Victoria's Sons

There are students and ex-students of the College who would deny the right of people like Gordon Watson to belong to the RSA. No doubt such political ghouls will remove his name and those of his comrades from the rolls of honour for the indecency of having died for their right to live.

One of the chief joys in Dr. Beaglehole's book is his delicious characterisation of the early staff. There are not many living novelists who can picture human beings so well as he has drawn Rankine Brown, von Zedlitz and the late lovable Prof. Kirk. His account of the Reverend Horace Ward and his management of the library is sheer Dickens. Nor has he overlooked among the mighty ones "Brooky" and Gerry Strawbridge.

Big Omission

Dr. Beaglehole apologises for not having said much about "courses of study, 'stages,' options, syllabuses, set books and text-books." Well, I for one would not like to have seen anything omitted from his 320 pages but I cannot help but feel that the most important things to cover in the history of a University are what is taught, why it is taught, and how it is taught. It would have been most instructive, for example, to trace how Victoria College arrived at the position where its students can solemnly hold Shelley to bo mad and Milton bad, to prove by figures that the tenth child is not as bright as the first one and that the luckless lad who is bom in Te Aro flat is not so intelligent as the one nourished on Kelburn Parade. Moreover, how has it come about that the defenders of a Lysenko can be pursued with the vindictiveness with which once the Bench of Bishops assailed Darwin and the inquisition, Galileo? The discovery in Salamanca Road fifty years after his death that there had once been a man named Karl Marx and the desperate attempt to explain him—or rather explain him away—should also furnish rich material for the historian of ideas.

Tradition Of Heresy

Readers will notice a thread running through the book which also is a thread running through the story of Victoria—freedom of speech—to some "an academic shibboleth," to others the life-blood of the place.

They will notice that, since 1915, what is sometimes considered to be a tradition has never been very safe in the hands of the official representatives of the College. In 1915 Victoria, as Dr. Beaglehole puts it so well, "found itself at odds, not merely with the community of its own University district, but with the whole of New Zealand." I refer, of course, to the von Zedlitz case. The story of this bad business with its connotation of shame for the ruling caste of New Zealand and of honour for the College is here told fully for the first time. As Dr. Beaglehole says truly: "There is nothing in the College's record of which its men and women have the right to feel proud."

But in 1924 the College Council refused to re-appoint Prof. von Zedlitz. It was as Dr. Beaglehole says: "The petty tragedy of men who feared to do a Just thing." The Council has been pretty petty ever since. In 1933 it did everything but grovel on the floor. All Doctor Beaglehole's observations on this period are bitingly sharp as any honest historian would have to make them. I find particularly manly and honourable Dr. Beaglehole's remarks on his own nonappointment to the Chair of History in 1935—a decision of the Council not uninfluenced by the Commissioner of Police. He says:

" . . . the Council in making an appointment to the staff, was to show itself moved by a political bias which men had proudly thought alien to this college; and the fact that it nevertheless made an excellent appointment cannot exonerate it. Fortune, whose blind favours have so often passed Victoria by, has also on occasion been kind."

Buy it Yourself

I am afraid I have said very little about Dr. Beaglehole's book for the readers of "Salient"—that is because I want them to buy it for themselves. You cannot precis it. If I have said perhaps a little more about my impressions of the College than about Dr. Beaglehole's the fault lies with-Dr. [unclear: Beagfible,] for he [unclear: lias] a remarkable capacity to suggest trains of thought. It is not the least of his merits.

Congratulations are also due to Frances Fyfe and Nancy Taylor for their index. It's a gem.