Sir Walter Nash’s Christmas Card

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30939, 21 December 1965, Page 8

Sir Walter Nash’s Christmas Card

“The Preu" Special Service

WELLINGTON, Dec. 20. Six separate quotations and a colour portrait adorn the Christmas card of Sir Walter Nash. The former Prime Minister has not included his own poetry this year; but his card, nine inches by seven, includes a prayer of St Francis, a prose-poem interpretation of the prayer and a maxim from Rabbi Van Staveren, formerly of Wellington: “That religion is best which makes the best man.”

Sir Walter Nash also borrows from “Hamlet” with the advice of Polonius to Laertes —“This above all; to thine own self be true. . . .** And he quotes J. R. Lowell, the •American poet and former Ambassador to London: ’They are slaves most base whose love of right is for themselves and not for all the race.” Unhappily the printer misspelled “right” as “might”

and Sir Walter Nash has bad to correct by band each nf more than 2500 cards he is sending. The whole of the back page of tte card is occupied by a quotation from Dr. Aggrey. a Negro scholar: "If you want perfect harmony you must use the black keys and the white keys” and a 77-llne account of one of Dr. Aggrey’s racial parables from a biography of the man. The portrait of Sir Walter Nash was taken earlier this year and shows him with an opened copy of the Magna Carta in the General Assembly Library.