Tribute To Boyd-Wilson

Professor Boyd-Wilson sired by a stationmaster, spent his early childhood travelling from one one-horse town to the other. His first voyage of academic interest was to Nelson College, whence he gained a Junior University Scholarship to take him to CUC. Here the activities which seemed to him of most nostalgic interest, were becoming the secretary of the Rugby Football Club and distinguishing himself as a hooker in the first representative team to play the Australian Universities, in 1908. However, he also managed a first-class in English and French, together with a B.Sc to demonstrate the catholicity of his interests.

Off on his travels again, he taught for a year at King's College, Auckland, and thence proceeded to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Here he sold oranges and matches, instructed the sons of nobility in rudimentary French and did the recently-instituted Modern Languages Tripos.

After obtaining a first-class pass here, he crossed the Channel to teach English in a German Government school in Antwerp. This brings us up to 1914, when ho escaped with what he had to England, leaving books, pipes and football gear to the Germans. Thence he returned to New Zealand via Sydney Boys' High School (where he taught German and French) and Perth University (where he was head of the department of French). Ho was appointed to the Chair of Modern Languages at VUC in 1920.

Time For Extra-Curricular Activities

During the thirty-live years he spent here, he found time for all kinds of extra-curricular activities. He was the prime mover in founding the Tramping Club, Football Club, and the French Club. Gardening, Rugby, deerstalking, fishing, winemaking, tramping, and carpentry, interior decorating and scenery-shifting for the French Club have all occupied him and even found their way into lectures as far apart as French Prose Composition and Aucassin and Nicolette.

His most significant sporting interest as far as promoting better relations between the City of Wellington and the University, goes, was his membership for nineteen years of the management committee of the Wellington Rugby Football Union.

His most famous pupil is Professor Fraser MacKenzie (Birmingham) who occupies the chair of Modern Languages at VUC this year. Professor dedicated his this is to his former teacher, and says that it is to Professor Boyd-Wilson that he owes his initial love of France.

By all his old students he will be remembered most as an advocate of the "play-way" of learning French —it was one of his firmest principles that students have to be entertained to be taught.

[unclear: This] is at preset touring England, Scotland and the Continent, where from letters already received, his academic vigour and practical curiosity continue undlmmed. Perhaps his greatest experience will be revisiting that France ho has taught so many to appreciate.

The Communist Method

It is an elementary British principle that not only should Justice be done, it should also be seen to be done, but this is not a principle which one would expect to have any appeal to Communists. Justice has certainly not been seen to be done by the Communist-dominated Electrical Trade Union (England) whose leaders have imposed lines on men who led a return to work without permission during a strike of employees of J. Lyons and Co., last year. Three of the men have been fined £20, £15 and £5, and, in addition, have been suspended from eligibility for cash benefits and deprived of the right to stand for union office for five years.

Letters sent to other men telling them disciplinary action against them is pending are reported to have pointed out that, if they sign the enclosed "confessions" of their guilt, they need not appear before the executive council. One of the men on whom a fine has already been Imposed has said that, when he appeared before the executive council, he was not allowed to call his own witnesses or to question those said to have made statements against him, at least one of whom had denied making such a statement. During his "trial," he said, a concealed microphone relayed his remarks to a tape recorder. When he complained of this, the president of the Union, Mr. F. Fowlkes, replied that it was merely normal procedure. The known methods of Communism do not make this seem mildly improbable.

This type of secret "trial" is abhorrent to British opinion, but unfortunately, many workers have been so misled by years of class-war propaganda that they can be persuaded to accept almost any abomination in the name of solidarity.