Offer Of Patrol “Pigeon Holed”

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30947, 31 December 1965, Page 1

Offer Of Patrol “Pigeon Holed”

(New Zealand Press Association)

AUCKLAND, December 30.

Members of the Kangaroo Club comprised of Australians visiting New Zealand offered some time ago to form a surf club to patrol Bethell’s Beach, where a university graduate, James Merryweather, of Onslow avenue, Epsom, disappeared in heavy surf on Tuesday.

A search of the beach today failed to find any trace of Mr Merryweather’s body. The beach had no club because the Waitemata County Council had “pigeon-holed” the idea, Mr B. J. Gleeson, manager of the Kangaroo Club, said today.

Mr Gleeson said he could not understand a statement by the chairman of the Auckland life-saving Association, Mr H. E. Millar, that only a 17-year-old boy who could not swim had volunteered to patrol the beach after a triple drowning in 1963. “Members of our club patrolled Bethells Beach regularly at week-ends from shortly after the tragedy until Easter, 1964,” he said. “We saw residents and obtained their support for our plan to form a surf club.”

Mr Gleeson said club members bought £l5O worth of life-saving equipment and took aerial films and slides of the dangerous spring tide to become familiar with it. “We wrote to the Waitemata County Council offering to form the surf club and received a reply on May 28, 1964. saying that the matter would be investigated. We have heard nothing since.” Mr Gleeson said that about 500 Australians in New Zealand were members of the

club. Many of them were experienced life-savers. “We would be quite willing to maintain a proper patrol of the beach at week-ends and at holiday periods,” he said.