huge procession “set” for the Thursday night. Curiously enough, it was headed by eminently respectable Post and Telegraph department officials. The P. and T. had their own very just grievances—ventilated rather warmly in their little magazine, The Katipo, which has since been “suppressed” to the extent that it is not distributed on Post Office premises. It is, however, still flourishing: more than one official has had reason to
Mackenzie, Secretary of the P. and T. Association, an earnest man and a good speaker, but too emotional to get far as a leader, was with the front-rankers who swung past.
As was reasonably to be expected (since after the entrance of a very small percentage to the Town Hall, the police made an effort, gallant as it was indiscreet, to keep the rest of the dragon outdoors), it became impossible to find “parking-space” for the marching and now excited men. The rear ranks continued to press towards the Town Hall, not knowing quite what was happening in front. Mackenzie and other delegates set down for Town Hall speeches had effected an entry and nothing was known in the Town Hall of the disturbances outside. Less official but more powerful and popular leaders made a frantic effort to swing some of the procession into a lower street, making for the back entrance of the Hall.
After that, police accounts and procession accounts differ so materially that one pays one's money and takes one's choice. Edwards' statement and that of the many who backed him up was that on mounting a low concrete parapet to make a speech of thoroughly “pacifying” nature, he was bludgeoned by a police official from behind. Bludgeoned, beyond question, he was: but whether he first provided considerably more provocation than he admits is, as I have said before, a matter on which one forms one's own opinion. The police may have owed him some regard for his intervention in Shortland Street a day before. On the other hand, no speech of Mr. Edwards' made at the London Theatre or open air meetings could have been described as pacifistic.
At its very best, the bludgeoning must have looked uglier than it really was. On the following night I witnessed the same gentle operation performed by police truncheons on at least half a dozen skulls, young and old. It's an unpleasant enough spectacle to cause a good deal of righteous indignation. The truncheons (wooden, and not lead-loaded, as was incorrectly and unofficially stated later), cause a scalp wound and much gore. If the police wanted to provide a tame dragon with a taste for blood, they must confess to having supplied the wherewithal.
Edwards'Scarlet Pimpernel ilk, or even more notable, an agent provocateur of some use to the police. He was not arrested in any inglorious fashion, but walked into a police station and gave himself up.
“Jim's” downfall did the trick. Despite the neat little array of armaments (notably a deadly-looking piece of lead piping conveniently bound with a leather thong), which were produced in court next day, it would be simply silly to say that any considerable portion of the procession came along armed. The “weapons” produced were not sufficient in number, nor, had they been prepared, would the mob have rushed to collect stones from a rock-bordered “minnie” golf course near by, and palings from a slat fence. The fun began. But before
An old proverb says it's ill wind, etc. — which calls to mind the fact that Auckland's two principal plate-glass specialists, to wit, Phillips and Impey and Smith and Smith Ltd., reaped a glorious harvest, an ironical coincidence being that Phillips and Impey was one of the very few shops in Queen Street which had its plate-glass left undamaged, whilst Smith and Smith, safely domiciled up in Albert Street, likewise lost not a pane.
In a theatre, a suave “special” came on at the interval of an amateur first night (“The Constant Nymph” was being performed by the Auckland Little Theatre Society), to request the audience not to go out at the moment. The white handkerchiefs worn by the “specials” were faintly reminiscent of the Saint Bartholomew's Eve massacre of Hugenots: but I will always remember that intrepid force of novices best by the exclamation of an enormous and derisive lady in the throng. “Yah,” cried she, “Glaxo babies!”
His Majesty's Arcade, housing the old Theatre where all Auckland plays that hope for real success go on, is fairly wide, and the shops at one end could hardly boast a pane of glass among them, when at last the audience tumbled out to the still chaotic streets. One well-known Queen Street chemist's shop suffered a quite phenomenal loss of birth
On the next afternoon, the Waikato “cockies,” more politely known as the farmers, many of them old reserve force men with reverent memories of “Bill” Massey, came to town.
Equipped with a sense of humour, even the mob might have seen something distinctly funny in that wild ride up Queen Street, khaki-shirted farmers flourishing batons which happened, at the moment, not to be necessary either as reassurance or as means of attack. Though much had happened during that day of aftermath and of totting up damages— which ran into many thousands of pounds and were not covered by insurances—there was, at the time, nothing whatsoever doing in the quiet street of shuttered and boarded-up windows, one and all dismantled of everything that looked in the least valuable. The wooden shutters were kept up for weeks.
Had the farmers been lucky enough to arrive at a moment when that flourish of batons might have inspired a hard-pressed little band of comrades, they would, no doubt, have looked gallant. As it was, they reminded me irresistibly of
63 Newton Road, Communist headquarters, had been raided the night before. But little Schofield, the deep-voiced, white-haired American sailor who is veteran among that small knot of Lenin-lovers, was still industriously peddling copies of The Red Worker (now banned in New Zealand) among the Friday night crowds that thronged Karangahape Road.
Mayor Hutchison, much taken aback by Thursday's episodes, had threatened to read the Riot Act, which empowers His Majesty's forces to fire, at a few minutes' notice, on a crowd refusing to disperse. He would certainly have made history
Only one woman, also, was arrested as a disturber of the peace. She was a resident of Auckland's most plutocratic suburb, Remuera.
“Jim” Edwards was out of things… disappeared. There were many to say that he was dead…… secretly arrested. But the most persistent rumour in the crowd was that the miners were on their way from Huntly by lorry. It was a wild night.
The mounted police rode their sleek horses on to the pavements. Caught in a jam, one lame woman who couldn't get out of the way quickly enough, would have been trampled then: but an enormous labourer, evidently “one of the wild ones,” but not one of the unchivalrous, clutched her by the waist, swung her off her feet and out of the road.
“Stand back, you dogs — this is an innocent woman.”
Thank you, D'Artagnan of the crowds.
The splintering of plate-glass windows was sporadic—a stone flying here, then further up the street where it took some time for the police to “spot” the culprit. They were no respecters of grey hairs, to judge by the bloody ones seen that night.
There were one or two imitation baton charges —not the real thing, just a mere spectacular attempt to move the crowds on. Batons drawn, flourished in faces male and female: loud outcries…… The mob eddied into shop door-fronts. Many of them were there more for excitement than for any business reasons.
“Get out o' there, now—get along—no business there… . .”
Thing to do in an imitation baton charge is to zigzag… . get out, cross the street, make your way higher up again. What the thing to do in an honest-to-God foray may be, I haven't an idea. Pray for luck and a thick skull, I daresay.
The Huntly miners—mythical—really put a period to Friday night's excitement. It seems unwise to promise an angry crowd circuses unless you are ready, in due season, to bring on your bears. They “procrastinated evil,” as the Japanese publisher Noma has it, until midnight was near. Then the fuse spluttered out.
Some of the unhappy “specials,” nursing batons completely unloaded, were viewing pictures in the Drill Hall, and made no secret of the fact that they found it all very tame.
People when bored like trouble. New Zealand has had quite enough of the depression to bore rich and po